CitySounds.fm uses the SoundCloud and Flickr APIs to bring you music and images sorted by different world cities. The site was created by Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud during Music Hack Day in London. I’ve been listening during my morning coffee/web troll routine to Nashville.

“The tracks and city information is fetched from the SoundCloud API–in fact the list of cities and tracks is even updated in real time as new tracks roll into SoundCloud. Additionally, pictures for each city are fetched from Flickr.” – blog.soundcloud.com

Check it out for yourself and let me know which city your think is producing the best tunes: http://citysounds.fm/

For more info: musichackday.org

Oh Monday how are you? What’s that Monday you say I have to wake up early and get to work? Sit in traffic you say? Work hard all day? Ok fine Monday but before I leave my house let me remember the reason I have to hit the street so hard. Show me a bunch of pretty synthesizers all that money will buy me! Oh thank you Monday. Thank you very much.

To view these photos directly on flickr: click here

Find me on flickr here: www.flickr.com/photos/thingstocomerecords/

Do you remember my post titled, “Why every musician should have a flickr pro account.“? If not, go read it and get back over here. Today’s post is about two things. First, flickr now has a great new way to embed slideshows like the one you see above. Second, a reminder that flickr groups are a great place to go to get your gearlust on!

You could always embed slideshows from flickr using flickrslidr. But the new embeddable slideshows direct from flickr itself are very nice. You can customize the embed size without going into the code, decide if the titles and descriptions are displayed and videos now play inside slideshows!

One of the main improvements we’ve made is that you can watch videos as they appear in a slideshow. When we come to a video in a slideshow, we’ll play it before we move on to the next item. You can also embed a slideshow on another website in bite-sized form. Just click the “Share” link from any slideshow, then copy and paste the embed code wherever you want. – blog.flickr.net

The above slideshow is from The Audio Recording Studio group. Here are a few other music related groups I like to check out from time to time:

Gear Porn
NAMM
SYNTHESIZER + SEQUENCER .de + Live Electronix
Synthesizers
vintage electronics
Electronic Music
Macintosh

Flickr is a fun place and it’s also a highly usefull promotional tool. Using flickr stats I can see my own photos have been viewed 102,234 times. The most viewed photo? The Horrorist – Studio… easy, free promotion!

Have you spent anytime checking out Groups on flickr? Got any favorites?

There is a website called Animoto that lets you upload or import a set of photos and music and then it will churn out a slick music video for you. Usually when I get back from a live performance the promoter or fans will send me some photos of the show. Why not get these into music video form onto YouTube? Great promotion no?

Of course you can take the time to create a music video from still images in Final Cut Pro, iMovie or Adobe Premier but Animoto is super easy, fast and effective. Here’s how it works: Head over to Animoto.com and sign up for an account. Click “create video” on the top left of the window. Next, you choose “30 Second Video – Animated Short” or “Full Length Video”. The 30 second clips are free to make. If you want to make something longer it will cost you $3.00. There is also a yearly subscription fee for $30.00 which allows you to make as many full length videos as you like. Now you either upload your photos or import them from flickr. Remember my post “Why every musician should have a flickr pro account.“? Here’s another reason why! You can also import photos from Facebook, Picasa, Smugmug, and Photobucket. You can choose a few photos to be featured by adding a “Spotlight” tag on them. Then you add your music and hit “finalize” and Animoto does its magic. A great new feature they just added is the ability to send your creation directly to YouTube.

You end up with a pretty neat music video. Fancy transitions with zooms and pans make your static photos come to life. The thing I personally like is how fast the process goes. Take a look at this short clip I put together from still photos from my show in Espenhain, Germany at Praezisionswerk and my song Now Destructor:

There’s nothing stopping you from using promotional photos and a talking soundtrack or an interview. Why not create a video of your album covers or event flyer’s?

“Animoto is definitely a slick, fun, easy way to compile your photos into energetic videos.” - Harrison Hoffman, CNET

There is one thing I don’t like about the service and that’s the fact that they slap the Animoto logo at the end of the video. The logo appears even at the end of full length videos you pay for. I contacted them to see if there was a way around it and they told me no. Oh one more thing: use Firefox, Safari gave me trouble.

For many years I had the photos I wanted to show the world on my record label’s website. Photos from live shows, promotional photos, studio photos and photos from other artists on my record label. I used Gallery and then later Simpleviewer to make the galleries. All the photos were stored with my ISP on my server. You could come and see the photos if you came to my website. The only way you would know when new ones were added would be if you were on our mailing list. Lame! It’s 2007 and there is a much better way.

There are some major advantages to switching from the above method to a flickr pro account.

First off to be clear you can still have your photos on your main website. In fact, the process of putting your photos on a regular web page from flickr is easier than using a gallery generator. A site called flickrSLiDR makes it simple. You input the URL of your flickr set and if you want to limit the gallery to certain photos you list the tags of only those photos you want. Next, you put the size you want your gallery to be and click ok. It then gives you the code you need to put in your html page. Another generator is called PictoBrowser and it works in the same way but the end result has a different look and it has more color options. Both are free.

Here is a flickr slide show/gallery I created using flickrSLiDR from my live show last week: The Horrorist live in Stuttgart

Flickr has an open API which means other software and websites can access your photos if you give them permission. This means that you can also have the same photo set now appear on your MySpace and Facebook profiles. Now we are getting somewhere! MySpace doesn’t allow Javascript and it suppresses most galleries ability to click on photos. Luckily there is flickranywhere to the rescue. There are several choices for adding flickr photos to your Facebook profile. The two most popular are My Flickr and zuPort: Flickr

You can also have your flickr photos on the sidebar of your blog. See on the right side of this blog you are reading right now? Those photos from the Things to Come Records studio? Those are from flickr. They are from my own photos tagged with “studio”. I used a plug-in called flickrRSS for WordPress to do it. There are many ways to add your photos into blog sidebars for any of the blogging platforms available.

People can subscribe to your flickr photos using RSS. And you can use RSS to collect your latest photos and send them in an email newsletter. For example, I use feeddigest.com to send fans the latest news from the Things to Come blog and I combine it with the RSS from my flickr feed.

Do you think all the above is too complicated? Well there are super easy to use badges and widgets that will show off your flickr photos. You just copy the code for the widget you create and paste it anywhere that accepts html. The three top widget companies are Widgetbox, SpringWidgets and yourminis. Easiest of all flickr has it’s own badge service. All these different wigetizers look a little different and allow different kinds of customization.

Wow your photos are everywhere now. And you didn’t have to repost the actual photos anywhere. And guess what else? Because your photos are in flickr they show up in google searches! I think thats major deal.

But there is a ton of great things that you can do with your photos inside flickr itself.

Most importantly for you as a musician/artist is the groups feature. There are tons of public groups in flickr. For example “Electronic Music“. Now when I upload my latest show photos I pick the best few and send them to that group. Cool no? You can join as many groups as you like and you can create your own group. So in fact you can create a group for your band and your fans can upload any photos they want to it. Originally I think flickr had weddings in mind when they created this but I see some really great band groups happening on flickr. Here’s a really cool group: The words of Leonard Cohen. “Images that reflect the writings of Leonard Cohen. All images must reference quotes from his work”.

Flickr has a world map and you can pin your photos on the map where you took them. People call this geotagging. This is actually a lot of fun. You get your own map URL so for example you can show your fans all the places you performed and the photo sets associated with each show.

Flickr also lets you get prints, books, calendars, etc… I didn’t try these out but there a lot of options.

With a pro account you can create as many collections and sets as you like. You can set any set or individual photo as private. You can have family and friend rules set up so you decide who gets to see which private photos. There is a contact/profile system and forums for each of the many flickr groups.

Your a band and need an album cover? Image for a flyer? You can search photos with creative commons licenses. Many of the photos on this blog are found in the flickr creative common pool. Many times the only requirement to use a photo is you leave a credit.

Lastly is the peace of mind knowing that when your band mates smash your computer in a drunken rage all your photos are safely backed up on flickr!

photo credit: spo0nman