Here’s a choice I am running into that I need help making a decision for. When you post your commercial, for sale music online do you allow the full song to stream or only allow a 30 second preview? The large online music retailers such as iTunes and Amazon only allow 30 second previews. Do they know something about buying behavior? Does allowing just a short clip tantalize a listener so he wants to hear the rest of the song and clicks buy? Could it be iTunes and Amazon believe people will “rip” or record a full song stream even if just 128k quality?
Some websites like Last.fm give you the choice. I had my music set for 30 sec play and I received the following comment:
“30 second clips? can we get anymore of a rip off thats like showing half of the picture you painted, but if you want to hear the rest youll have to buy it if people like you enough, they will buy your music stop being such a rip off” – mnmcandiez
After a little thought I switched my settings to full song play. Is that the right decision? I think everyone knows it’s easy to record any sound your computer makes. I also know my publisher Strengholt music group doesn’t approve. There are some sites such as Bandcamp who rely on people buying music in order for them to survive yet they only allow full streaming songs.
So what do you do? What are the pros and cons here?
Loading ...photo credit: mag3737
This entry was written by , posted on July 3, 2009 at 6:06 am, filed under business and tagged 30 seconds, Amazon, Bandcamp, business, iTunes, last.fm, preview, promotion. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNM-3QFq9fA
Tom Cosm always gave his music away for free. When his life went online he gave his music away and also started giving away free sounds and tutorials. When Tom’s computer died many of the people who enjoyed all the free gifts from Tom helped him out. I really liked the video above. I’m sitting in the center of Manahatan as a write this so seeing a nice New Zealand landscape is going down well with my coffee. Also quite cool is to see a few N.Z. techno parties. It’s a nice feel good story and it’s well needed in the music “business”. Tom printed all his contributors names in a tag cloud on the cover of his new Macbook.
“In the last 24 hours, Well over 1000 USD was raised to help get me a new Macbook. I am both amazed and overwhelmed with gratitude. Thankyou thankyou thankyou to those who chipped in to make this possible. I’ve had to stop accepting money for the Mac… I now have enough to not only purchase it, but upgrade it to it’s highest specs! (and probably get a nice carry bag) How exciting.” – www.cosm.co.nz
Tom Cosm – Making a bassline sit well with a Kick from Tom Cosm on Vimeo.
If your looking for a few tips, tricks, sounds or tunes why not stop off at Tom Cosm’s place: www.cosm.co.nz
This entry was written by , posted on March 3, 2009 at 3:07 pm, filed under Uncategorized, promotion, sounds and tagged New Zealand, promotion, techno, Tom Cosm. 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.
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.
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.
One year ago today I installed Wordpress and starting typing this blog. My main motivation was to give my friends a break from the relentless emails and instant messages I was invading them with. I couldn’t stop showing them new audio gear and software I thought was cool. I figured if I started my own blog they could come and visit if they so cared and I would also find new people to have conversations with. I am happy to report I have gained quite a lot of new friends and my old buds are reading the blog too.
Another motivation was to have a place for common questions I was being asked repeatedly. Today if someone asks me a question I have a post I can point them to. Getting an unwanted distored sound from your DAW? Go here: keep-your-channel-faders-low… You don’t know how to bring in external hardware into Ableton Live? Go here: use-the-ableton-live-external… By the way if you have a question you want me to try an answer send me an email: oliverchesler@wiretotheear.com
Of course as a professional musician having a blog is a must. I’ve been using Wire to the Ear to share my remixes and new releases. Getting unbiased feedback from strangers should be a priority for any artist. Your friends and family are always going to tell you your music is good.
My goal is to continue to post a balance of original content mixed with the best stuff I find along my online travels. I’ve had a blast visiting Jomox and doing interviews with people like Dan McPharlin so expect more material like that. I really want to give my fingers a break and get in front of the video camera and do some video posts or even a fancy show. So far the test video posts I did were too geeky to show the world. Eventually I will figure out a way to produce something that I am happy with.
If you want to help support Wire to the Ear all you have to do is go tell your friends to read it! Remember you can also subscribe to the RSS feed by: clicking here
Thanks for reading!
photo credit: jpc101
This entry was written by , posted on September 30, 2008 at 7:23 am, filed under Uncategorized, promotion and tagged birthday, blog, promotion, Wire to the Ear. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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?
This entry was written by , posted on August 29, 2008 at 6:37 am, filed under promotion and tagged flickr, photos, promotion. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Brian “Botkiller” from Albuquerque, New Mexico shares his thoughts on playing live. I agree with what he says concerning doing your own share of promotion. Even if your playing an event with 10 other hot acts and you you know it will be packed you want 50 of your own superfans front and center. Remember crowds follow the lead of the people near the stage!
I talk about working with promoters and clubs and promoting your shows. – brianbotkiller
He’s also correct to mention that the person who books you is probably not the only individual who you need to deal with. Getting to know a few people who work at the venue early on could save your if anything goes wrong at 2AM.
I noticed he kicks off the video by mentioning he just bought a house. Congrats to Brian but later in the video he mentions sometimes he only gets $10 for a gig! He must be in one hard working band! Maybe he has a day job? Something about his “vlog” videos crack me up but I respect him for going for it.
This entry was written by , posted on August 19, 2008 at 12:32 am, filed under business, live performance, promotion and tagged Brian Botkiller, live performance, promotion, video, vlog. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Last night I reached 10,000 friends on MySpace. I’ve never tried to hack the system or send a bot out to friend people. It’s true a large percent of those 10,000 maybe fake, spam or who knows but you can bet a 
whole bunch are real fans. First off I created a MySpace bulletin (blog post?) saying thanks and I really do mean it. Without an audience there is no artist or musician.
The surprise came when I logged in this morning and I got a message stating I could: Automatically Approve Friend Requests. So getting to 10,000 actually got me something cool. Who knew?!
I know a lot of people knock MySpace and there are plenty of competitors but I still use and love the site. There’s no better way to get an instant view of a band. MySpace is in talks with Amazon and the major labels creating a deal for a new MySpace Music store. They plan to launch in September and I think it could be big. Check out the article on TechCrunch: click here
This entry was written by , posted on July 31, 2008 at 9:22 am, filed under promotion and tagged Amazon, MySpace, promotion. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Loading ...
Google Reader Updates
Recent Comments