Write a Feature Article on IMT

If you would like to write a guest article on Indie Music Tech (IMT) and have it featured for about 24 hours promoting your new music tech startup, app/service/features, or discussing a music tech topic, just send me an email or submit your news via the tabs above. As Greg Rollett of Gen-Y Rock Stars suggests, writing guest posts on blogs is great way to build your brand, and if your content fits, I'll post it.

IMT reaches thousands of music industry professionals, artists, companies and media each month in almost 100 countries.

Cross Promote your Music with other Artists via Headliner.fm

Yesterday, Headliner.fm gave a presentation at the SF MusicTech Summit. Essentially, the service provides a cross promotion platform for artists. You can read how it works here, or watch the short video below:

MobBase is Live

Last week I briefly mentioned MobBase, a web app for creating iPhone apps for your band - today they went live. I'm not going to repeat the excellent coverage from Hypebot or RWW and others, but I would like to share a few screenshots of how easy it is for your band to create an inexpensive, customizable and feature rich iPhone app:



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Tweet My Song

Is TweetMySong the future of music promotion on Twitter, or a tool for music spam?

Mixcloud Releases Cloud Radio

The following is a quick press release from MixCloud. I'll post a follow-up if time allows, but this looks like a cool service:

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New London based online radio startup Mixcloud opened its doors to the public today at 12pm GMT. It's aim is to re-think radio.

The founders of the company – friends from Cambridge University – were frustrated with how hard it was discovering and promoting radio online. As radio presenters and DJs themselves, they were actively hunting down great shows every day and realised more could be done to help connect this content to listeners.

A year ago they quit their full time jobs and moved into a warehouse in West London to fix these problems. Their vision is to build the YouTube of radio – a definitive online platform for on-demand radio shows, from music to talk.

Mixcloud has an interesting view on the future of radio and are innovating to disrupt the traditional ways people discover and interact with the medium. They describe the concept as “Cloud Radio” and the content as “Cloudcasts”, which are stored in hard-drives in the sky – the “cloud” – and accessible on-demand, anywhere, where anyone can upload to the site and the listeners decide who get exposed.

The shows currently lean towards club music and DJs, given the founders’ background in organising clubnights and warehouse parties. However they are already working on expanding the breadth of content and are in discussions with big house-hold names, and they now have over 1,000 content partners and presenters, including: Diesel Radio, former BBC Radio 1 presenter, Chris Coco, leading music blogs such as, Curb Crawlers, great record labels like, Border Community and many more.

Share Your News, Thoughts and Advice on Indie Music Tech

If you'd like to be a guest writer/contributor on Indie Music tech - sharing your thoughts, advice, promotion, news about your company, etc. to over 1,700 international subscribers - just submit it above. If you have any questions, please comment in this post.

Indie of the Year 2009

Music Emissions is running its third annual Indie Of The Year contest beginning September 1. They'll be awarding over $15,000 in prizes, and there is no fee for bands/musicians to enter and no specific genres. Artists can currently pre-register to qualify for voting on day one whey they can begin to rally their fans, friends and families to vote for them and help push them to the top. Good luck!

SellaBand vs. Kickstarter: Fan Driven Fundraising for Artists

I've been a huge fan of SellaBand for the past couple of years, but I've never tried to get any of the bands I work with to use their service because none of them can raise the required $50K to produce a record. While I've always thought that was too much considering recording, editing, and mastering have all come down significantly during the last decade, I'm still a big fan of their concept anyway.

However, there's a relatively new service I've been meaning to write about called, Kickstarter which also provides a way for bands to raise money from their fans but with a few advantages: 1) there is no minimum amount an artist must raise, so the artist can determine how much; 2) artists can upload video pitches about their project and needs (see below) and 3) artists can express their appreciation by providing gifts for different levels of donations, and some have been highly creative like Five Times August's camping trip for $5K - reminds me of some of the examples Michael Masnick has presented. 

All-in-all Kickstarter is a great service for bands, and fans benefit too, as they get to be a part of the recording process and support their favorite artists at the same time.

Here are three examples (we liked them so much we donated to all three - good luck guys!):

April Smith and the Great Picture Show:

Shwa:

Five Times August:

Follow an Indie Band Wednesday

If you haven't yet heard about "Follow an Indie Band Wednesday," you've still got some time to show your support for an indie artist, or you can just wait until next week. The hashtag is #faibw. Here's mine.

Insight into Retaining your Fans

Brian Mansfield of USATODAY wrote a great piece in Friday's edition about different ways artists are retaining their fans through interaction. Here's a snippet: "As CD sales decline, advances from record labels dwindle and audience demographics break up into smaller niches, more and more artists from all levels of popularity are seeking to retain fans by including them in the creative process."

The article may give you some ideas, and the comment thread is interesting as well.

Interview with Creator of the Artists on Twitter Spreadsheet

I'm sure most of the IMT community is familiar with the crowdsourced spreadsheet that Gabriel Nijmeh created listing artists on Twitter. But, it's evolved a great deal since I first read about it. He now includes music bloggers, radio stations, music promoters, and much more. So, I thought I'd interview Gabriel via email and see what his plans are for this free and useful music industry list.

1) Why did you start the spreadsheet?

GN: I love music and the deeper I got into Twitter the more I realized there were many other passionate music fans.  People would post tweets saying so and so bands were on Twitter and so I thought I should quickly whip something up that helps keep track of bands using Twitter. This was at the end of January 2009 and within the last couple of months, there has been explosive growth on Twitter which has translated into a lot of new bands using Twitter.

2) What has surprised you about the spreadsheet?

GN:  Maybe it was naive of me but I never expected that people would embrace it and find it extremely valuable. I did Tweet about it a few times and not having that many followers at the time, I didn't think I had that much reach. Really it was only meant for a handful of my closet followers to use.

But if you have something that people believe is valuable and you are willing to open up and share, Twitter is an amazing communication and relationship building platform. So when various high profile blogs (Pitchfork, Stereogum, Guardian music UK) and high profile Twitterers (Mashable) picked up on it, the list took off, and it was obvious at that point that I was onto something.

3) You should turn the spreadsheet into a free web based directory where people can search, view, add, edit, etc. - thoughts?

GN: Absolutely! It's painfully obvious a spreadsheet will just not cut it! I'm working with a small team and are turning the spreadsheet into a web based directory. We have a few great ideas that once developed will make using the Artists on Twitter directory very easy to use and interactive. The plan is to keep it a crowdsourced/wiki-style directory. I have found that quite a few people have become protective of the directory.  I get many emails telling me about fake/questionable accounts or just general information that helps ensure that the list stays clean, timely and accurate.

4) What's the official name of the spreadsheet?

GN: Well, I started off calling it the Artists on Twitter list and that is what so many people know it by. So we will most probably keep referring to it that way.

5) Can you track how many times it's been viewed, if so, what are the numbers?

GN:  Yes, we have had close to 8,000 visits.

6) I see you've added several new tabs to capture other music properties, like music blogs, labels, music services and more. Those are all great additions, why did you decide to do that? What other sections are you going to add? I'd like to see venues added to the list.

GN: Well, we first started with the most obvious, artists and as people started submitting new entries, I started creating new sections like music bloggers, music labels. I've had people contacting me asking if we could add new sections and we are always open to new ideas and suggestions.  For example, I just got an email yesterday (Friday, April 3rd) from a guitar amp maker (@gabstero) and he asked if I could add a section for musical instrument manufacturers.   I also was recently asked to add a section for sheet music/guitar tabs. Both ideas I thought were brilliant. I know there are a lot of Twitter people who play instruments.

For the average music fan, the artists section will be more important than say the music promoters section.  But if you are a band and you are seeking specific band services (for example a band manager), you would focus on the music services section. A really good example is when an indie band out of Chicago posted a tweet saying they were looking for a new band manager. After seeing the tweet, I was able to help them get in touch with a couple of contacts that added themselves to the Artists on Twitter list.

7) It seems to have it's own life from an organic community effort. How are you trying to grow input?

GN: People just love music! From the casual to the most passionate music fan, music elicits a certain passion and response. You can't go anywhere without hearing music and just like food, music brings people together and is a great way to celebrate life! In the online world, Twitter is perfectly suited to bring together a lot of people from around the world together to discuss just about any topic or subject. We are seeing that with Stocktwits.com, which has become its own Twitter powered community for people interested in stocks, finance, business and economics.

So for us, we engage other music fans by sharing informative links and new music, and by having a vibrant discussion about anything related music. Anyone interested in music will naturally gravitate to the discussion and to the Artists on Twitter list. The key point is that we are an open community, and we take a bottom-up approach to building the list.

8) How many artists do you think you're missing from your list?

GN: I am continually amazed at how deep the list is. Whenever I come across a band and check the list to see if they are on it, I see that someone has already added it. So I would say we have pretty much all the big names covered because these were the first entries that people contributed. Now, I'm starting to see a lot of indie/emerging artists being added.

9) What are the present numbers (e.g. total number of bands, labels, etc.)?

GN: As of April 4th, we have 1557.  Arists make up 1200 of them. Record labels, music bloggers, music services, etc. make up the rest.

Good stuff Gabriel! I look forward to watching the list grow.

SoundCloud on Indie Music Tech

For several months now I've been meaning to add a SoundCloud DropBox for artists to share their music with the IMT community. Well, tonight I had some time, so if you'd like to have the opportunity to have your music highlighted on IMT, all you have to do is send one track to my DropBox in the right sidebar. About once a month, I'll pick a track and highlight it here on IMT. It won't be reviewed; rather, I'll just share it with the IMT community.

I'll start with a track called Damn Love by the Dirt Drifters, a song I mentioned on Twitter a few months ago. This band is doing a great job sharing their demos on SoundCloud. Check it out, you may get some ideas.

BTW, I think SoundCloud is one of the top music tech companies out there; not to mention Alex is a great guy!

Submit Your News

For your convenience, you can now submit your news directly onto IMT. Just fill out the form and I'll review. To increase your chances of getting it posted, please make sure it's music tech related and newsworthy.

ArtistDish Releases Podcast #5

The ArtistDish released its 5th podcast today about some of the shifts and trends in print and digital media, gatekeepers, fandom, the gaming industry and more. It's our longest episode to date (1 full hour), and we are joined by music industry veteran, Barney Kilpatrick of Rattlesby Records, and one of our advisors, who provides a great deal of insight and sage advice, so if you’re an artist, you definitely want to listen to this episode.

Special thanks to Montana Skies for providing the intro music with their song, Gringo Flamenco.

Guest Bloggers Welcome

If you'd like to be a guest writer on IMT like Greg did yesterday, just send me an email with your proposal. It's a great way for you to promote your music, company, blog, etc., while sharing your thoughts with a larger community as well.

Guest Post: Do Bands and Musicians Understand What is Happening Online Right Now?

The guest post below was written by my friend, Greg Rollett of Endagon Innovations. Greg writes regularly on Gen-Y Rock Stars, a Social Music Marketing Blog and Resource for indie musicians. To get a free copy of his Social Media Sites for Musicians and the Rock Star Tool Kit, go here. If you'd like to reach Greg directly, please send him an email (rollettmarketing [at] gmail [dot] com).

(confused music photo by Adam Schilling)

Do Bands and Musicians Understand What is Happening Online Right Now?
I ask myself this question everyday when I see all of the small companies, corporations, brands and innovators taking advantage of tools, resources and conversations that are happening every second of every day online. I get scared when I see musicians still parking their homepage on Myspace, blasting out self promotions with no regards to getting real fans to have conversations with and not accepting feedback from that promotion.

We can start with Twitter, since everyone from the president to late night newbie Jimmy Fallon to, even, Facebook is taking notice of what is happening on this platform. Every second, there are thousands of links being shared, videos being passed, questions being asked and answered and music being streamed directly because of Twitter. In the music world there has been uproar of music related services and platforms devoted to heighten the music experience of Twitter. Roll call please:

Twisten
TinySong
Blip.fm
Tweettj
Song.ly
playTwitter
Twiturm
TwittyTunes (FireFox Plugin)

Then there are the Music Marketing people providing resources for how musicians can leverage twitter:

• Bob Baker’s Music Twitter Resources
• Ariel’s Publicity Twitter Roadmap

And don’t forget the ridiculously long crowd-sourced list of musicians on Twitter

• Musicians On Twitter – (Google spreadsheet)

But did you know that? Do bands see what is going on here?
Technology shrank physical sales and transformed us into a digital world. If you are willing to accept that fact, and embrace the tools, tactics and hard work that it takes to make these things work, there is a great chance that your music can be in more iPods, more YouTube channels, more blogs, more playlists, more countries, more options that ever before.

The key to getting the word out to musicians is to prove that this stuff we are preaching actually works. The reason Myspace friend adders/blasters/spammers were extremely popular and ultimately helped to ruin the site was because they worked. It was a numbers game, reach enough people and a few become fans.

The reality is that numbers were inflated, play counts skyrocketed and bands felt like the king of the mountain. Then you booked a show off your Myspace stats, invited the local music industry players who were also impressed, and you played an unrehearsed live show to the bartenders, wait staff and your frat buddies.

The reality is that developing fan relationships is the key to all the tools and websites out there today. The name of the game has become, how many people can I connect with, on a personal level?

• Can you broadcast your show via UStream and connect with fans that may never get to see you live?
• Can you throw a Meebo widget on your blog and talk to fans every Monday night for an hour about life, music, hobbies and pet peeves?
• Can you take photos at your shows with real fans, post them on Flickr, Facebook and Myspace, tag them and get the fans excited to tell their friends about the night? Can you do it the next morning and not wait 3 weeks to get around to it?
• Can you write a blog post so inspiring that 20 of your fans retweet it, their friends see it and pass it on and all of a sudden you get new traffic from new fans?
• Can you remember to send your monthly newsletter out every month? Can you use Champion Sound or FanBridge to collect emails on your websites and at your shows to grow your fan base?
• Can you look at your band's analytics to see how popular your music is, with whom, in what social networks, gauge where your fans are coming from, etc.?
• Can you create products on demand? Special shirts for special shows? Audiolife can do this for you, instantly. What about a lyrics book or a tour journal? Can you publish that as an eBook or physical book that someone can print on demand (think Lulu)?

The idea that musicians can now create content, have their fans talk about it directly to the band, and then have the band comment back while measuring the process and results is something that is so inspiring, it’s hard to find a reason to argue against it. Yes, it takes time, it might take some money, but this is your life, your business and your future.

Do you understand what is happening? Bands, do you get it?

Your Band's Marketing and Promotional Tactics that Work

I'm curious about the online marketing and promotional tactics bands/musicians are using (e.g. communicating with fans via social media, or giving away free tickets to shows) which have been successful in growing their fan base. If you'd like to share it would be great to hear from you, so just add your comments to this post for all to benefit.

Rock Stars Tool Kit

Greg Rollett has published a follow-up to the 100 Social Media Resources for Musicians called Gen-Y Rock Stars Tool Kit. Essentially, it's a scaled down one page check-list of the most important things you should be doing to market and promote your music, garnered from his previous report. To get your FREE copy, just go here, and provide your email address and Greg will send you a link to the file.

The Atlanta Braves are Looking for Bands

Have you wanted to play at Turner Field in front of thousands of music fans like a few bands did in last year's competition, but you didn't know how to apply, or you missed the application process? Then go to www.braves.com/bravesbands and submit your information, as The Atlanta Braves are looking for a few bands to energize and entertain fans at Turner Field before some home games in 2009.  All genres are welcome to apply, but they seem to be focused on country, rock, pop, cover, and/or original indie bands. If selected, it's a great opportunity for exposure to a large audience, and who knows, maybe you'll get some airtime when they cut to/from a commercial break - good luck!

Musebin: 140 Character Micro Music Reviews

Musebin may become the equivalent of Twitter for music reviews. Like Twitter, Musebin has a minimalistic interface that only allows for 140 character postings, but Musebin is focused solely on music reviews and news. I'm enthusiastic about this site as it opens up a band's ability to tap into the wisdom of crowds and find out what their fans think about their music. Not to mention, it's fun to use! I just posted a review myself.

Additionally, each review can be commented on and voted "yea" or "nay." The idea is that what the community believes is the best music, and/or most accurate reviewers will rise to the top of Musebin. This in-turn may create a new group of influencers.

This is a web app that I think all bands and musicians should use, and encourage their fans to use too. Not only will it provide them with feedback about their music, but it will also help them connect with other artists, and spread the word about their music as well. Musebin is also integrated with Twitter, so micro reviews about your music can be tweeted from Musebin at the same time, further contributing to the development of your tribe.

It's no revelation that the music industry has shifted to a singles market, and that fans are engaging artists like never before. These are perfect ingredients for a company like Musebin, as fans will embrace the speed and ease-of-use of posting micro reviews about their favorite new tunes, and artists can benefit by understanding their fan's sentiments about their music.