Springtime for Indies and Oh Emm Dees

Consider this:

You can carefully craft a tune in the luxury of your own bedroom and, with a little skill (and maybe even a little talent?), you have the power at your fingertips to create a piece that is technically and artistically as good as anything that any signed artist is producing.

Before you “acoustic” artists berate me saying “that’s fine for an electronic musician but what about me” just reflect on the fact that for the cost of a few rehearsal sessions you could probably turn your own PC/laptop into a passable mixing desk and, using the skills honed on a portastudio (whaddyamean you’ve never heard of them?), produce a decent recording of a “live” session.

If you are reading this there is also a strong probability that you also have access to a virtually free method of distribution, via the various on line hosting sites, some of whom even provide a way to get paid.

For a minimal outlay (i.e. the cost of your equipment) you have a product, the means of distribution, and even a potential income –so why aren’t you as big as the Stones?

The traditional answer is that you are lacking promotion, but even THAT is questionable these days.

Even with the backing of major corporations musical tastes have now become so fragmented that major advertising campaigns no longer translate to major sales.

It may be a socialists dream come true that, at least in the musical field, the workers now hold the means of production and have been freed from the shackles of the Music Moguls exploitation, but now that we are all Producers who is going to peddle our wares to an increasingly shattered and fragmented market?

Preaching to the converted

Sometimes promoting your music via modern technology can seem a bit like the search for extra terrestrial life.

Take a look at Mashables 90+ On Line Music and Audio Websites along with this guide to OMD's and its no wonder, as an independant artist, that it must get frustrating trying to get heard.

The internet has the POTENTIAL to get your material beamed directly into the ears of millions of people who, if they only knew it, are your most ardent fans, but how in hells name do you get them to listen?

Type your own bands name into your search engine of choice and I'll warrrant that top of the list will inevitably be your MySpace profile, and therein lies the rub.

Despite its apparent brilliant manipulation by the likes of the Artic Monkeys and Lily Allen (I remain skeptical partly because of Miss Allen's showbiz links and partly because I refuse to conceed that anyone could ever seriously suggest that the Artic Monkeys are anything other than sub-medoicre) , the accompanying gold rush by every unsigned artist (myself included)to attempt to emulate them has merely swamped the social networking site.

Ask youself where YOU would go to listen to new music - note the word listen- to new music? Is it the same place that you host your own material on? And if it is, other than fellow users of the site, do you share this place and recommend it to your MySpace friends?


Its all very well wanting people to listen to your stuff amnd recommend it to others but ask yourself how often do YOU recommend something to others?

Karma dude, do unto others and all that.

Radio Mperia at IAC

The Independant Artist Company is still a viable option if you want to sell tracks.

However,as the limit on the free option is two tracks it will probably not net you that much unless you plan releases the way they used to plan single releases (anyone remember the Blur/Oasis "battle" back in the nineties)

There is another use for this site, namely for exposure. Embedded in this blog is the Radio Mperia playlist streaming through the XSFP player via IAC

If you want to be included on the playlist and get exposure via this blog, and the Radio Mperia Myspace profile,and anywhwere else that I can find to paste it, then simply open an account at IAC, upload two songs & let me know where they are so I can add them to the playlist.

Yes,I wish that you could just upload them and they'd be automatically added, but at the moment this is the only way until someone fulfills the wish list outlined on the Mperia Legacy post

I'll leave it up to you whether you sell them via IAC

Tunesquare

Another tack perhaps to be taken is that offered via TuneSquare.

The listener is offered the chance to download MP3’s for free and in return the artist gets a share of the revenue generated from the advertisement that fund the site.

One criticism that is levelled is that the tracks are from bands that folk have never heard of but hey, isn’t that the point? Okay so the artist is technically giving away the tracks, but if this is above board and you can generate enough plays there could be some financial reward in participating

Soundstation Music store solution for the independent

On the ongoing quest to find a suitable replacement for Mperia I’ve stumbled across the SoundLoud/SoundStation online music store.



Alright, so the sight has no social networking facility, no forum and no Collabarative Filtering that is aaparent, but it does provide a player (which appears to be based on the XSPF Web Music Player)with the functionality of being able to sell tracks directly whilst still remaining on the mother site so to speak.



You’ll see Kick Asteroid's player at the bottom of this post and although its not a total solution as discussed in the Mperia Legacy post it seems to be a fairly good site to use as a store.

Mperia legacy

In 2006, in an act to preserve the meagre outpourings of my creativity over my lifetime, I digitally remastered a number of recordings. (Digitally remastered in this instance merely means transforming the recordings from old ferrous oxide tape cassettes to MP3's)

It was during this process that I learnt that there was a plethora of sites that offered to host MP3's! Some even offered the possibility of being able to sell the stuff! After much deliberation the prefered site ended up being the now defunct Mperia.com

The site allowed anyone to upload their masterpeices, regardless of quality, and sell them for whatever price they chose. Mperia took 30% of the selling price to run the cost of hosting and processing of any transactions. Now that may sound like a hell of a lot, but it cost the artist nothing. That's right, nada, neinte, nix, zilch sweet Fanny Adams. (Pay attention to this because I'll come back to it in a while).



The site also had fairly developed social networking functionality, playlist creation, and even the ability to embed MP3 players on other websites.

However, even though it became my chosen online repository, there was always one thing that I felt let the site down, namely that for all the wealth of talent that was hosted there it was awkward at best to really discover new music.

Sure it had search facilities so you could pull up lists of bands or tracks that were similar, or influenced by, or in the genre of, the usual thing that has become commonplace.
But they were lists.
To hear a particular track you would have to click on it.
Then, to hear the next track on the list you would have to click on that, so it was a very passive system, there was no functionality to stream a whole bunch of tracks by visiting the site.

Compare that with other sites such as IACmusic.com , which seem to revel in the notion of playlists.
The mechanics of it are very similar to Mperia, inso far as you can create a"Radio Station"(effectively a playlist) and add favourite tracks to create your personalised sound track.
Naturally the player, with its associated playlist can be exported and added to your website, MySpace profile etc.
There are differences (each IAC"Station" can host up to 100 tracks whereas Mperia "playlists" only held 12) but both use(d) the excellent XSPF Web Music Player.

However, the IAC site allows the listener to search these "stations" by genre, and these can then be streamed in their entirety.

For the artist IAC only offers the possibility of hosting two tracks on their free package, anymore than that and you have to start paying .
I'm not picking on IAC by the way, this model seems to be the norm, and the artist does keep 100% of any sales- if you are confident that you can attract enough online sales via the site to recoup your initial outlay then it, or any of the other myriad sites offering similar services, is worth investing in.

The financing of Mperia was reliant on micropayments via BitPass.com When BitPass closed so did Mperia, with all the love, sweat and tears that had gone into it's creation, not only from the Mperia team, but for the artists/listeners that had participated in the adventure.

The subscription model as used by IAC & others seems to be the safer bet, at least for the operators of the sites.

For me however there is one major gripe.

Once you are signed up, none of the sites that offer these facilities seems to actively promote the material they are hosting.

In the real world when you go into a record store invariably there is some track blasting out of the speakers- it may be the clerks favourite band, and it may not be to your liking, but that particular track is being broadcast.

You head towards the section that contains the genre or artist that you have a predeliction to listen to.

In the real world, the clerk continues to play his favourite music, and there’s almost negligible chance that you might actually like any of it.

Now, just imagine that the clerk notices which section you’re headed to and changes what’s playing to a track from that area.

The chances of you liking the new piece are still not certain, but the likelihood that you will has gone up.

Now imagine that you indicate to our friendly clerk that actually you do like it and would like some more of the same.

He puts on another track, but this one is not going down well – sure, you like metal, but Slipknot is one of your pet hates – and you ask him to put something else on.

This is the silver bullet offered by collaborative filtering. It’s already up and running on sites like Last.FM, Pandora and of course Yahoo’s Launchcast streaming system. Yet for the independent artist each of these has drawbacks.

The one that seems to offer the most promise is Last.FM.
However, the audioscrobbler device by it’s very nature means that independent/obscure stuff is swamped by the major/established artists – the amount of folk out there still listening to the Beatles is always going to outnumber those listening to Jet Silver and the Dolls of Venus- thus negating the idea of it being a site to discover new or unsigned bands/artists.

On the plus side, they will accept your material no matter what the recording quality/artistic merit, and it can’t do any harm to your ego to have material on there vying with the big boys.

There is also the option of linking to an online store, although you can’t actually sell the tracks you host on Last.FM direct from their servers, so in effect you’ve got to put your stuff on two servers – Last FM for exposure, Somewhereelse.com for sales.

Pandora requires you to submit your stuff for approval (quality control more than censorship issues), and getting onto Launchcast seems nigh on impossible unless you are signed to one of the major labels with whom they have agreements.

inDiscover.net, a Canadian site, seems to have a system that could be a good model; it has CF functionality & the material is uploaded to their server. (The site is paid for by advertising) Their player downloads MP3’s from their catalogue and the listener rates them and/or adds them to their playlist, with this behaviour forming the basis for the recommendations. At the moment the MP3 is downloaded (ie given away) & at the moment there appears to be no functionality in the player to link to the artists website/store.

Now, I don't have the technical knowhow but it strikes me that IAC et all already have access to the data required to drive some form of colloborative filtering engine - after all there must be some data mining going on to generate the charts .

If the music hosting facilities that such sites offer could be coupled with the CF machines used by the likes of inDiscover then we are getting close to the Holy Grail - for artists a place to host material, showcase and gain exposure and maybe even sell some stuff, for the listener a place that feeds new music based on their preferences.

That clerk is now a virtual recomendation machine that gradually builds up an idea of what you would like to listen to and your visits to the store become more frequent to the point where you actually start making your purchases there.

And if your "store" is where units are moving then every artist is going to want to be represented in it

That's the theory I'll leave it to the techies and the financial wizards to sort out the machinery