As usual Facebook has annoying news for you! They have launched the Timeline for pages just like you now have on your personal page. This is great news since you can do many cool things with the timeline. What is not so great is you now will no longer be able to make your music player your landing page. Stay tuned as we find some cool work arounds to make this change a little more easy. Read more about the new Timeline on All Facebook.
Apple has announced a new section in the iTunes store entitled Mastered for iTunes. If you are thinking this is another scam by the majors to get you to buy classic albums you already ow you are partially right. I am sure many of these records now have a fresh new coat of mastering on them and some of the releases in this section are actually current and new releases. In fact, throughout the white paper on the subject Apple makes no reference to any practices that would ensure you master for iTunes as compared to what you would normally do to master a great sounding record int he digital world. This really seems like a way to revitalize the iTunes Plus platform which tacks on an extra 30 cents to each download for a higher quality download.
So what does this mean for DIY artists? Honestly, not much until aggregators like TuneCore and ReverbNation will allow you to add to this section. You could tell your fans you mastered your record for iTunes (since that’s what most mastering engineers are doing these days anyway, it is in no way a lie) but unless you are going through one of the more exclusive digital distribution companies (IODA, The Orchard, Ingrooves, etc) you are most likely not going to get to take advantage of this prestigious title.
Great news! The FAA has announced new rules that make airlines have to care about musicians. The New York Times has up a post that says if you are carrying an instrument there will now be ways to keep it in the seat next to you and if you can store it below your seat you can carry it on. Check the full details here.
The awesome folks at HypeMachine have a launched a super cool way for you to browse projects to fund – KickStumbler is an App that gives an easy way to find projects that are looking for Kickstarter funding. With everything from a video channel to a cool interface this gives those with a philanthropic DIY heart a way to easily find cool things to fund. Kudos, Hype Machine for this awesome invention. Check the app here and the video channel here.
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Alex Day is a UK artist who has received quite a lot of success lately despite his lack of attachment to a record label. In the above video you can hear him talk about why he has no need for a record label in this day and age. Inspiring story of an artist who owes much of his popularity to YouTube.
If you talk about the music business, you have no doubt gotten an ear full about people’s feelings about crowdfunding and Kickstarter. A while back we posted a link to a discussion on PunkNews where their readers discussed their feelings on the tool and now AbsolutePunk has gone and one the same. This thread and poll is a great insight to how your fans feel when presented with the option of funding your music and a must read for anyone thinking about going down that road.
One of the things musicians can rejoice about is that we are past the “MySpace Days” where your choices were between the world’s worst sounding player and or a couple of players you had to hack into the MySpace player. Now you can can choose from a wide variety of great players all with their own awesome features. Some music fans I talk to seem to prefer one player over the other, so why not give them options? While you can only choose one page as a landing page (and hopefully you did this to your favorite music player) you can always give your fans an option to do another one. This means you can have a RootMusic or MyBand as a default player that has tons of info but also have Bandcamp so that your fans can know they can go there to stream your latest record and/or buy it.
In case you haven’t heard, Pintrest is being touted as the fastest growing website EVER. This means you should probably be thinking about how to market your music there. Thankfully, they already have some great tools for you to do so! If you head to this page you can get share buttons and badges for their service and start introducing your music to this fast growing, hip community.
Many of our users really love One Sheet as a platform for a simple website for their music. Since everyone is so into it, we have great news – The service has added a wide variety of features that can be great for musicians.
They are also presently beta-testing custom URLs. Exciting stuff! Check out all these features info here.
In the past, we offered our feelings that “pre-liking” for a track from a group can actually deter getting more fans. When I wrote this, I wrote it based on my own personal feelings, but now Jason Tate at Absolute Punk has opened up the flood gates to a great discussion where many die-hard music fans on his site have shared their feelings in an open thread on the subject. Check it out here and gain some clear insight on how fans really feel about this practice.
Apple’s iTunes Match is one of those services that is supposed to start rescuing us all from piracy and the evils of file sharing and start making royalties drip back to musicians. TuneCore has great news, in that this has already started! Check out their blog post on the subject and get the whole story.
CD Baby’s DIY Musicians blog has up an interesting showing of their service from 2011. Check it out to get some great insight on how most groups are making money on their service.
YouTube’s viewership keeps growing and growing and you have to know that it is one of the most powerful music discovery and marketing channels out there. While it is obvious you should be using YouTube, but what type of video should you have on your channel?
Vimeo has always been the choice of those who want their videos to really look fantastic on the net. Their video service has always been better looking than YouTube and served as more of a community for those looking for good looking videos instead of more videos of cats yawning. If you are making great looking videos, you should always be using Vimeo to connect with those who appreciate them. If this is the case, the great news is they have many cool features. The most notable for music marketing is there is now a Tumblr like interface that delivers a feed so that you can take in the newest videos from your favorite video makers. Check out all the new features here.
