Entries from September 2008 ↓

Fairtilizer, a new web application that allows musicians to let their music reach even more people. That is good news, right?

Apparently musicians and upload their music to Fairtilizer, and get a piece of code that they can embed in any site they want.

Your music, available to be played straight from any of your sites. Not bad. They allow you to sell your music too, though you know we believe selling music is a wee bit passe.

We tried signing up to upload some files and see how it works, sadly if you sign up as an artist you have to wait for them to approve your request. So here is a review from ReadWriteWeb instead -

each track page comes with customizable URL, artwork, space for description and links (like to artist web sites, stores, and booking contacts, etc.), and a comment board for listeners. Tracks can be set to streaming only or made available for download, and soon artists will be able to mark them for sale, too, if they so desire. The tracks can also be set to public or private.

From the review, one of the founder of Fairtilizer is quoted as saying

it won’t be about who owns the rights to a recording anymore. Music will instead center around the URL

We surely agree with the idea of music being free from rights management, surely.

Marillion - a band from UK is giving their album for free. Absolutely Free. Just go to google look for their latest album’s torrent and start downloading. We think it is absolutely fantastic to see more bands giving music away for free. From Marillion’s wesbite -

Today, Marillion become the first band anywhere in the world to release their new album (Happiness Is the Road) legally using P2P (Peer to Peer) internet networks for distribution.

However, they are not the first band ever, really. Some musicians have been giving away their music for a while using bit torrents, check out Jamendo. But still, given Marillion are quite a big band, this is an fantastic development. Much better than what Radiohead did - allowing downloads from their site, even though the traffic demands meant the Radiohead album was downloaded a lot using torrents.

Marillion is asking people to support them in return for giving away the album by coming to their, concerts and buy merchandise like T-shirts. Again, fantastic. Though they haven’t opened themselves to the idea of voluntary payments, which Radiohead did.

So there we are - giving away music is reaching mainstream quicker than we expected. There are a number of ways to make a living from your music. The first part is to let your music reach as many listeners as possible.

In the last post where we reviewed SoundUnwound’s use for musicians, we said that it did not seem possible to create a new page for yourself, if you were not already in the SoundUnwound database.

We wrote about this concern to SoundUnwound and they came back to us saying you can actually create new pages. Here’s how to do it, right from the email they sent to us.

You can create a page for your own band. We’ve made SoundUnwound editable for any of our users: simply click the ‘Edit’ tab at the top of the screen
and then you can alter much of the information we already provide. If you can’t find your own band from a search, click on the ‘New Entry’ button at the bottom of the search results and add it from there.

We’d love for you to give it a whirl and let us know what you think

So there we go. I think musicians should really go create a page for themselves on SoundUnwound, and take control of the information on it. After all, it seems like a wikipedia for musicians!

Amazon and IMDb have launched a new service - SoundUnwound, a service that allows people to ‘explore’ music while allowing anyone to edit the database. A bit like Wikipedia and IMDb, and an earlier service called MusicBrainz.

IMDb allows people to read and discover movies they might like to watch. MusicBrainz is a community database for music that works of CDs. The most often use of Musicbrainz is to help people update tags on the digitised music collection. Most mp3 players on computers connect to MusicBrainz to get you the tags for a track, and people can update these tags if they find them broken.

So what does SoundUnwound provide, and what does it mean for musicians? Can musicians use it to have another public page, and why?

Lets first look at what SoundUnwound provides. From the service’s front page it is clear that it helps people ‘explore’ music, and also ’share’ your knowledge. So lets see how it works for a user.

1. Search for an artist, genre and find related artists - The search results are quite comprehensive already. Here’s the search results for U2.
2. Artist Public page - Has a wide range of interesting information. An artist’s public page shows the timeline, trivia, a list of sites of the artist, link to pages for band members and even youTube videos available for the artist. Check out the U2 page on SoundUnwound.(The youTube videos are broken for sure check out vidoes on Prince’s page)
3. Timeline - This is quite a neat little tool. Look at U2’s timeline for example. The timeline includes, album releases, information on when band members joined and left and even the timeline of events like concerts and tours.
4. Family - This is really a peculiar little feature. SoundUnwound lists your family members who also have a page on SoundUnwound.
5. “You might also like” - The link that helps people explore music. So from U2’s page you see artists like - Brian Eno, David Bowie and Bob Dylan. Now what someone might like is quite up to them, but SoundUnwound seems to do a decent job of finding related artists.
6. Edit a page - This is what allows anyone with an amazon account to go edit the page of any artist. Interestingly the reviews of the edits are done by folks at amazon - quite unlike wikipedia, where other people review page edits.

So should musicians take control of their pages on SoundUnwound? I think they should. Having a page on SoundUnwound will surely give a user that comes looking for a similar artist accidentally discover your music. Apart from that, the presentation of the page is really nice and telling your fans about your timelines, band members, releases and other details can only be good.

But how does a musician influence their page on SoundUnwound. Signup, start making edits and wait for the amazon’s team of reviewers to accept your changes. Slowly you’ll have a useful enough page. It does sound laborious, but in any case you will have to keep an eye on your SoundUnwound page, in case there are errors creeping in. So might as well be proactive and inform even more users about your band and band members.

But there is a problem. We can’t just seem to create a new page. So all you can do is edit an existing page. That seems a bit crap. But do search if a page about you or your band already exists. If it does, I’d suggest going in and editing all that you need to and can.

I am pretty sure SoundUnwound will catch up a bit, if not a lot. Why? They have this list of “Top Editors“, and knowing people on the internet, some will surely want to make to that list. So do expect a lot of editing on the site which will result in pages with useful information and thus people will start going there to explore music too.

Search for your page on SoundUnwound

Rhodri Marsden writes on Music Think Tank about the futility of trying to sell your music. The post is written with a lot of self-deprecating humour including links to YouTube videos from the days when he was a member of a band trying to sell records after a gig.

The conclusion of the longish (though I repeat a really fun post to read) is again captured best by a couple of quotes from the post itself. The first one is when he captures why distributors can no longer be blamed. Rhodri believes, it is a band’s own fault if record sales are reaching that ‘zero number’. A bit harsh, but he seems to think it is true.

Now that we’re put in touch directly with our audience and that distributors can be completely removed from the equation, and replaced by MP3 aggregators who a) don’t need warehousing space for your MP3s, b) will put them into a range of online stores for a flat fee and, crucially, c) don’t care whether you’re brilliant or whether you’re bloody awful, we have exactly the same problem selling the music as the distributors had. Just because the songs are available to buy, doesn’t mean we can sell them – in the same way that (and excuse the often-used analogy) installing a landline doesn’t mean that the phone is going to ring. And we can’t blame the distributors any more. The only people that are left to blame are ourselves. And that hurts.

The second is the final conclusive paragraph -

In the unlikely event of anyone wanting my advice, it would be to stop worrying about selling recordings. Just give them away. Let them go. Put them online for free, and tell people that they’re there. And if, against the odds, you’ve been given some cash, you’ve managed to release an album commercially, and you see that someone has posted it on a blog for readers to download – for god’s sake don’t get angry. Don’t see it as being down £20. See it as being up 20 listeners. Yes, your music might conceivably have been stolen, but there are no police. So get used to it. And now you’re freed of this burden, pursue all the other things that you want from being in a band – writing songs, rehearsing, doing gigs, building relationships with other bands, going on wallet-busting tours, receiving unmemorable blowjobs. Because seriously, you’re almost more likely to get a blowjob after a gig than sell an MP3. And remember – just because music doesn’t make you money, certainly does NOT mean that it’s worth nothing.

The post is full of humorous analogies, really worth reading. It does make one wake up to the reality of this distribution on the Internet era - If we can’t take a record, a website, a short story, a novel, a painting to market - it is no body’s fault but our own. But more importantly trying to control the market, limiting the number of people who can hear your music to only those who will ‘pay’ for it is certainly a lost cause.

Hope you enjoy Rhodri’s post.