Jukebox Jive

Okay, so you've accepted that you've got to give stuff away to get attention but where do you put it? Something that springs to mind, especially if you are a gigging ensemble is to get yourselves on the various sites of the venues that your outfit has performed at. Take for example the London venue of the Bull & Gate . Now in the dark distant past one of my old outfits played there, and as is the norm, we asked the sound guy to record the live performance. This was before the net had really impacted on every day live & recording to a CD was the height of technology

Now, what if you played that venue today and agreed to make such recordings available to the venue to put on their web presence in a sort of jukebox of bands that have played there?

You would get increased exposure, and the venue would have a growing showcase to pull in the punters.

The band plays “live” at the venue which supplies a soundman to record the performance and let the band have a copy.

The venue itself may not have the hosting capabilities to store all the mp3's that would invariably end up on the proposed jukebox, so why not put your recordings in the Internet Archive with a Creative Commons license attached. In return for giving the venue the right to broadcast the tracks free of charge, the band could then have them featured on the venues on-line jukebox.

The venue gets to show its credentials in terms of the past acts it has hosted, and the acts get further exposure.

Extrapolating from this the venue could use this as a means of gauging which bands to re-book by capturing the hits each act gets via the jukebox. If they are so inclined it should also be feasible to produce charts – let’s face it we all like our names in lights.

Likewise with a little clever meta-tagging the bands could exploit the “showcase” to point punters in the direction of their material and/or website- naturally it would only be right to include reciprocal links back to the venues site.

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.