The best ringtone ever

I totally want this ringtone.

Music sales aren’t what they used to be…

Interesting graph here. Always refreshing to see how all this plays out in terms of units shipped. Never would’ve thought digital downloads, whether they be for singles or for albums, would represent such low revenue in this time and age. Seems like people still haven’t gotten that used to buyin’ on the web, and it appears to be just ridiculous to count on making any money with CDs, so yeah, this graph is yet some more corroborating evidence that bands have got to be as creative in marketing whatever they can, than as in creating their music.

Multi-Tasked Creativity will represent the musician’s greatest ally in the decade to come.

Woof

The DAW touch screen: touch screen device that will run with any application

I haven’t posted anything pro-audio lately so here goes.

For all of you who produced music regularly in their home studios, and who have been looking to spend some money on a new cool device that can massively ease-up your configuration, I would recommend checking out this device:

When I first saw the picture up on Red Leaf’s website (www.dawtouch.com), I thought this was yet another touch screen thingy with a dedicated interface. As the video demonstrates, I was in the wrong. What a breakthrough to be able to control any sequencer whatsoever with the Daw Touch. And its not pressure sensitive – the advanced optical imaging technology makes it smoothly and easily manageable with your fingers, a pen or whatever (for those of you who spend hours upon hours mixing and recording in front of your dual-screens, manipulating keyboard and mouse till you fingers get numb, this seems like a life-saver).

This device is pretty darn amazing and will most probably set a standard for the new DAW generations to come, and for most audio geeks $3500 ain’t that big a deal.

Woof

David Byrne and beautiful musical contraptions

This ain’t new but it’s still worth a mention. First off, here’s a video of “a software-sequencer controlling 8 solenoids, that knock on different things and therefore produce nice rhythmic patterns”.

And here is an introductory video of the “Playing The Building” project.

Both of these musical works was devised by no other than David Byrne, founding member of the avant-garde 70’s new-wave band, the Talking Heads.

Bark

Cats are masters of contemporary music

You are about to see something pretty frigin’ amazing. I mean, if I were to you show you videos of cats playing Schoenberg on the piano, that would be amazing right?

Well voila!

So there you have it, cats playing the second movement of Schoenberg’s Opus 11. Here’s the first and the third. Who ever said doggy’s weren’t tolerant?

Well yeah, you probably guessed it, a certain someone, who goes by the name of Cory Arcangel, mixed up videos of cats playing the piano and re-created one of contemporary music’s greatest masterpieces. Somehow this impresses me even more then Kutiman’s Thru You project. Truly mind-boggling work. On his website Cory gives full explanations on how he made the videos. Check it out here. And here’s his youtube channel.

Meow.

Indie Artist X’s website solution determined

Just a quick note to let you know that David Rose, who is editor over at www.knowthemusicbiz.com and responsible for Artist X’s website, has published an article yesterday on his strategies for getting X’s site up and running. Once again, this is a good overview for any musician who lacks website creation skills and who needs to get things rolling fairly quickly (and who is on a budget of $20/month)

The final choose for X is a mix of popular online band services:

• Bandzoogle for its website templates
• Reverbnation for its plethora of widgets
• and Audiolife as a complete e-commerce solution (for merch, physical CDs, Mp3 distribution and warehousing.)

Read the article here. Nice breakdown of what every service offers and can accomplish for X.

Woof.

File-sharers, the RIAA, and the art of the absurd

“He who rejects change is the architect of decay”.
Harold Wilson

Ever heard of Joel Tenenbaum? Well I hadn’t really paid any attention to that name until today, and more precisely until I read this article from The Guardian – “How it feels to be sued for $4.5m“. I have always known thousands in the states had been sued for absurd sums for sharing music, everyone’s aware of the RIAA’s sissy-fits, but to read such a testimonial set me aback some. Do read it: it was written by Joel himself, and weather you’re with him or against him, it won’t leave you indifferent to his cause.

I don’t want to go into the details of his story because  it is all written marvelously well in that article. What I’ll say is this: Joel is one of the tens of thousands of people who have got their lives crushed just for sharing music. Joel is not the compulsive file-sharer type who detains tera bytes upon tera bytes of music storages on dozens of 7200 rpm, RAID intertwined hard-drives, he’s just one in 50 million file-sharers who unluckily won the RIAA lottery. His battle started off small, just in for a couple of thousand of dollars. Now he is in for millions because he fought back.

He finally made it to the trial which started yesterday (most people cave in before reaching that point). Joel’s story struck a chord in many music lovers’ hearts, and he is now backed-up by thousands from all over the world. He has got his proper “Joel Fights Back” twitter account (@joelfightsback), twitter feed (#jfb) and website.

The Guardian’s article holds ten pages full of comments, but the very first one made my day. It was written by a nut who hammers Joel by invoking the “you just shouldn’t steal from people more creative than you. You deserve what’s coming at you” speech. I can take a step back like any other and realize there are laws for a reason, that these laws must be reinforced to maintain order. I am not defending Joel 100% just because it’s easy and comforting to be on the martyr’s side, engaging resistance against corporate fat cats, I’m on Joel’s side because if we succumb to absurdity, we are headed straight for a brick wall, the likes of which mankind has a tendency to bang its head against over and over again.

For such trials to be enacted in this day and age is absurd for the simple reason that there is no balance whatsoever between technological advancements and copyright law anymore. The later has, since its most primitive founding, been intimately linked to the former. They both go hand in hand, and when one changes, the other follows briefly after. The recording industry caved in on many accounts in the past because of ever-evolving music distribution mediums, yet now, the RIAA still won’t accept the change p2p brought to their consumers’ consumption habits. And why are they so aggressive? Because of scalability. Never have the paper-rolls, the radio, the cassette-tapes and so on scaled such a gap between consumers and content owners. So members of the RIAA have litterally been shittin’ their pants these two past decades. Their solution: to frantically sue customers at random for completely absurd sums of money for no reason other than fathering fear and making up for decreasing profits.  I would like to repeat myself here: it is only to engender fear and make money that the RIAA is suing. There is no long-tail humanitarian purpose here, there is no will whatsoever to educate the masses, there is no greater master-plan behind all this grief – just fear and money.

We don’t burn people on stakes anymore just because they refuse to believe in the virgin Mary. Same should apply to file sharing and music in 2009. But apparently, that is still far from being the case.

Accepting change is the key to healthy evolution. The first step would be for major labels to admit their wrongs in terms of serving musical garbage to us all these past 10 years. Economic instability, growing gaming industry, DVDs and Internet- related-entertainment didn’t help them one bit in getting back that entrepreneurial spirit they lost so long ago. Add to that p2p networks, and it all seems so logical that the RIAA affiliates are going down the drain, taking 15% decreasing market blows every year or so.

That is just the ways things have changed, and those who go against what has changed, although it is completely beyond their power to do anything about that change, are fools, plain and simple.

Good Luck Joel. You have my total support.

Mruff

RockDex: a comprehensive and complete analytics solution for bands

Some time ago, I had written a post on a band management website called Music Arsenal. Its founder, Jimmy Winter, who was working on an analytics features for Music Arsenal, decided to turn turn the feature into a whole new independent venture called RockDex Pro. I received an email from Jimmy on Friday asking me to check it out, so I did.

RockDex Pro is a comprehensive, simple and complete analytics solution for bands who wish to know who’s talking about them and on what social network. One of my favorite features here is the Twitter integration.

“Initially launched just before SXSW Music in March, RockDex provided a measurement of an artist’s overall social presence with its RockDex Score. RockDex Pro vastly improves on this by providing in depth information on how artists are represented and discovered across various social networks and blogs. Bands and their reps can use this information to understand how their marketing efforts are working, discover rising talent while its still off the radar, and understand customer behavior”.

If you are using Twitter for your band, you’ll want to check this out. RockDex not only shows you your Twitter stats, but also indicates who’s tweeting about you. So basically you can directly connect with the twitterers who are preaching the good word. Very useful stuff.

The RockDex Pro beta was just launched on Friday. You can take a look at the app at http://rockdex.com/signup using the invite code ‘gigdoggy’.

Finding and understanding your fans is crucial in the current music environment. I built RockDex Pro to bring a lot of that fan information into a single location to make marketing and promotion decisions easier.

Here’s a tutorial video – http://gigdog.gy/_rockdex_tutorial.

Woof.

Hypebot’s In-Depth Interview With Amanda Palmer: a must read

Hypebot’s interview with Amanda Palmer is a must read for basically anybody, so I highly recommend you take some time here and there and check out all three parts (as well as the comments!).

Posted exactly as on Hypebot’s blog:

“If the point is to find meaning and fulfillment but the very idea of staying connected is causing you eternal anxiety, it’s defeating the purpose… I simply feel blessed that I’m an emotional exhibitionist right around the time is seems to be expected and en vogue.”

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

Thank you Bruce for this wonderful interview, and of course for Hypebot! (Follow Hypebot on twitter @hypebot)

Oh and here’s Indaba’s interview with Amanda (this time it’s a video!) talking about Twitter (yet again), her crazy success stories, and other music 2.0 stuff – very interesting as always.

Mruff.

Indie Artist X making headway

Last week I wrote a post on the new Indie Artist X project, devised by a group of music industry insiders, who’s main goal is to launch the career of an anonymous musician by applying all DIY techniques and music 2.0 tools available in today’s day and age. In other words, these music insiders will act as consultants for Artist X for a period of 4 months, recuperate and publicly announce concrete results for X’s progress, and basically just attempt to use this experiment to create a custom business plan for indie, DIY bands and musos.

In this spread – http://gigdog.gy/_indie_projectX_spreadsheet – you can see the project’s main objectives and strategies, as well as that list of advisers.

One thing I either didn’t notice for my previous post, or that simply wasn’t there yet, is the set of different sheets at the top of the document where each adviser details his/her plan for X, and generally explain the highlights of their mission (as well as the tools they intend on using to accomplish it). Having just read through it, I decided to share this tid bit of info because this simple sheet, which is most likely going to evolve and get more detailed as the project goes on, is a great starting point, or a healthy break-down of what any musician can, and even should do, while trying to market his/her self.

Check it out, and bark us, and more importantly them, some feedback.

Woof