Tha Throwback is produced entirely by Cartel and features some of the most promising, upcoming MC’s in the game right now. “I’ve named it Tha Throwback because it’s a throwback to when hip hop artists actually cared about lyrical content.” states Cartel.

All versions of Tha Throwback come with PDF digital art, come as DRM-free 320kbps mp3 files, and there’s also a virtual cd booklet.

It’s great to see more independent musicians on MySpace Music but it’s worth remembering that there is the alternative of connecting to your fans in more immediate and direct way. Put up tracks on MySpace, distribute an album through torrent sites, tell people that they can support you if they like your work.

Music has always been free in one form or another, throughout history and that the relationship between the artists and their fans - the artists and their patrons is what really matters.

Kusek tracks the history of recorded music, from radio to Napster, and doesn’t hold back when evaluating the record industry:

The record business has never really been good for the vast majority of musicians. A dirty little secret of the music business is that 95% of artists never recouped their royalty advances. Labels have been notoriously unfair to their artists.

Especially relevant to Karmafan is his vision of the future:

Technology has shifted the power base from the record labels to the artists and mangers, and the music fans. Performer and patron are meeting again with direct relationships between artists and their fans enabled by technology.

It’s a very positive and optimistic presentation which should make any musician feel in control.

Sales were probably helped by the extra publicity, but fans felt a very direct connection the band when they realised that they alone were responsible for how they reacted to the free release. And many decided that the music was worth something to them.

One interesting footnote to the experiment was that “BitTorrent downloads did indeed greatly outnumber those from Radiohead’s official site”, which would suggest that bands don’t really need to invest heavily in distribution. Get enough loyal fans willing to distribute an album and the work will find its way to the people who want it.

Today, there are more ways than ever to share your talents and hobbies in public. And if you’re driven, talented and focused, you may discover that the market loves what you do. That people read your blog or click on your cartoons or listen to your mp3s. But, alas, that doesn’t mean you can monetize it, quit your day job and spend all day writing songs.

That’s the dream, but only some people can live the dream. The rest of us have to do what we love in our spare time and hope that one day we’ll be able to devote more time to it.

But there is always the temptation to create according for the market, to change your style or follow the latest trend. Sometimes that might work, but Seth encourages artists not to “wreck your art if it doesn’t lend itself to paying the bills”.

In fact, his advice is to create without concern for commercial value, arguing that the “twist is that as soon as you focus on your art and leave the money behind, you may just discover that this focus turns out to be the secret of actually breaking through and making money”.

Sounds like good advice to us here at Karmafan. If you create something you value then there’s a very good chance that others will value it, too. And they might just be willing to give you a little something in appreciation of your work.

Seth’s Blog

Artists - you’ve made the music, you’ve earned the fans, now all you need to do is add the Karmafan MySpace app and feel the love come your way. What are you waiting for?

Install or view Karmafan MySpace app

Let us know what you think. Email joanne@karmafan.com or add a comment when you’ve tried it out.

The Karmafan Team

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.

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.

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!

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