Trent Reznor who has put togehter his new band with his wife Mariqueen Maandig, will release a free six track EP on June 1st. The EP will be made available via the band’s website, HowToDestroyAngels.com.
There will also be an HD version of the EP, which is available for download; the ‘hi-def’ release will include a music video for “The Space In Between,” with a price of $2.
If you pre-order now, they’ll send you one track, “The Believers,” immediately. You’ll then be automatically emailed on June 1st as soon as the full EP download is ready.
The EP is set for a CD release on July 6. Vinyl edition to follow.
The Songwriters Hall of Fame is inducting some great songwriters in 2010, but Taylor Swift shouldn’t be one of them! Other songwriters who have be included this year are David Foster, Leonard Cohen and Earth, Wind and Fire. So why the hell is Taylor Swift joining those legends?
I admit that Taylor has had a great couple of years in which she has won a few CMA and Grammys, but the point here is that she only 20 years of age and has only been around for a couple of years. Given her young age and the songs which blatantly reflect her innocence, is the Songwriters Hall of Fame in the States jumping the gun? Can we really group her with the likes of David Foster who gave us “The Prayer” (Celine Dion/Andrea Bocelli) and “I Have Nothing” (Whitney Houston) or Cohen for “Hallelujah?”
You can find out more about the Songwriting Hall of Fame at their official website.
There are a lot of artists who want to know how to use iTunes to increase their sales on iTunes. Here at RouteNote we have a lot of artists who do amazingly well from their sales on iTunes, and a top seller has provided the musicthinktank with some amazing tips on how to sell more on iTunes.
With iTunes you really need to promote yourself within the walls of iTunes, and this goes a long way to help you sell and grow your fan based across other sites.
Here is a step by step process on how to promote yourself within iTunes. Please remember that this does take a lot of time, but overall can really get some great results.
Step 1 – Sign up to iTunes and Buy Some Music
The first thing you should do is signup and buy some music (your and your friends), this gets you familiar with the process of buying, plus this will come in handy when you ask your fans to buy your tracks later.
Step 2 – Create at Least 5 profile accounts
Did you know that with each credit card that you register with iTunes you get 5 separate accounts? iTunes designed it this way so families in one household can all use one card.
All profiles are kept completely seperate and not interconnected. One of the profiles will be use by you as your main account, but you can use the other 4 accounts to help promote yourself.
TIP: While you are creating these profiles: Think about your target audience – who are they? Older dudes that like prog rock, or teenagers that like Britney Spears? Create profiles that would fit the types of people who like your music. Choose a name for each profile so they each have an individual personality. Give them distinct personalities and even imagine where they might be from.
Step 3 – Review Other Artists
With each profile – individually begin to review other people’s music. You definitely want to review three or four other artists that have nothing to do with you or your genre so choose some of the artists that have influenced you or artists that you like and create some reviews.
Step 4 – Create iMixes
You will need to create 2 categories of iMixes:
1: iMixes that have nothing to do with you and your music
Examples:
Best of Madonna
Great local bands from your hometown
Best of Bob Marley
Best of the 1970’s
2. iMixes that INCLUDE YOUR OWN MUSIC
Create mixes that include your own tracks with other complimentary tracks (artists you get compared to and who you are influenced by that sound good when played next to your songs). When you create iMixes think of yourself as a DJ or a curator and piece together thoughtful lists.
TIP: Add some of the top sellers from each week in your genre and style as buyers will already be looking for the top sellers when they come to iTunes.
TIP: You should create an iMix at least one time per week per account.
Step 5 – Vote for iMixes
Make sure you vote on as many iMixes as possible. Vote for your own iMixes using all of your profiles.
COOL: iMixes that begin to pick up votes rise to the top where other buyers will begin to respond to them and purchase your iMixes.
A Note about iMix voting: People who are key users who are also heavily promoting their own music sometimes can be competitive. They may try to vote your iMixes down so that the iMixes that they have created rise to the top.
What my friend says about this: Being malicious on iTunes is awful. Don’t give other people bad reviews. Stay away from this type of negative behavior. Just focus on your own voting and contributions.
Step 6 – Master iMix Sandwiching
When you create an iMix, you want to sandwich yourself between hot chart-toppers in your genre, and add artists that already have five-star reviews.
For each iMix, make it at least 20 songs, but you can go to 40 or 50 songs. To stay on top of the charts for your iMix, you must get the most votes and the most stars.
TIP: Don’t forget to vote for other people’s iMixes so it looks like you are well-rounded.
This is where registering different credit cards and different personalities so you can actually log in and vote for yourself comes in handy.
Step 7 – Remove Unpopular iMixes & Update Them
If your iMix fals below three stars you should take your iMix down from iTunes, add some new tracks to it, and then add it again as an updated iMix.
It will take a few hours for your updated iMix to show back up into the iTunes profiles, but you don’t want to have a poorly rated iMix sitting in the iTunes system with your music in it.
How To Update an iMix: In order to update an I-Mix: Click on the arrow on iTunes. Then click on “update,” and add some new tracks,
TIP: Don’t rename your iMix
iMixes are good for a whole year, so you want to make sure that you start voting, when it goes back up. It takes between 6 to 12 hours for a newly edited or a new iMix to show up.
Here’s The Wrap Up:
For each profile you create: Their iMixes to match their personality:
1. Create then wait for your iMix to show up.
2. Log in as each of your different reviewers and users.
3. Vote five stars from each of the profiles you have created.
4. Start watching your music sell
5. Go in two times per week and create new iMixes.
6. After a while to stay in the most recent, you must continue to make new iMixes. Vote, vote and vote.
7. Remember, you must log in and submit votes for each of the iMixes with each of your separate accounts and many sepearte times. This is the most time consuming part of the process, but if you do this, the rewards and the sales will pay off deeply
8. Log in and vote for: Was this review helpful? And click yes per account. This will help your iMix move up the charts.
9. When you make an iMix, don’t only include the chart toppers, but also include what appeals to you as a listener and what the fans of this iMix might actually like.
10. Remember, you are creating a useful contribution to the iTunes community. The key is make iMixes on Mondays because on Tuesdays the new release schedule will kick in and that’s when your iMixes will show up
B.o.B is set to have a great hit with “Nothin’ On You” this summer. B.o.B.’s even brought it to Ellen, which is, like, mom territory, so maybe we’re looking at something bigger.
Villains have reshape it as funk-fried disco-house in their heretofore unreleased version, painting dribbling liquid synths over a swaggering, stuttering backbeat and wasting not an ounce of delirious catchiness.
There are so many stupid award ceremonies out there, but Billboard thought it would be worth adding another one to the list. Billboard has announced the Billboard Music App Awards on Tuesday.
For the first time, Billboard will set out to pay homage to the gods of… mobile music apps. Not desktop apps, mind you, just apps for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and Nokia platforms. A “panel of industry visionaries” will whittle down apps to the finalists, which will be announced on September 1, 2010. All app makers are encouraged to apply for consideration at MobileEntertainmentLiveFall.com.
Billboard’s award categories are Best Artist-Based App, Best Music Streaming App, Best Music Engagement App, Best Music Creation App, and Best Branded App. To be eligible, an app must have been released between July 1, 2009 and July 30, 2010.
Winning apps will be announced at the Mobile Entertainment Live!: The Music App Summit on October 5. Select finalist apps will be featured in a pre-show section of Billboard magazine, and their developers will be able to demo their apps in person in Billboard’s “App Lounge” at said summit.
M.I.A has just released “Born Free” for everyone to preview. “Born Free” is completely punk rock. If you have been listening to singles from The National to get you pumped up via rock music, then this might actually work also.
Check it out below and let us know what you think!
You’ll need your 3-D specs to properly appreciate this amazing view of the surface of an LP, magnified x390 by an electron microscope, photographed by Chris Supranowitz at the University of Rochester, who has also taken pictures of a load of other interesting stuff, including the pits on a CD, ladybird claws, and the surface of a fly’s eye… Makes you appreciate the wonder of the commonplace! Click on the pic to go to Chris’s project page, where you can find the rest of his images, or here to go to an amazing and totally non-music-related zoomable image of an ant under an electron microscope. 1950′s monster movie anyone?
Everything Laura Marling touches seems to turn to gold. Her past romantic liasons have both preceded breakthrough musical success, first for ex-boyfriend Charlie Fink and Noah and the Whale, and then for current beau Marcus Mumford of the eponymous Mumford and Sons. She was also [ahem] instrumental in the rise of Emmy the Great, and modest initial success for her debut album ‘Alas I Cannot Swim’ has built into a devoted critical following and a growing fanbase. She’s now just days away from releasing a second album, and because she’s a smart cookie, she’s previewing it through the Times’ website here. If you like what you hear, you can pre-order ‘I Speak Because I Can’ on Amazon here. Imagine a young, less squeaky Joni Mitchell who could give Feist a decent bout in the song-writing ring and you’re pretty much there…
The RIAA have loosed another volley against the filesharing contingent that they believe are bleeding the profitability out of the music industry. The arguments are pretty solid: those who choose to download music illegally instead of paying for it through legal physical and digital channels are not enjoying the fruits of the people working in the industry without contributing to their livelihood. Bad people, right? Not proper music fans, right? Theft is insupportable, but there are questions of degree to be considered… From the RIAA’s press release:
According to SoundScan, the top 10 albums in 2009 sold a total of 21 million copies, and the top 10 tracks totaled 36 million paid downloads. But the top 10 albums in 1999 totaled 55 million in sales. Even with digital track sales factored in, those top sellers fell by more than 50%. In the last 10 years, the major record labels’ direct employment in the United States fell from about 25,000 people in 1999 to less than 10,000 today – a drastic reduction of over 60% in people who enable the creation and development of new music.
In the music industry, it takes the investment of many peoples’ money, effort, and time to create the songs and albums we all get to choose from and enjoy. Since most acts never even reach the breakeven point in sales, music labels need to operate like venture capitalists and count on the successes to subsidize the continued development of many artists and releases that may never break out of the red. And it’s easy to ignore the harm being done when you’re only stealing one copy.
Stealing music is wrong. This is undeniable, but there is something about what the RIAA say – it’s easy for a punter to ignore the criminality of nicking one album at a time ‘just to hear it’, and so the solution to the problem has to be slightly more nuanced than cutting off the consumer’s internet connection, or suing individuals for vast damages in high profile cases. Legal, profitable channels of consumption have got to compete directly with the illegal, risky, but free-to-consume-unless-you-get-caught methods like filesharing and illegal streaming.
Picking on individuals makes the recording industry look like the aggressor rather than the victim, which they are not; they’re just trying to safeguard their sources of income, and their jobs. It’s hard to think of Edgar Bronfman’s kids going hungry, or Puff Daddy having to sell his jet to make the mortgage payments, but there are real people doing good work whose livelihoods are on the line. That said, progress is inevitable (see the video at the tail of the post), and the music industry has got to roll with the punches and capitalise on the massive innovation that’s happening in the digital sector if it is to thrive as it has in the past.
Another thing to consider is how much this piracy actually costs the industry. If the pirates couldn’t get hold of the music easily and for free, would they bother getting hold of it at all? Does the money not spent on records all get spent on eyepatches, stuffed parrots and WOW subscriptions, or does some of it come back to the music industry in other ways? Concert revenues are certainly up over the last few years, and some artists are making money against the trend of decline by using clever andnon-traditionalmarketing methods, selling coolphysicalproducts, and using new outlets like Spotify and eMusic (to whom RouteNote will happily distribute your music, by the way) to boost waning physical revenues. Is it better then, for the industry to put a death-grip on sometime pirates who may also be gig-goers and box-set-buyers, and look backwards at the fantastic success they had with physical formats, or to look forward to an era when everything is digital and try to maximise it’s readiness and thus it’s profitability? Perhaps we’ll see things go full circle, and recorded music sales will tail off completely as we all go back to being regular concert goers, just like in the 1800′s…
Digital Music News are carrying this story about online ticket scalping – a case in which an LA based company calling themselves ‘Wiseguy Tickets’ employed a ring of Bulgarian computer programmers to buy up all the best tickets to high profile, high demand concerts and resell them online for a huge mark-up. Perhaps parting with more thansix times the face value of the ticket is painful for whoever buys the ticket second hand, but presumably no-one is twisting their arm as they click ‘confirm bid’, and as far as eBay is concerned it’s perfectly legitimate (at least in the UK – some US states have laws against it).
So who is at fault here? Blocking the public from buying tickets wholesale with highly organised, bulk buying and reselling operations seems pretty underhand and unsporting, but the scalpers are taking the risk that people will purchase the inflated tickets, so isn’t it just the normal exercise of a free market? Are the promoters missing a trick in the first place? A staggered ebay auction style release of tickets by the promoter, with say 25% of total tickets released 12, 8, 4 and 2 weeks before the gig, with prices starting at a reasonable face value would surely have the same free-market effect. There’s the strong argument that this competetive model would be a disservice to the less affluent fans, but promoters would have the same chance of selling out a venue at the starting price, and could only benefit from any uplift if the tickets ended up being worth more to a punter than the original price – if they were bid up by competing punters, and this would make it harder for scalpers to get hold of tickets in the first place, as to get them they’d have to compete with Joe Public in the first place, paying the elevated prices themselves. It would also go some way to eliminating their profits – why buy from an unofficial auction when there’s an official one happening, and could potentially make more money for the promoter, venue and artist if the ticket revenue is split out between them.
What do you think, internet people? Is sclaping fair practice, or callous parasitism? Would selling online like this just be a way for promoters to benefit at fans’ expense, or would it be a neat way of cutting scalpers out of the loop and rationalising ticket prices for the rest of us?
There are a lot of artists who want to know how to use iTunes to increase their sales on iTunes. Here at RouteNote we have a lot of artists who do amazingly well from their sales on iTunes, and a top seller has provided the 
There are so many stupid award ceremonies out there, but Billboard thought it would be worth adding another one to the list. Billboard has announced the Billboard Music App Awards on Tuesday.
