Restorm is here to answer the prayers of all these bands that have had it with paying exorbitant fees to license their music online. This new platform has been created to put an end to that, and to allow musicians to license (and sell) their music to anybody, paying the lowest possible commission (only 10%).
Registration to this service is free, and bands can have their music and data imported from any other service they might already be using, so a profile is created in a flash. Oh, and the process can be sped up even more since one can sign in using his already existing Facebook profile. Continue reading →
Nogeno is the latest site to be released that makes having a profile page where to promote your music an absolute piece of cake. Thanks to Nogeno, just any musician can have an active presence on the Internet, and include everything from a short bio to a calendar listing his every upcoming date. And all the songs he has recorded so far, of course. He can stream these online by way of the provided player, and also sell them for good money. Any musician who uses Nogeno can start generating a direct income, without A & R men getting in the way of what is rightfully his.
A Nogeno page can be created in a breeze, there’s just nothing technical to do or handle – such is the beauty of sites like this and Onesheet. All you have to do in order to get started is sign in using your Facebook account.
And note that if you already have a Bandcamp or a MySpace profile then you can have all your data imported into Nogeno, and be up and running within minutes. In no case will you have to pay anything – Nogeno is free, and (by the looks of it) will remain like that for good.
“The Future Is Medieval” Is The Newest Album By Kaiser Chiefs. In A Bold Move, Fans Can Choose Which Tracks To Actually Buy
Can you imagine what would happen if bands let punters build their own albums using the songs they have recorded, arrange them in the order they want and also pick a cover to go with these? Would that be beneficial for the actual music recorded by bands, or would that be taking things just too far? I ask you because a band has done exactly such a thing, and it is turning to be the talk of the Internet.
British indie band Kaiser Chiefs has just finished recording a 20-track CD, and it lets people buy any ten songs from it, in the order they see fit, and give it a cover of its very own using lots of preloaded images. What’s even more interesting is that once a person orders this customized CD, he will then be given the option to sell this customized album himself online, and earn 1 pound per sale.
This is as interesting as it is debatable. While letting fans do such a thing is the ultimate way to get them engaged, it also lessens the unity of what has been recorded. In this specific case, Kaiser Chiefs has recorded 20 songs. The fans buying the album will get to listen to only 10. A system like this one might as well come with a large sticker reading “Forget about sequencing or continuity”.
Plus, the fact that there might be as many versions of an album around as fans of the band means nobody will have the same impression of what has been released. There are thousands of ways in which songs can be combined.
This is not really the first time something like this has been done. Not so long ago, Devo crowdsourced the tracklist for its album “Something For Everybody”. And going way, way back I recall how MusicMaker.com let you customize your copy of The Who’s “The Blues To The Bush” before ordering it. Granted, it wasn’t the same thing. That was a live album. But it made for multiple permutations of the same disc to be available to the public.
Kaiser Chiefs’ “The Future Is Medieval” is a brand-new collection of songs. The only way to listen to all of them is by ordering two copies with 10 cuts each. So, how will this go down with fans? If your favorite band ever did the same thing, how supportive would you be? Leave a comment below and let us all know, please!
Tonall is a social network for musicians, but the instruments are the real stars of the show here. Why? Simply because connections on Tonall are made based on which instrument one plays.
If you become a user of Tonall you will be able to review the instrument you play, and wax romantic on its sound, its appearance and all these things that makes your eyes go misty when you think about it. The idea is that others will both get to know you better thanks to such reviews, and (which is every bit as important) get to realize if such an instrument would be a good fit for them.
And as it is only suitable, users of Tonall can buy and sell gear – a marketplace is provided to these purposes. It is browseable (and usable) by any single person who signs up for a Tonall account. That costs nothing, by the way. As long as you can speak English then you can jump aboard.
To think that once upon a time the dream of every musician was to have his own CD on the racks of record stores all over the country… now, his aim is to have it featured on iTunes. Yet, how many stop to think of what would it take to make it happen before doing anything? How many understand how it really works? I hope the text below answers that, and gives anybody something of a direction when thinking about selling his own music through iTunes.
The first thing to realize is that you are not going to work directly with Apple – the requirements for doing that rule most people out (IE, you must have 20 albums in your catalog – that is more than bands like The Who put out in their actual time together). No, what you are going to do is to work with Apple through an aggregator such as TuneCore or CDBaby. These are companies that work with Apple in order to ensure that the content which is featured on iTunes meet its actual quality standards, and they also take care of marketing/promotional duties.
In the case of the two that have just been mentioned (TuneCore and CDBaby – they are easily the two most popular aggregators around), you retain the rights to your music, and you also retain more than 90 % of the royalties for every sale (TuneCore actually lets you retain 100 % of every transaction). Aggregators also let you sell your music on other stores and services such as Amazon MP3, Spotify, MySpace Music, Zune, Rhapsody, Nokia, Amazon On Demand and (in the vast majority of cases) you are also allowed to market your music physically, and have it sold on record stores. Continue reading →
Sales Of Beatles Music Through iTunes Have Been Excellent. Their Most Purchased Album Has Been “Abbey Road”, While The Most Sought-After Track Has Been “Here Comes The Sun”.
“How well would the Beatles’ music sell if it became available digitally?”
There is no end to the number of ways in which you can sell and market music online. If anything, these services become more and more direct as time goes by. A case in point: the Buy Widget website.
In general words, Buy Widget is a generator of playlists that you can place in your blog or website in order to sell music. These playlists take the shape of widgets – hence, the name of the service. If you want to sell something else, you will have to browse. But if you want to sell your own tracks this will do the honors.
You can upload entire albums and then have people buy them right away. The widget is also somehow configurable, and you can tweak with more aspects than one – you get a chance to modify the logo that is displayed and so on.
Of course, a system for direct monetization is always preferable to other revenue models that adhere to a “one size fits all” ethos. Buy Widget simplifies the way in which your own music can be sold so notably that just any person can get down to it. All he needs is having a website or blog. If he does, he will be able to get this system working for sure – WordPress, Blogger and TypedPad blogs are fully supported. So is HTML, of course. Continue reading →
This is the second (and final) part of the interview with Dan Dabner from Songstall. If you haven’t done so already, you can check out part 1 here.
PART II
MUSIC & YOU
When did you become interested in music? What was the first album or single you ever purchased?
When I was younger my mum listened to the singles chart on the radio every Sunday, so I had a feel for some pop music, but my brother introduced me to heavy metal when I was about eight or nine and I think I bought a tape of Metallica’s Black Album so I’d have my own copy.
Are you in a band yourself, or have you been in a band in the past? Is there a file on YouTube or elsewhere we could watch?
I used to play the keys in the lonelyband a few years ago but sadly the band split in 2006. I’m not aware of any videos on YouTube but naturally our music was the first available on Songstall! http://www.songstall.com/thelonelybandContinue reading →
Every musician knows that the Internet is akin to a freeway of opportunities when it comes to promoting his art and getting through to others. But it is a freeway that has some hazards along the way. While it is true that it is a superb platform for self-promotion and selling your music, it is also true that many sites that act as online marketplaces have a series of inherent limitations that make the experience a somehow diluted one. For starters, many of these sites do charge fees that end up making the actual transaction negligible. And a vast majority of sites letting artists put up their music for sale make the artist undergo a lengthy approval process for his tunes to be listed.
If you are looking for a way of getting around these shortcomings, then I think a site like this one could be worth a gander. Named Songstall (and recently launched, by the way), it will let any unsigned artist sell his compositions without having to pay any over-the-top fee, nor having to sit through a lengthy process in order to have his music listed online. Artists will be charged only when a sale is made. Continue reading →
