Here’s a great idea worth mentioning. I received an email this morning letting me know “AbletonTweets” was following me on Twitter. With a name like that I had to click over and see what they tweet about. Happily it’s “Unofficial Ableton Tips and Updates”. So like peanut butter and chocolate, Ableton and Twitter go great together so why not follow too: http://twitter.com/AbletonTweets
Don’t forget to follow me too: http://twitter.com/thingstocome
Related posts:
Use Twitter as a promotion tool for your music.
Follow amazonmp3 on Twitter for daily deals.
This entry was written by , posted on February 1, 2009 at 10:33 am, filed under Ableton Live, promotion and tagged ableton, Ableton Live, Twitter. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Today is my birthday but today I have a gift for you. It’s one of my new songs that will appear on my next album. Feel free to copy and share it. In fact, I hope you help me spread it around. The song is called “Born this Way”. Here’s the official stuff:
Born this Way – The Horrorist Download Mirror Mirror 2
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Written & Produced by Oliver Chesler. Published by Things to Come Records/Basart Music Publishing B.V./Strengholt Music Group. Out of Line Music, www.outofline.de, Masterhit Recordings, www.masterhit.com, Things to Come Records, www.thingstocome.com
Photography: Silent-View, www.silent-view.com, Hair: René Hilbert, Graphic Design: Maurice Roy. Location: Tresor, Berlin. www.tresorberlin.de Special thanks to Peter Entjes.
The song was recorded in Berlin, Germany. Sequenced using Ableton Live. Synthesizers: Electrocomp-101, Roland SH3, Yamaha CS5 and many software synthesizers. Vocals: Shure KSM-32, TC Electronic Voice Modeler and many software effects.
This entry was written by , posted on January 19, 2009 at 10:45 pm, filed under music, promotion, song writing and tagged electronic music, gothic, Oliver Chesler, The Horrorist. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
QR Codes are going to be everywhere soon. They are similar to bar codes and already very popular in Japan. Japanese teenagers print T-shirts with QR codes on them. When the shirts are shot with a phone camera it launches their homepage. Tell me that’s not pretty cool. I created the above QR code which will take you to Wire to the Ear. I used a free service found at: qrcode.kaywa.com
There are a few QR Code readers for the iPhone. There is a free QR Code reader named Barcodes. Barcodes does the magic trick well: You take a photo of a QR Code, it scans it and asks you if you want to launch the URL.
iCandy is a service that matches QR Code creation with sharing and printing. Without a doubt I’m going to put a QR code to my latest album on the back of my business cards.
More info: How to create QRcode
photo credit: 5Volt
via readwriteweb
This entry was written by , posted on January 16, 2009 at 11:49 am, filed under promotion and tagged barcode, promotion, QR Code. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I’m not sure if the BBC has been duped but they ran a story today about Anthony Ghosh, aka DJ Talent who is selling his gold teeth because “Records aren’t really shifting these days…”. I never heard of Anthony and I never knew gold teeth could be worth $60,000. Click to view the story, photo and please come back and tell me if any of this is real: Downturn forces DJ to sell teeth
photo credit: uberculture
This entry was written by , posted on December 16, 2008 at 7:36 pm, filed under promotion and tagged Anthony Ghosh, BBC, DJ Talent, gold teeth. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The Horrorist Live – Halle, Germany 2008 from thingstocome on Vimeo.
Often a promoter from an event I am booked to play will ask me to do an anthem. Sometimes they want to post the song on their website before of after the gig. Other times they are doing a CD for the event and want a song with the event’s name in it to kick it off.
A few weeks ago I played in East Germany at the Alte Lampenfabrik for an event called Ton Aus Strom. It was there 10 Year anniversary party. As part of the plan they recorded my set direct from the mixing console. I started my show with an anthem for them. I did some screaming, pitchshifting and beat shuffling. Some of the vocals… “Ton Aus Strom” “Take Over!” “East Germany!” “Deutschland!”
Ton Aus Strom Anthem by The Horrorist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
This entry was written by , posted on November 17, 2008 at 2:07 am, filed under music, promotion and tagged Animoto, anthem, Germany, promotion, SoundCloud, The Horrorist, Ton Aus Strom. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Scribd is a San Fransisco web company that helps you present documents online. You join up, upload and your doc, pdf, xls, txt, rtf, ppt, odt files to the service and then it displays your upload in an interface which is easy on the eyes. For example, the readers who find your Scribd document can zoom around, flip pages, see thumbnail views and jump into a full screen mode. There are options for viewers to email your iPaper (that’s the official name of your Scribd uploads), save them for later reading, embed them, leave comments and add them to Scribd Groups.
So what’s good about this for musicians? Press kits baby! If you search online for “online press kit maker” you will find many companies willing to charge you $499 to make a flash type of online magazine out of your clippings. But Scribed does this free (ad supported) and has Social Networking and SEO built in so people actually find your interviews and five star reviews.
Something to keep in mind is you have to get written permission from each magazine or newspaper you plan to copy from. If contacted with a DMCA notice Scribed will zap your file. When I get contacted by a magazine asking, “Would you do an interview in GothWorld?”. I always say yes of course as long as I have the right to reproduce and distribute the article. There is plenty of copyrighted material on Scribed as there is on YouTube, Flickr, etc… so I don’t suspect many publishers will be asking for your Press Kit to be deleted. After all it’s good promotion for them too.
Another thing I discovered while trolling the site was that there is a bunch of sheet music that’s been uploaded including an Aimie Street sheet music Group. I always say the best way to improve your sound is to take piano lessons. If your teaching yourself here’s some compositions you can check out for free. If you are a beginner I would not try the “Crazy Musical Scores” I embedded above!
So far all my recent press is: click here. It’s time I get all my saved press clippings going back to 1990 and get them into a Scribd and backup PDF.
This entry was written by , posted on November 13, 2008 at 6:57 am, filed under promotion, song writing and tagged iPaper, press kit, promotion, Scribd, sheet music. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
It seems I am in a constant dilemma when it comes to my music career. I simply can’t create my albums as fast as I should. Ideally I would like to release an all new full length album every 18 months. However, with all the remixes, live shows and well simple procrastination I never meet my own deadline. It’s a shame because I really feel it’s important to remain in the eyes and ears of your fans. It’s also important if you want a constant strong flow of income from royalties and publishing.
I could put filler music on my albums and get the release out the door. Yet this is a shamefull practice because your seriously devaluing your own art. In the long run you will loose fans and your own self respect. Another thing to consider is if you make every song on your album as perfect as possible then people will listen to it longer. Heck we all own great albums from the 60s we still listen to.
Don’t think I can write perfect songs one after another. My absolute biggest trick as a musician is to simply throw away most of the of the music I create. Out of twenty songs I end up finishing I only think eight or ten are worth sharing with the world. Some people say to wait for inspiration to strike but I don’t think that works. I find many times I end up with that killer tune only after pulling my hair out on something that started out quite crappy.
The reason this is all on my mind this morning is I am making a major move from Berlin to NYC in a few weeks. I finally will go from being a renter to landlord! There will be about six months of renovation before my all new music studio is a room a can work in. Yes you will see photos of the build and whatever sound treatment we use. Now to my point… I have seven great songs finished for my next album. I really need about twelve. I took what I had to the label that releases my music (www.outofline.de) to discuss the situation. In the end we decided to put off the release until Spring/Summer 2009. This way it will surely be something I am proud of.
Luckily we live in the internet age and because of that there is now distribution from artist to fan. I decided a good compromise would be to give away two of the best songs from the upcoming album to keep myself in the mind’s eye. So shortly after I get a little settled in New York and armed with some new promo photos I will do just that. I’ll shoot to the world a song I recorded called “Born this Way”. Besides my own websites and Social Media spots I will have my friends help me contact the million music blogs out there and see if they want to help spread the tune.
photo credit: in touch
This entry was written by , posted on November 11, 2008 at 5:29 am, filed under promotion, song writing and tagged Born this Way, momentum, moving, perfection, song writing. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
When I first started my record label over 10 years ago I included 8.5×11 sheets of paper inside ever single record with information about the songs, label and artist (see below right). When the web started to flourish I stopped killing trees and sent email news. At the beginning I had only about 250 contacts but I knew almost all of them personally. At that time my promo emails were all text and I would send about one a month. As people 
sent fan mail or I met “kids” at shows I would collect their email addresses. By 2001 I had several thousand people on my email list. Around that time I started sending my “eNews” every two weeks and was sending graphic pretty HTML email. Each time I sent an email news out I would get about twenty responses from close friends and family, a host of questions about where to buy merchandise and usually a promoter or two asking to book one of us.
Well eventually and unfortunately spam took over the worlds email system. We all remember that right? I remember in the early 00s going from 10 spams a week to well over 100+. Because of that my ISP blocked me from sending my own newsletter out too. I pleaded with them and explained that everyone on my list was “opt in” it but alas no luck. I then discovered a piece of software called Maxbulk Mailer. Maxbulk allowed me to throttle my newsletters so they would get past my Host’s blocking system. For about two years this worked fine. About a year ago Maxbulk was also rendered useless. My host and by the look of the Maxprog forums most other people’s hosts knew how to stop Maxbulk Mailer. I know some people still use the software with success but dealing with blocked ports simply made my day way more boring than I could handle. Sadly, I stopped sending my newsletter.
I put some thought into how mid to large size companies were sending their own pretty spam to me. Then it hit me: They pay someone to do it! Immediately my super smart friend Google pointed me to companies like Constant Contact and Mailchimp. I was almost sold on using them but to be honest I couldn’t look at the PC style Contant Contact website and well the price was just too high for my to justify. To send my my list of about 4800 people it was going to run me about $50 per month.
A few weeks ago I made a very happy discovery called Mad Mimi. This is not an advert for them. I would tell you early on before you read this far if I was leading you to buy something. Mad Mimi is similar to Constant Contact however it’s gorgeous and cheap (or even free up to 100 contacts). Anyone who wants to shoot a newsletter out can use the service it but I discovered it was originally designed for musicians. You design really nice email Promotions using templates and your own images. You can also customize the CSS to perfection. It saves all the different promotions you make in your profile. You import your contacts (called Audience). After Mad Mimi sends your Promotion out it lets you know email addresses that bounced and lets you delete them from your Audience list. You can also track if people clicked or forwarded your promotion (how does it know that?). It also handles unsubscribing for you. Lastly Mad Mimi gives you an HTML snippet so you can embed a sign up page on your websites. This is another thing I used to do locally now moved into the cloud
Never ever spam. Don’t use anyone else’s list. Don’t buy lists. Slowly create a list of people who are really interested in what your doing. I also recommend that you don’t send more than two promotions a month because it’s just plain annoying (Beatport are you listening?).
Have you ever tried email marketing? Are there any pro-audio companies or bands that have notoriously bugged you with spam?
Check out: www.madmimi.com
This entry was written by , posted on October 29, 2008 at 10:02 am, filed under promotion and tagged Constant Contact, email, Mad Mimi, Mailchimp, Maxbulk, Maxprog, promotion. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Bandcamp Screencast from Ethan Diamond on Vimeo.
Last week I mentioned to a friend that 1pixelout must have released a new audio player because I’ve been seeing huge versions of it around different sites. The 1pixelout audio player is the one you sometimes see on this site. Well it turns out these new players are coming from a new service called Bandcamp. Just watch the video above as it tells the story better than me typing it out. It’s clean, free, pretty and let’s you sell your music. I love it.
SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.
SoundCloud the Berlin based startup has enjoyed a great beta ramp up and launch. They have attracted a nice group of industry insiders and electronic musician to their site. The SoundCloud audio player which allows your to make comments along the waveform of your song is just plain awesome. However trouble may be brewing in die Hauptstadt (capital city) because they just released their pricing plan and it’s a doozy. They continue to offer a free service but the forums, tweets and blogs seem to think they are gouging.
You know what? I want a combination of these two services. Give me a way to sell my music in many formats. Give me a great audio player with comments along the timeline and a waveform view. I want a dropbox. I want widgets. It should be free with ads or $25 a year advert free. They can have a few percent of my music sales too. I’d like to be able embed all my music on my own site as a mini store and have complete control over the CSS.
Bandcamp: http://bandcamp.mu
SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com
Loading ...This entry was written by , posted on October 12, 2008 at 11:42 pm, filed under business, promotion and tagged Bandcamp, mp3, SoundCloud. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
We all know that having a few music videos per album is great promotion. With inexpensive tools like iMovie and a Flip video camera there is no excuse for not producing them. Once your video is all finished you uploaded it to YouTube and MySpace and your done. But wait what about that gorgeous video site Vimeo? Or that site let lets viewers comment along the playback timeline… Viddler? You know having your video in Blip.tv is also cool because they offer an embeddable show player. Hmm it’s going to be a long day uploading the same video to all these sites. But alas there is a better way: Tubemogul.
Tubemogul is an incredible free service to which you upload your video to one time and they distribute it to over 20 sites. That distribution service alone is truly a gift from the time saving gods however they give you more goodies. Once your video or videos are uploaded and delivered around the web universe and a few days go by log back into your Tubemogul account and viola you can see Analytics. Analytics is the fancy word for “Who is watching, how many are watching and where are they watching.”. The data is presented to you with nice interactive charts and graphs.
You may end up surprised that YouTube is not getting you the most views. Remember your video on YouTube is lost in a huge ocean of content. Earlier this year I discovered videos from a music blogger named Vergel Evans in his studio via Viddler. I got to his video because I searched “drum machine” and because Viddler is low on content like music tech his LX7.ca videos show popped up.
Don’t worry if you already have your videos on a few sites already because you can still upload them to Tubemogul and deselect “distribute” to those you already have covered.
Be sure to check out Tubemogul’s video channel on YouTube which is full of usefull tutorial videos: click here
This entry was written by , posted on October 1, 2008 at 2:11 am, filed under promotion, video and tagged Blip.tv, distribution, Tubemogul, Viddler, video, Vimeo, YouTube. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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