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

I was pleased when Amazon.com took on iTunes in the MP3 selling space. The more competition the better. I am a member of Amazon’s affiliate program. When I suggest a product on Amazon I can add a little snippet of code to the end of the url and if someone purchases the item I get a small cut. You can add your own affiliate code to your own band’s music for sale on Amazon too. This way you make money from the sale of the MP3 and a small bit extra for creating the sale on Amazon. Amazon also gives you a cut of anything else someone buys on their site during the visit that started with the special url. So if someone comes to Amazon to buy your MP3 but then buys a television you make a nice commission.

The great thing about the Amazon affiliate program is that you not only make commissions on the item that you link to from your blog but any item that your referred reader might buy after clicking your link. – problogger.net

Last week Amazon released a new MP3 Clips Widget. You don’t have to be an affiliate member to create and use them. You can choose any song or album or combination of either to be displayed. If you are an affiliate member it will attach you code to any sale generated by the Widget. The Widget’s come in a few web friendly sizes. Interestingly, your MP3 Clips widget can also be set to automatically display the latest MP3 tracks you purchase on Amazon. Here is a Widget I created for my newest album:

If you hit the play button you can see the cool translucent interface that pops up over the album cover image. The buy links take your directly to Amazon and include my affiliate code. I hope iTunes releases something similar. As of now their affiliate program which is run by Linkshare only lets you attach an affiliate code to an iMix or pre-determined popular albums.

If you want to feature just one song try the mini player. Here is one set with a white background:

Here’s a scenario I run into all the time. I have a new release ready for my record label. I need to make 30 second previews of each song. I make the shorter clips in Ableton Live. Live doesn’t not export as MP3. I drag the rendered previews into iTunes, convert then drag the MP3s out. Lastly, I need to select all the previews in iTunes, click delete, send to trash and then empty the trash. Thats really stupid so I was thrilled to see one of my favorite companies release an audio converter for Mac.

I know there are some other audio converters but Techspansion makes one of the hottest Mac Apps called Visual Hub. Visual Hub is a video converter that is the de facto standard. Its ultra fast and works on any video type. I also like that Visual Hub uses Sparkle and so does AudialHub. What’s the Sparkle? When a new version of an application is ready from a developer you get a notification the next time you launch the app and with one click it updates itself. This is an important feature for programs that do conversions because the developer can update and add new files types often. So heres some details for AudialHub:

• Conversion from dozens of audio types to popular formats like AAC, MP3, WMA, AIFF, WAV, Apple Lossless, 3G (cell phones), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and even Audio and MP3 CDs!
• Audio tracks inside video files can also be converted!
• Common tags (Artist, Album, etc) are automatically passed when applicable.
• Up to 16 hours of audio can be converted to a single MP3 CD.
• Easy-to-use Trim capabilities to narrow down short segments of audio.
• Quick Preview capability to check out compression quality and Trim settings before a full conversion.
• Dynamic file queue, allowing mid-conversion changes or additions, Pause/Resume, and an “always ready” Assembly Line Mode!
• Run multiple simultaneous conversions in separate queues with separate settings.
• Growl notifications, Dock progress indicator, and AppleScripting automation support!
• Normalization, audio track selection, multiple decoder options, and direct access to add custom low-level command-line settings!
• Detailed Users Guide and Help Center.

There is another bit of excellent news here in that AudialHub uses the Lame encoder for MP3s. Certain digital download stores like Trackitdown (big for dance music in the UK) only accept MP3′s encoded using Lame. Itunes does not use the Lame encoder. In fact, audio previews will play back at the wrong speed if you do not use Lame.

AudialHub is $19. If you already own VisualHub you get it for $15
www.techspansion.com/audialhub/

It’s hard to be writing in any publication concerning audio and not comment about this week’s events. Radiohead shocked the industry by announcing it’s new album In Rainbows was available to download for any price you think it’s worth (including free). They also let us know they are no longer bound contractually by EMI. They broke another convention by not giving radio stations a single to hype before the album release.

Besides paying (if you so choose) for the digital download super fans can purchase a box set for £40 that contains a CD, 2x 12″ vinyl and a bonus CD with some photos and artwork. Interestingly, the NYTimes.com reports: “And Radiohead plans to release “In Rainbows” as an old-fashioned CD no later than January, though it has not determined if it will return to a major label to do so.”.

It seems like Radiohead has made a smart move and covered all their bases. They look like heroes for dropping EMI and giving their music away for free. They also did it first and such are receiving lots of attention. They have a plan to make some money and even a fall back to the traditional CD on a major label if things don’t work out.

Trent Reznor, Jamiroquai and Oasis all said they have similar plans. Somewhat related Madonna turned down an offer from Warner Music Group to go with concert promoter Live Nation Inc.

But wait a minute. Deep breath. What does this really mean? At first I was actually angry. I thought “Great, a bunch of rich people are giving away what I need to sell to make a living.”. I showed some of the articles to a friend of mine who is a graphic designer and he said, “This is awesome. Music should be free!”. Now I was really pissed off.

Being 37 years old I realize I am starting to be at the age where I need to consciously think outside of my own norms to stay current. To stay young. To stay relevant. So I started to think, “What if?”.

What if music should be free? What if audio should be treated like most text and images with the ability to copy, paste, quote and cite at will. Why not have it supported by advertising? Japan already has an average download speed of 60 megabits per second and soon so will the rest of the world. Audio files (in fact albums) will load on a page instantly.

Imagine that one hundred and fifty years ago before the phonograph was invented to hear music you had to hear it live. Then, wonderful inventors created the record player as a convenience to the human race. Did they envision their inventions as money making machines for corporations? Did they see their new device as a way of locking down and monetizing every recording?

And today haven’t we seen a loss in quality in our music? Pitch correction, vocal comping, quantizing, loudness maximizing have sucked the life out of our lullaby’s. Isn’t there a large amount of fakeness going on? Wouldn’t making the best performing artist the most successful remedy this situation? Wouldn’t most music be better if it had to work somehow in a live performance?

Things are definitely changing and this topic is huge. There is a lot of history to study before one can see the future. I would like to let you know of a two great articles online that I really enjoyed on this subject. First, click over to Techcrunch and read “The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free“. Be sure to look at the now 200+ comments for some great insight from some intelligent people. Every few comments I changed my mind back and forth. Next, scoot over to the Freakanomics blog at the NYTimes.com and read “What’s the Future of the Music Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum“. Five highly qualified people from business schools, musicians, Peter Rojas from Engadget and Steve Gottlieb (president of TVT Records) all tell you their perspective.

What do you think?

Photo credits: velo_city, makeitgreat and KGBKitchen

About a year ago I was looking for a way to sell MP3′s directly from my record label’s website. I had two requirements. First, I didn’t want to pay a percent of each sale to anyone. Second, I wanted the process to be automatic. For example, someone comes to the website, clicks “shop”, fills his cart with MP3s, pays, and then without me doing anything the download links are sent by email.

Surprisingly, there were not many options. Building my own store in Paypal was over my head. I could get close to what I wanted but I ran into issues. Every time I tried to get support help from the Paypal developer forums I was spammed by people trying to sell me their finished stores (none of which were elegant). There is Payloadz which starts out as free but if you sell more than $100 worth of music in 30 days you need to upgrade your account to a pay version. I sold more than $200 in the first week so it’s a good thing I didn’t go with them. Snocap gives you a flash store you can put anywhere on the web and its the only store that will attach to your MySpace page music player. However they take the highest cut in the industry. Nimbit has a really pretty flash based store you can also paste all over the internet but again they take a cut. Out of all the ones that took a cut I liked Nimbit’s OMT the best. It also let you sell merchandise and sell tickets to list upcoming gigs. Recently I noticed they added Facebook integration. There are a few other download stores but either they didn’t work well or: they take a percent of your earnings! The thing here that I really want to stress is: Why in the internet age would you let another company take a percent of your moola? There are many ways to self promote online. None of the digital download stores will do that better than you can do it yourself.

Eventually this lead me to easybe.com and the 1-2-3 Music Store. You pay once. $68 for bands, $168 for labels and that’s it. Its a complex PHP script you install on your server and Mysql database (most hosting plans include several databases on your server for you to use). If you can’t figure out to install the store you can pay Easybe $38 and they will log into your server and do it for you. It looks good and you can customize it to fit your own website. You can hear previews of the songs, see the artwork and fans can write reviews. You can also set up categories and it has mailing list features. People pay with Paypal or a credit card and the store automatically sends them an email with download links. Your songs are hidden on the server and you set how long the download links will be active. You can also set the number of download attempts. The best part is when you get an email telling you how much money was transfered to your Paypal account and what was purchased!

You can try a demo of the store front at easybe.com or visit my own store at Things to Come Records. Also at easybe.com you can try out a test of the admin area which I recommend. It will give you an idea of what you can accomplish.

I’ve been asked a few times how I customized the Things to Come Records 1-2-3 Music Store so instead of emailing each person I decided to put my answer here. I am moderately knowledgeable about creating websites and I put customizing the store at about a medium difficulty. It will take a few hours and some twiddling to get what you want.

Most of the files you are going to modify are in a folder called “shop”. Here’s the path you need to follow on your server to get there:

public_html -> 1-2-3-music-store -> docma_xxxxxx -> modules -> 123-music-shop -> templates -> shop

“public_html” is your root folder (it can be called something else, this is simply what my ISP calls my root) and your docma_folder will have a number attached to it instead of xxxxx. Once you are inside your shop folder you will see all the template files you can modify. They end with .tpl and you should open them in a text editor that has syntax highlighting. All syntax highlighting means the program colors the text according to the type of text it is. There are free text editors on both Mac and PC. I use one called TextWrangler on my Mac. You actually do not have to use an editor with syntax highlighting but I really recommend it as it will help you see clearly what is what and point out if you make mistakes (like not closing a quote). One thing that may happen to you is your FTP client won’t know how to open .tpl files. Don’t get stressed because you just need to teach your FTP program what application should open .tpl.

Besides the templates files the only other thing you will want to edit is the style sheet. It is found here:

public_html -> 1-2-3-music-store -> public -> shop -> simple_style.css

So you now know exactly what you need to edit. Backup any file you plan to work on. Start with the style sheet and get your colors and fonts where you want them. Next edit the newrelease.tpl file because this is the default/opening page you see when you go to the store. Here is where you can add your websites header and footer. You will have to do this for each of the .tpl pages.

Thats basically it! It will take you a little time to get used to what the code is changing on your website. Be patient and expect to give it a day or two to complete.

One last thing I’d like to add is that my music is also available on iTunes and Beatport. Remember that point of sale is important. Be everywhere thats hip or a good deal.