Indie Music Tech

Promote your Music and Expand your Fans with idiomag

A couple of weeks ago I learned about idiomag, a personalized digital music magazine that keeps you in the loop with your favorite musicians/bands by aggregating various types of content about these artists in a centralized and interactive format. The content includes audio, articles, photos, gigs, videos and more. What's compelling about this service is that idiomag deploys an intelligent system which adapts to a reader's interests as he/she rates the appeal of the content they are viewing, helping to refine the viewer's preferences.

An interesting service, I see at least three ways indie artists could benefit from using idiomag:

1) Bands and musicians can submit their MySpace profile for inclusion in the magazine for FREE. Within 24 hours, your MySpace profile and information will be sent to idiomag subscribers and readers that like your genre of music, enabling you to reach new fans.

2) Artists can promote their music on idiomag to relevant viewers for as little as $10. To do so, just send idiomag an email.

3) You can submit your band's feed for inclusion in idiomag, and then create a personalized magazine focused on your band that you could also publish on your Facebook page. Here's an example of what it could look like:

MOG Raises $2.8 Million

In case you haven't heard, MOG, a music sharing and discovery site announced they've received a $2.8 million investment from the Universal Music Group and the Angels’ Forum. According to CrunchBase, MOG has raised at least $6 million since their founding in June of 2005 by David Hyman.

This round of funding for MOG pushes music technology investments since the beginning of the year to over $60 million. That's impressive. Who's next? If you know of more, or one in the works, just send me an email and I'll add it to the list.
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I was listening to Honestly when I wrote this post

San Francisco Music Technology Summit

Last week I wrote about the sizable investments (over $58 million) in music technology companies since the beginning of the year, and it seems this activity is spawning conferences like the SanFran MusicTech Summit. Interested? Here's a brief FAQ I put together to help encourage you to attend:

What's the purpose of the summit? The purpose of the summit is to "bring together the best and brightest developers in the Music/Technology Space, along with the musicians, entrepreneurial business people, and organizations.... to discuss the evolving music/business/technology ecosystem in a proactive, conducive to deal making environment." Sounds brilliant! I'm seriously considering attending this event.

Who will be speaking and/or presenting? Here's a brief sample, or you can view the entire list here. As you can see, it's an impressive group.

• Ann Chaitovitz - Executive Director, Future of Music Coalition
• Richard Conlon - VP New Media & Strategic Development, BMI
• Tim Westergren - Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Pandora
• Ty Roberts - Co-Founder and CTO, Gracenote
• Derek Sivers - Founder, CD Baby
• Lars Murray - Senior Director Digital Media and Marketing, SONY BMG
• Paul Anthony - Founder and CEO, RumbleFish

How much does it cost? It depends. For students/musicians it's $99.00, developers $199.00 and $299.99 for general admission. Wow, that's inexpensive! You can purchase your tickets here.

Also, here's an interesting video clip discussion on the future of radio from the inaugural music tech summit held just a couple of months ago:

This summit sounds like a great way for indie artists to learn about current and developing technologies they can use to more effectively manage their careers. It also sounds like a good networking event for folks building music tech companies like myself, but I can't discuss any details until we launch, so that will probably prevent me from attending.
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I was listening to The Grateful Dead as I wrote this post.

Overlay.TV: Enhancing the Music Video Experience

A few days ago, Faisal Sethi, Art Director for Overlay.TV contacted me about his company's recent beta launch, and how their technology can assist indie artists trying to promote their music through videos. According to their site, Overlay.TV provides a way to easily enhance existing video by overlaying contextual information, such as external links. For example, indie artists can "Overlay" hyperlinks on top of any of their existing music videos posted anywhere online, like on YouTube. These new Overlaid videos can then be viewed within an artists' Overlay.TV channel, and/or embedded within an artists' social spaces. These Overlays could be anything from links to merch, digital downloads, tour dates, interviews, etc. - the possibilities are endless! With Overlay.TV, your videos become more interactive and informative.

Sounds cool, and I can see how these types of video "overlays" could increase sales, especially from the impulse buyer. But, it seems that YouTube could roll out overlays as a product feature fairly easily.  Apparently, their investors think otherwise and see a big opportunity, as Overlay.TV closed $4.6 million in Series A financing just a few months ago.

Music Videos as Viral Marketing: Lessons Learned

About 5 weeks ago, I worked with Greg Hester to release a music video that would hopefully help promote his band and grab some new listeners. The idea was simple: take a song he was already working on in the studio and develop a video that incorporated a current event that was of interest to a large audience, while at the same time, staying true to the content of the music. These are just a few things we learned from this promotional tactic:

1) It worked! In the 5 weeks since releasing the video, Greg has been offered gigs in Columbia, SC, Augusta, GA, Athens, GA, Charlotte, NC and Atlanta to name a few. His MySpace page views jumped over 15% from 9140 to 10635 in less than 40 days. He also added almost 100 new MySpace friends from across the country (a 15% increase as well), and his total music plays increased by over 10 percent to 9,461. And at the time of this post, his video has been watched on YouTube 950 times. Additionally, he now has a few more labels following him on MySpace.

2) Finding someone influential on Twitter to make a post about your video will certainly bring in traffic. For us, it was Dave Winer. We received over 200 views directly from his tweet alone - Thanks Dave!

3) This was an inexpensive tactic, only $200 to produce. Not bad considering the amount of increased exposure, and most musicians and bands will be able to DIY.

4) It provided us with an entertaining way to easily showcase Greg's band to a couple of major label artists considering working with us on an upcoming James Brown tribute CD (more on this project in the coming months).

5) It was a great way for us to pre-release the song before making it available for downloading later this year.

All in all, the video was certainly worth the expense, but there are a few things we would have done differently. For example, asked our friends with YouTube accounts to add the video to their channel, uploaded a high quality version to Vimeo, as YouTube is not a great medium for releasing high quality video/audio, reached out to our friends with music blogs, contacted more influencers interested in the content of the video, sent copies to the media, and spent much more time promoting it in social networks, to name a few tactics. Due to time constraints, we did very little, almost none, but I have a feeling we are going to be creating more of these kinds of music videos in the future, so hopefully the next video will have a greater impact.

Alltop: A Music News Dashboard

If you're like most musicians, you've probably subscribed to several music feeds via RSS to keep your finger on the pulse of the music industry. About two weeks ago, I learned of Alltop, a free "digital magazine rack" that aggregates music stories, among other types of news topics from leading sites and blogs into an easy-to-scan page, displaying the five most recent music headlines from each content provider (e.g. Paste Magazine). You can then place your cursor over any headline and part of the story will be displayed, allowing you to quickly decide if you want to continue reading it.

What's interesting about that, you ask.... A great deal actually, as Alltop becomes an eloquent, content-specific, "table of contents" on today's music news, updated every 10 minutes. More importantly, it's a great tool for discovering new feeds, part of the company's mission - "the cessation of Internet stagnation.” Here are just a few sites I discovered for the first time by going to music.alltop.com:

• KEXP Blog
• Gorillavsbear
• Music Thing

Skribit for Musicians

Several people have asked me about Skribit and how a band/musician could use it, so I'm providing a couple of answers and suggestions:

1) What is it?  Skribit is the name of a social software company based in Atlanta, GA that's creating applications for the blogosphere and social communities. Skribit's initial product allows bloggers to receive suggestions directly from their readers, creating an interactive blogging experience.

2) So how is that useful for musicians? By installing the Skribit widget on your blog you are creating another way for your fans to easily communicate with you. They can post questions, comments or suggestions that could help you with recording, touring, performing, or even with your merchandise. For example, your fans may post suggestions asking you to perform certain songs, or play in new cities/venues you've never even considered. Imagine having some free market research before you even hit the road. Cool, unh? They may even make suggestions to you about musical arrangements, or ask you to explain the meaning of a song. The possibilities are endless and at the very least, Skribit is another tool to engage your fans with.

3) When can I install it? Probably within a few weeks as right now it's in private beta while they work out the kinks, but you can register for an account, and you'll be notified as soon as it goes live.

4) Who started Skribit? The company began in Atlanta during a Startup Weekend, an amazing three day social experience developed by Andrew Hyde that I highly recommend any entrepreneur or future entrepreneur attend. I can't say enough about how fantastic Startup Weekend is! Many thanks Andrew! The actual Skribit concept was created by Paul Stamatiou, and Skribit now operates similar to a coworking group with people working on it as their time allows. Lance Weatherby facilitates and orchestrates the company's numerous moving parts (e.g. product development, marketing, legal, etc.).

AdaptiveBlue Releases SmartLinks

Early this morning, AdaptiveBlue released its latest product offering for blogs and web sites called SmartLinks. Essentially, SmartLinks automatically provides your readers with the ability to see detailed information about movies, books, music, restaurants, stocks and more every time you create a link to your favorite band, film, company, etc. on your blog or web site.  For example, click on the small blue square (AdaptiveBlue's logo) to the right of Chuck Leavell to see detailed information about this legendary musician. As you can see, useful and relevant information about Chuck Leavell is aggregated from a variety of places. You can also see below how I used SmartLinks in a previous post, as I was a beta tester for their product:

SmartLinks will help indie musicians market themselves, as music enthusiasts reading content online will be able to quickly see detailed information about you (e.g. links to your videos, blog or discography) when they see your SmartLink on another site. It's another angle at helping you reach new listeners through music discovery, so spread the word!

SmartLinks works on all major blogging platforms (e.g. WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, etc.), and you can easily turn it on for your web site with this simple line of JavaScript:

<script type="text/javascript" defer="defer" src="http://s1.smrtlnks.com/js/bluelink-window.js?auto=true"></script>

To get started, or for more information go here.

Broadcast your music in real time with Synchronicity Live

Looking for a way to broadcast your live shows in real time to your fans for free? Synchronicity Live can help you do just that and then some...  Synchronicity Live is a new music startup (about 9 weeks old) based out of Jacksonville Beach, Florida that is providing a way for bands and musicians to stream their live performances for free to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Here's how it works:

1) create a free account with Synchronicity Live
2) schedule your live performance and select on demand viewing
3) set-up your own video camera at your show's location and connect it to a computer with a high speed connection (at least a 300Kbps upstream) - it will also need to have the Flash Media Encoder installed with a few adjustments that allow it to communicate with Synchronicity Live
4) make sure your computer's internal clock and time zone are set to the location from which you are broadcasting from and
5) a few minutes before you take the stage activate your stream via the FME and your show will immediately be broadcast in real time on Synchronicity Live for anyone to watch.

Once the show is over you can archive it on Synchronicity Live for free, allowing your fans and lurkers who missed the show to view it when they can. Here's an example of an archived show from Sovus Radio.

I caught up with the founder of Synchronicity Live, Aric Berquist at the Atlantis Music Conference last week and he said that they make their money from forthcoming content distribution deals as well as advertising, but the ads are not intrusive and are barely noticeable. Right now there are about 3,000 people that have registered for a free account with Synchronicity Live, about 1,000 more than last week so the excitement is spreading.

Synchronicity Live is a very cool service.  Not to mention there are lots of ways you could use it beyond just broadcasting your live shows. For example, you could broadcast your studio sessions. This kind of real time streaming video will help you connect with your existing fans and tap into other music enthusiasts that may have never heard your music before.... what are you waiting for?

As always, I welcome your comments.

Peace

100 Places to Promote Your Music Online

I was just reading the Secret Music Life of Kat and stumbled upon this article, Marketing for Musicians: 100 Places to Promote Your Music Online by Laura Milligan on the Bootstrapper. It is just too good not to share so here it is.

Peace.