"UNDERGROUND 2 MAINSTREAM" Your NEW Source For Hip Hop Entertainment!!! |
| Jay-Z Live @ University Of Arizona Posted: 30 Apr 2009 05:17 PM PDT  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| New Economic Sentiment Indicator Introduced by Dow Jones Hints at First Tentative Signs of Recovery Posted: 30 Apr 2009 07:56 AM PDT ____________________________________ Dow Jones & Company, Inc. April 30, 2009 New Economic Sentiment Indicator Introduced by Dow Jones Hints at First Tentative Signs of Recovery To view the full press release, go to: Visit http://www.dowjones.com/Pressroom/PressReleases.htm to view all Dow Jones & Company, Inc. press releases.
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| 10 Online Music Marketing Priorities By David Rose Posted: 29 Apr 2009 10:02 PM PDT I recently participated in a panel discussion on online music marketing with Jed Carlson of ReverbNation, Lindsey Kronmiller of Merge Records, Mike Robinson of the Annuals / Terpsikhore Records and moderated by Heather McDonald of About.com's Music Careers. The panel was hosted by Secondhand Freespace at The Local 506 in Chapel Hill, NC. Below is a recap of some of the topics we covered and my take on the top priorities for successful music marketing. 1. Write Great Songs If you are trying to attract the attention of music fans it all starts with great songs. It's understood that this is much easier said than done but it is a critical starting point. Great songs with mediocre / poor marketing will ultimately trump mediocre / poor songs with great marketing when it comes to attracting and keeping the attention of music fans over the long-term. Artists should make sure they have a reasonable balance between the amount of time and effort they spend on social networks, designing merch, creating videos, email campaigns, etc. and the time and effort they spend perfecting their craft. 2. Get a Website If you are serious about a career as a musician you should own a url that includes your name (or bands name) and have your own website. If you don't already have a website check out Bandcamp and Bandzoogle, they both provide full featured and inexpensive website solutions specifically for musicians. The central point for all marketing activities should be the artist's website. Marketing efforts that drive fans to MySpace, YouTube or iTunes help foster relationships between fans and MySpace, YouTube and iTunes, instead of directly with the artist. 3. Direct Marketing I firmly believe an artist's success in achieving a sustainable career in music is tied directly to their ability to build and nurture an ongoing, direct relationship with their fans. Both FanBridge and ReverbNation offer an impressive set of direct marketing tools that can help artists communicate directly with fans and drive traffic to their website and live shows. Both companies help gather and provide important information that can be used to better understand their preferences and demographics. To learn more about effective email marketing to fans check out this blog on Email 101 for Artists. 4. Direct Commerce Buying directly from an artist helps strengthen the direct to fan relationship. Direct commerce also provides better margins for an artist than selling through a third party like iTunes or Amazon. Selling direct also provides the artist with more flexibility and creativity when it comes to bundling sales of music with t-shirts, tickets or unreleased tracks. Make sure fans can easily purchase music, merchandise, tickets and anything else you sell directly from you / your website. Both Audiolife and Nimbit offer direct commerce solutions for musicians that can be easily added to any website, MySpace or Facebook page. 5. Metadata Metadata is all the collective information associated with a particular track, release or band, summarized and available in a digital format. Metadata typically includes track titles, track lengths, ISRC codes, album art, genre, band bio's and publishing information. Accurate metadata is of significant importance since it is the information fans need to identify a particular artist or song in the very crowded digital music world. Digital retailers, MP3 players, computer based media players, online & satellite radio and mobile phones all use metadata to provide their users with information about the songs and artists that are playing. Not having the titles of your MP3 tracks or CD show up when it's being loaded into a media player will appear amateurish at best and at worst prevent your songs from ever being played by that fan again simply due to the hassle factor of trying to locate an another unlabeled track in a large digital music collection. Be sure to register the metadata information with the three primary companies that manage metadata databases for the industry: All Music Guide, Gracenote and Muze. All three companies have different procedures for accepting metadata from directly from artists. Check out each of their websites for details. 6. Digital Distribution Even though artists should encourage fans to buy music directly from their website it's still very important for artists to have their music available for sale at the leading online music retailers (Amazon, eMusic, iTunes & Rhapsody at a minimum). The leading online music retailers have large user bases and fairly good recommendation tools for music fans to discover artists similar to the ones they already enjoy. Retailers typically work exclusively through distributors and don't accept music directly from artists. There are many very good, inexpensive options now available to artists for digital distribution including CD Baby, ReverbNation and TuneCore. 7. Live Shows Playing live shows is one of the most important aspects of an artist's career since it provides a great opportunity to directly connect with fans, sell music and merchandise, add fan names to the email list and (hopefully) earn money from ticket sales and / or the venue's door receipts. Electronic press kits have emerged as a very effective and low cost way for artists to submit their music, bios, photos and videos to promoters or music buyers at the venues they would like to play. There are several companies now providing electronic press kits for artists including OurStage, ReverbNation and Sonicbids. 8. Internet Radio Internet radio is continues to grow at a phenomenal rate. According to a recent Arbitron study, the weekly online radio audience in the US has grown by one-third in the past year alone. Internet radio now provides independent artists with unprecedented access to a large and growing audience and promotional opportunities that had only been available to label backed artists. Many of the leading Internet radio stations such as AOL, Imeem, Last.fm, Pandora and Yahoo accept submissions* directly from artists so there is no need to incur the cost of hiring a radio promotions person or firm to work a new release to Internet radio stations. Another benefit of Internet radio is that artists actually earn royalties. Soundexchange collects royalties from internet, cable and satellite radio stations then pays those royalties directly to the performing artist (and copyright holder) for streamed tracks. Make sure you are registered with Soundexchange! 9. Awareness It's important to have a presence in the primary places where music fans discover new music. The big social networks, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, are good places to start. It can seem like there are endless options available to artists for promoting music online. What's the best way to prioritize them? Before signing up for the latest / greatest site for promoting music to fans be sure to check out their site traffic through Compete or Alexa. The data isn't perfect but it will give you a general idea of whether or not they have enough fan traffic to justify the time required to regularly maintain another presence on their site. Once you have an online presence established it's very important to keep the content, especially tour dates, regularly updated. Managing and updating each of these sites is a painful, time consuming hassle. ArtistData is a free service that solves this challenge by automatically updating "artist websites, social network profiles, concert databases, Twitter, official news feeds, iCal, local press, fan newsletters, and even tour books" when artists upload tour dates to the ArtistData site. 10. Hire a Fifth Beatle Finally, don't try to do all this online music marketing by yourself. Give serious consideration to Pandora radio Founder Tim Westergren's Fifth Beatle for The Digtal Age suggestion and you just might have time left over to write some great songs! *Internet Radio Submissions Info AOL Radio: Mail Submissions To AOL Radio Pete Schiecke 770 Broadway 4th Floor New York, NY 10003 Immem: Artists can build their own profile page and directly upload music Last.FM: Artists can build their own profile page and directly upload music Pandora: Mail Submissions To Music Genome Project Submissions 360 22nd St. Suite 440 Oakland, CA, 94612 Yahoo / LAUNCHcast: Mail Submissions To CBS Radio Seth Neiman 1515 Broadway, 46th Floor New York, NY 10036  |
| Eminem On The New Cover Of Vibe Magazine Posted: 29 Apr 2009 10:00 PM PDT   |
| Julia Angwins Book Stealing Myspace: Expanding Notions Of Web Publishing Posted: 29 Apr 2009 09:58 PM PDT  I just finished reading Julia Angwin's Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America and it's a great read, especially if you're interested in the power games of big media players. Topics of interest include the birth of MySpace via a company full of sp@mmers, the infighting that plagues so many media companies both new and old, the slowness of Viacom and the quickness of News Corp in dealmaking as an extension of the big bosses' approach, the many and changing reasons for the ongoing poor performance of MySpace on the front end and the inherent difficulties and dangers of running a radically popular web publishing platform. Though Stealing MySpace focuses on the behind the scenes maneuvering and the big business news, I'm discussing it here at This Business of Blogging because it got me thinking again about the fact that, on the web, the notion of publishing has changed radically and that the term "user-generated content" remains problematic in so many ways. I do consider social networks to be web publishing platforms and MySpace is an excellent example of how such platforms offer a pro/am mix of web publishers that undermines the concept of user-generated content. If you think about it, this blog is an example of user-generated content because I use TypePad as a tool to publish This Business of Blogging. Yet, this blog is also intended as a professional web publishing endeavor or, at least, a project heading in that direction. So, while the term "microblogging" gives blogging status to Twitterers, who are basically using a public form of instant messaging with social network components, and therefore expands the concept of blogging, the label ofuser-generated content limits the mental frame of those considering social networking in relationship to web publishing even though some MySpace accounts are important digital publishing sites for major bands, among other users of the service. What's also worth considering is the merging of web publishing and marketing on such platforms as MySpace and not just on member pages. Widgets are an excellent example of the blurring of the lines between and the transformation of both marketing and web publishing. iPhone apps are an example of related developments in mobile publishing. At this point, for many readers immersed in this new world of digital self-publishing, these points may seem obvious but I think underlying principles should be simple and are always worth reconsidering. If one considers the difficulties of print publishers in transitioning to the web, one sees they are often resisting or even disparaging the simpler truths of our complex existence and that's one reason they're dying even faster than is necessary. More generally, I've often stated or heard someone state something simple that relates to a deeper paradigm only to hear others treat it as an obvious thought. But what is so often revealed by the actions of those who claim to have a keen grasp of the obvious is that they've misunderstood or discounted what they claim to be obvious and so undermined the effectiveness of their work. For such reasons I consider the simple and obvious to almost always be worth using as tools to reconsider one's actions whether in business or in everyday life. Though Julia Angwin doesn't really dig into such topics in Stealing MySpace, it is a good read and wraps things up around May 2008 with MySpace's CEO, Chris DeWolfe, finally in full charge of the total business (p. 261), a reminder of the inherent difficulties of running an entrepreneurial endeavor inside of a larger corporate entity, whether Intermix or News Corp. It's also a somewhat poignant ending to this account of MySpace's early years in light of Chris DeWolfe's outster as CEO from MySpace.  |
| Step Ya Shoe Game Up! Nike Air Max LTD Posted: 29 Apr 2009 09:54 PM PDT       |
| Step Ya Transpo Game Up! Anliker McLaren 999 Red Gold Dream Posted: 29 Apr 2009 09:46 PM PDT   Anliker McLaren SLR 999 Red Gold Dream Ueli Anliker Design has festooned a Mercedes SLR McLaren with 500 rubies and 24k gold accents. The custom supercar has been christened Anliker McLaren SLR 999 Red Gold Dream. The Change: The front splitter adds 220 lbs of downforce at the vehicle's top speed of 217 mph. The 9 mph increase is courtesy of engine tuning that gets the power up to 999hp. A total of 500 LEDs have been used to ensure excellent vision. The Cost: 30,000 man hours and a whopping $4.3 million for this gilded revamp.  |
| Step Ya Shoe Game Up! Young Jeezy Adidas Snowman Posted: 29 Apr 2009 09:42 PM PDT  |
| Skull Gang " I Am The Club" Video Posted: 29 Apr 2009 06:04 PM PDT  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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