Music Ally is usually a mine of information, and they’ve just published a neat little top-ten list of spin off sites that link into Spotify and help you discover music, explore other people’s collections and playlists, and all of which provide channels through which you can promote your music to people once you’ve got your music on Spotify by using our free-to-sign-up digital music distribution service 
In order to encourage people to get their music online with us, and introduce new potential customers to our service, we thought we’d run a little competition. If you’re a solo musician or you’re in a band that has new music that needs to get out there and selling, all you need to do is add a comment to this blog post with the name of the band or artist and a link to the track that you think is their (or your) best. We’ll keep entries open until the 14th of December, and then we’ll judge all the tracks that have been entered. The top 3 according to our judges will be given completely free distribution to all of our partners stores during 2010 on any new releases they upload to RouteNote. No fees, no subscriptions, no back end cut, no strings – just access to our service completely free until 2011. The top 5 will get a feature and review on our blog, and we’re promoting this competition in collaboration with www.music-news.com, so you can expect to get their attention too. This competition is open only to artists and bands and music not already signed up to RouteNote.
Thanks, and good luck!
There’s something of a running joke about keeping up with Lady Gaga’s antics in the RouteNote office, and with two posts about her in a day it might be getting a little out of hand… We’re not ValleyWag, after all. Whether you like her style or not, she is great at grabbing media attention with wacky little stunts, intentional or not. This time she’s done something both unusual and unequivocally nice – buying pizza for hundreds of fans queuing all night to get her autograph. $1,000 worth of pizza to be more precise… Music News reports that she wrote on Twitter: ‘To all my beautiful fans, I love you more than anything. Thank u 4 making the fame monster number 1 on itunes. You are the only reward I need x gaga.’ [sic] Now how many of those fans undying loyalty do you think she bought for her $1,000?
You’ve got a great band together, some great ideas, you’ve polished your performance, you’re happy with your sound and you’ve got the perfect 15 tracks to lay down on the debut album that’s going to be the major weapon in your assault on the charts. One problem. You haven’t got the ten grand you need to have it recorded and mastered in a professional recording studio. What’s the solution? Chicago based rockers I Fight Dragons had the rather brilliant idea of getting their fans to fund them, with a hundred dollar contribution to the recording fund buying a ‘membership’ including all the band’s previous recordings on a specially produced USB drive, “and they guarantee[d] the owner a free digital copy of anything we ever release, as well as free admission to any live show of ours now and forever. And there will only be 100 ever made.” They posted a link on their website, sent an email out to their mailing list, and the drive/membership combination sold out in 48 hrs. This is a great example of a band that’s connected with its fans, and has given a huge amount of added value to a small group of committed fans that will continue to support them throughout their career, cherish their relationship with the band, and recommend them to all their fans. Read Hypebot’s take on the matter here, and the rest of IFD Brian’s post here, on the WeAreListening blog.
You might not be able to get a slot on From The Basement without greasing some major label palms, but BalconyTV is a channel that does daily sessions with unsigned and indie artists. So far they’ve had more than 8 million views across their bands, with The Script netting almost half a million plays as their most popular band. You can apply to play a session here, and then wend your way to either Dublin, London or Hamburg for a one day, live, unplugged recording session that they’ll chop up into a little video for you. Obviously if any of our distribution clients get on there we’d love to know about it so we can promote you on this blog!
Everyone seems to be agreeing that the way to get yourself noticed online is to give away a taster of your music, then give fans the opportunity to buy the rest of your catalogue, t-shirts, tickets and whatever else you can offer on the back of the free sample.
If you want to take this advice, here are a few places you might consider setting up a playlist including some of your music; just make sure you’ve got links back to your own website, or to your music on iTunes (after we’ve down your digital music distribution, obviously).
http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists – Set up a list including your video that you can embed into your own website, facebook or myspace.
http://mixtape.me/ – Free streaming site where you can upload your own tracks and mash up other peoples – make sure you put your info and gig dates in the liner notes for your playlist
http://sharemyplaylists.com/ – Spotify’s dedicated playlist hosting site. In it’s infancy, but a nice way of getting people to your music really easily (especially if we’ve already got your music online with them).
http://8tracks.com/ – A hosting and discovery site for short playlists (at least 1/2 an hour of music)
then of course there’s always iTunes – putting up podcasts is a little tricky if you’re not using a mac, but here’s the guide page on how to produce your own podcasts
http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html – with the added bonus that you can link people straight to your content on itunes (also click here to use our itunes linkmaker for other sites).
Band Name: Polina Kourakina
Genre: Acoustic Alternative with a hint of Jazz and Blues.
[EDIT: 3rd person from a 1st person perspective usually makes my hackles rise, but Polina is really enthusiastic about her music, so give her a chance and check out her stuff ] When Polina Kourakina steps up on stage, there’s a small giggle and wink of a smile across her face. She then lightly hops up on the stool provided for all the show and tell individuals, and clears her throat. She then quickly makes the scene fill with a presence of calm serenity and young minded spirit by stating “here’s my soul in a bundle of 6 strings tightly wound on my guitar”. The song starts slowly, increasing in tempo, which makes your heart beat with the rhythm. Finally an astounding sound of a voice crawls out of that tiny little girl, proclaiming her love for the music. The reason I believe polina kourakina is so unique compared to other musicians is how she controls the scene, and draws people in with her choice of poetry, and chord progressions. Undeniably I cannot see her on the face of some poppy magazine cover, but yet on a tour bus heading to a strongly awaiting town of individuals waiting to hear the songs of life, love, pain, and hope. What does her music sound like? It’s soothing, original and calms the soul. Polina has played in many places, from café’s in D.C., to the dive in bar in San Diego. This shows to most that no matter what coast you’re on, you’ll love what you hear. She, will be the best, and greatest, but what this little young lady has, no other can match up to. Her love for the music, you
see through her soul when she is on stage. The riffs with her voice, the choice of jazz notations seep into your every crevice finding you inside. Inspired by her mom, and loved ones.
YouTube .com:
http://www.youtube.com/user/polinaKourakina
www.myspace.com:
http://www.myspace.com/russiangelbabi
Australian blogger Andrew McMillen recently hosted a panel on the digital music industry in Perth, on which sat Simon Wheeler – director of digital at Beggar’s Group, an amalgamation of some big indie labels here in the UK [they're on the same road as my old primary school ]. Mr. Wheeler has some pretty progressive and pragmatic attitudes to online promotion, and some forward thinking methods that it might be useful for artists to replicate in their own spheres.
“…we know that fans are passionate about an artist, and they’re very excited about a new album. So to be able to give them something to satiate that demand somewhat has been quite effective. There’s also the purpose of giving people a piece of music to ‘try before they buy’, if you like. We get a lot of love and a lot of coverage in the blog world, because I think our artists are very suited to that world.
We don’t give music blogs free reign, because you’d find that each blog would post a different track from the album, and so ten minutes after you’d publicised the album, people could just go and download the whole album (laughs).
So by making available one chosen, one focus track from a new album – much as you take a track to radio – there’s kind of an unwritten dialogue between us and the bloggers. We don’t tell them to post it, we don’t say they can’t post it; if people post the whole album, we’ll definitely say they can’t do that, and we’ll get it taken down. But they understand that if we post an mp3 to one of our label sites or blogs, then they won’t get any grief from us at all [if they repost it to their blog].
This really helps focus the campaign around a lead track, much as you do when taking a track to radio. There’s no new science here; this is just what the record industry has been doing for decades. We’re just applying that to the digital age.”
Making a few tracks available for streaming or download online is a great hook for pulling people into an album or gig ticket purchase – that’s one of the major reasons myspace was such a success, bands need to connect with fans these days. Blink 182’s Tom Delonge is of the same opinion: [via Hypebot, via Techdirt, via The Guitar Center]
In an adjunct to my vociferous defence of Twitter and it’s web 2.0 cousins in that John Taylor post, I thought readers might be interested in a Twitter contact list that Bruce Houghton of Hypebot (a music industry news site) is putting together. Keep yourself informed, and pester decision makers in the industry to help you out. You can do this even more easily by downloading Tweetdeck, a little program that lets you find out who’s talking about certain search terms (your band’s name for instance), and different groups of people that you’re following.
Music Marketing dot Com have dropped a line about this guy’s not so novel scheme of selling space on his blog (and his shirt) for a given price every day. You send him a t-shirt, he wears it, and promotes your product for a day on his blog, with the first of Jan costing a dollar, and the 31st of Dec costing $365 ($66,795 in case you’re wondering). While I don’t recommend selling out in quite such a flagrant manner to any aspiring musicians, it does underline the power of brand presence. If you’re going to go to the trouble of organising a tour, getting yourself in front of thousands of people and making a spectacle of yourself, then you might as well take an appropriate sponsor along for the ride, and charge them for the privilege. Unless the idea completely repels you find someone who will benefit from being associated with your music (it could even be a charity if you’re concerned about the whole corporate whore thing) and get them to give you some shirts to wear and stickers for the van. They might even pay for that video camera you’ve been meaning to buy, so that you can get your performance and their logo up on youtube; it needn’t be a blatant thing – get your mate’s t-shirt printing company, or someone else local who has a real connection with your band to help you. Music is a business these days, and business is about relationships – look at sponsorships as a way to build them. This can be a two-way street as well – you can get exposure by them promoting the relationship through their own channels, and maybe even playing at their business events – don’t be afraid to look for ways to grow together with other businesses, especially those close to home or in your area of the market; safety pins and punk music, florists and hippie-folk, brylcreem and Rockabilly…
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