Blanks and Postage
Here’s a neat idea for a community site: Blanks and Postage. Fans send blank CDs and cover postage costs, and get great live shows on disc in return. Bands pay $50 for inclusion in the directory, which will surely expose…
Web/Tech
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No automatic sound, please…
79% of web users surveyed respond negatively or "very negatively" to websites that play sound without asking. (No, the fact that 21% did not fall into those categories is no excuse.) Forcing your audience to hear your music without asking…
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Avoid These Band Website Design Mistakes
Over at Build Your Band’s Site, I’ve been testifying about what to include in your site — here’s the flip side of that same coin: a great rundown of the items you should steer clear of. [ Thanks to Jason…
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Gatecrashing Google
Lots of folks who attended 2NMC in September were asking me to clarify some things David Hooper was talking about in his advanced web seminar. Our colleague Neil Shearing just released a nice illustrated guide that talks about many of…
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The Pope Would Like You To Share Your Music
From a stellar overview of digital rights management, this insight from one of the most influential folks at a major label… Ted Cohen, EMI SVP, believes users who pass around music after paying for it are basically recruiting new fans…
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Build Your Band’s Site
Here’s a sample from the class we held on the conference bridge last night. You can get to participate in all five of these classes LIVE with the Build Your Band’s Site workshop or with a membership in IndieBiz…
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New Calendar App
Cool new calendar widget for your website that supports iCal and RSS!
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5,000 Downloads
My head’s been so underwater, I missed this study that’s been causing buzz in the blogosphere. According to a UNC researcher (and others), it takes 5,000 peer to peer downloads to “displace” one retail sale of a CD. And, as…
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diyTunes
If you’re determined not to take advantage of some of the great offers for digital distribution on the market, you can check out a new book about placing your independent music on the iTunes service. As always, it’s still up…
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Mperia would like to kick ass with you.
I’m rather fond of the manifesto posted by the founders of Mperia, a new pay-per-download music site that manages sales for indie artists.
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Your Favorite DJs Call YOU For A Change
Streaming radio over cell phones was the holy grail for small broadcasters even when I helped launch xpn.org back in the late ’90s. With cheaper-every-week access and tools like mobile ShoutCast, if you don’t like your local stations, you can…
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Non-Comm Stations Among Top Streamers
Sometimes, market forces work in your favor. When AFTRA, the union that includes most voice-over announcers, forced stations to pay extra to use their talent on streaming audio, it pretty much eliminated the benefits of streaming for commercial radio. Non-comms…
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LightningCD
Musician Nissa Ludwig puts a compelling spin on pay-per-download sites. Her LightningCD site not only lets you buy an album for ten bucks, like iTunes, it automates the process of burning that album to disc and printing official cover art…
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Warp vs. the 800 Pound (99 pence) Gorilla
Warp Records is launching their own pay-per-download site. What’s different is that they’re just putting straight-up, un-DRM’ed MP3 files out for you to download. And the logic is clear. You can get pirated MP3s anywhere. Wouldn’t you rather skip the…
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Name Your Band
We’ve posted before about robotic band name generators, but here’s an entire site dedicated to helping you find just the right name for your band, your album and even your memoirs. [via Seth Godin]
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Burn and Share
I wrote about this a while back, but I wanted to bring it up again. Our friend Veken from the band Granian has developed a counterintuitive but highly effective marketing campaign that capitalizes on how people really use music online…
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Live from Memphis
Christopher Reyes earns some column inches for his work on the excellent city guide LiveFromMemphis.com. Whether or not he’ll find enough revenue to hit his dream of hiring a $500K a year staff is up for debate. But this is…
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GarageBand
I’ll pass on the iPod mini, but GarageBand makes me regret switching back to PCs after my last PowerBook self-immolated.
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That Really Is An E-mail from Me.
I was having so much fun sending out the first Indie Music Club newsletter of the year, I plumb forgot to give it a subject line. That really is a message from me in your inbox. It isn’t spam or…