SoundOut, TuneCore Track Smarts, ReverbNation Crowd Review, AudioKite, and Music Xray Compared

This is the story of a mediocre song. An objectively mediocre song. My song. Curse you, data!

If you’re looking for unbiased feedback on your latest track, you’ve got five options. Well, five-ish.

There’s SoundOut, which I wrote about way back in 2010.

Then there’s ReverbNation Crowd Review and TuneCore Track Smarts, both of which are powered by SoundOut.

Are all three SoundOut services the same? We’ll find out.

I reviewed AudioKite earlier this year, gushingly. A new and improved version launched just this month.

Finally, Music Xray offers a diagnostics feature, which presents your track to 5 music professionals and 20 potential fans.

Which is right for you?

Time for a good old-fashioned market research shootout!

Click to read more ...

What Artists Should Know About Next Big Sound

Perhaps you don’t sell too many albums on iTunes, or have that many SoundCloud plays or YouTube views. But maybe, just maybe, your music is really popular in some far off corner of the digital universe you never even knew about, and all that “exposure” you’ve racked up over the years is paying off behind the scenes.

Next Big Sound provides detailed online music analytics to measure the growth of bands on streaming services and social networks. It doesn’t cover everything, but it casts a wide enough net to shatter an artist’s dreams with cold, hard data. I know it did mine! <sniff> Cidney at NBS agreed to give me an artist credit for one month so that I could write this article, way back in April. Hopefully she’ll forget to downgrade my account.

Features

The screenshot above shows a dozen “key metrics” of my choosing. It’s an easy way to focus on what’s important to me, and not get bogged down in all those numbers. So for example, I could replace Rdio plays with Vine loops, Last.fm shouts, or unique pageviews of my website.

Click to read more ...

What Artists Should Know About AudioKite

Has this ever happened to you? You think you’ve written your best song yet, but an offhand remark from a friend plunges you into self-doubt. Wouldn’t it help to have feedback from music fans of your genre who have no incentive to sugar-coat their opinions?

Sure, you say! I’ll just use SoundOut, or ReverbNation Crowd Review (also powered by SoundOut). Unfortunately, my experience with SoundOut, and those of most of the commenters, left a lot to be desired. I’ve also received a mostly useless - but free - focus group from Music Xray, and even repurposed Jango aka Radio Airplay to create my own focus group.

AudioKite has built a better mousetrap. Here’s why:

Click to read more ...

What Artists Should Know About ArtistLink

ArtistLink started as an extension of the Topspin Media platform, so that non-Topspin users could add content to the MTV Artists site. It’s well on its way to becoming the control panel for the music industry.

I encourage any artist with a release on Spotify to sign up for ArtistLink. All essential functionality is free. As of this writing, ArtistLink is basically four services rolled up into one. I’ll go over each, starting with the coolest.

Click to read more ...

Blogging Sucks

Some artists are just good at Social Media, and some artists even love interacting with other people. In my lectures & panels around the world I have always told musicians Twitter is a medium which works best for an artist who enjoys going to the merch table at the end of a show, shaking hands (a bottle of anti-bac in pocket) and signing vinyl, possibly even breasts. But for creative introverts, Social Media is a dish best served cold.

For those who don’t reside in the digital media bubble, blogging is still an abstract verb looming over the undercurrent of social media nuisances interrupting the daily routine of an otherwise productive artist.

Click to read more ...

How Stuff Spreads – Gangnam Style vs. Harlem Shake

In a new study looking at ‘How Stuff Spreads’ Face has identified key components that make things go viral. Looking at the spread on Twitter of two global memes, Gangnam Style vs Harlem Shake, Face discovered eight common characteristics which it says led to them becoming viral phenomena, generating thousands of spin-off versions and billions of views.

The eight common characteristics are:

1. Bursts and Rises: There are 2 models of virality.

The Burstmodel is bottom-up:the variations are more powerful then the original seed and there’s no clear leadership or narrative. The meme relies on community relevance to spread.

Click to read more ...

The Weekly Batch

Musicians are expected to be everywhere these days. We’re interacting on social networks, following up on blog comments, keeping our profiles on countless music sites up to date, and checking our stats and analytics with a variety of online tools. It’s enough to make a lifelong indie yearn for a label - one with a marketing department!

Most of these items don’t need to be addressed daily, but they do need to be performed on a regular basis. Tasks that have to be done on a given day, I schedule. Everything else is relegated to The Weekly Batch™ (note: not actually trademarked). I tackle the entire list as a single to-do item on Friday afternoons, when I find it hard to do much of anything else. Here’s my latest iteration:

Click to read more ...

Music Industry Email Etiquette 101 – For/from people who give a damn.

When emailing a band’s management for the first time, you only have a few chances to get our attention. Mess that up, and your email is lost.

Below is a list of common mistakes and pet peeves from years of receiving emails, along with suggestions for ways to improve your communication to people you do not already know. Reading this will increase your chance of the support slot, or the desired response you hope for.

Remember, we are all people, trying hard to share music, just like you.

Click to read more ...

The Social Media Bandwagon: Everybody "Likes" a Winner

Mumford & Sons released their 2nd album Babel a few weeks ago. It’s hard to know what any listeners think of it. But one thing we all seem to know — Babel sold 600,000+ copies in its first week. That statistic was re-blogged and re-tweeted thousands of times, blindly hailing “the best debut of 2012.” Everybody {likes, re-tweets, +1’s} a winner.

Does a splashy debut lose significance as media transitions from the physical to weightless digital? We’ll get to that later. In any case, debut has replaced legacy as a benchmark of worth.

Artistic works that build their audience slowly and sustain it for long periods are becoming rare. Most works live and die with their debut. Open big or enjoy staying under the radar. In music, Adele’s 21 is the most recent outlier. No one saw it coming, and then nothing could displace it for more than a year. In the back catalog, Pink Floyd’s enduring hit Dark Side of the Moon returned to the Billboard Top 200 (at #156) for the week ending 21-Oct-2012. That’s 817 (non-consecutive) weeks on the chart (more than 15 chart-years).

Click to read more ...

Musician's Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools & Sites - Official.fm

There are so many companies creating audio players and widgets; some are great and some, well, not so much. But all we really want to do is just get our music heard. And while the magic player that ensures everyone hears your music hasn’t been created yet (be patient, I’m working on it), there are some that do a fantastic job of increasing the ‘share-ability’ of your music. One such player is Official.fm. Official.fm is a platform that provides artists the ability to create players and promo pages.

Click to read more ...

The Music Industry versus The Internet

When self-appointed guardians of the Internet and rights holders argue about the fall and the future of the music industry, you can put all of the talking points into two buckets:

Guardians of the Internet
Open, free, free culture, remix, sharing, do no evil, censorship, don’t break the Internet, innovation, value creation, music-will-be-like-water (don’t worry), scale, disintermediation, alternative income sources, patronage, greedy and shortsighted labels, etc..

Rights holders (artists, labels, publishers)
Copyrights, permissions, illegal sharing, stealing, royalties, negligible royalties, transfer of wealth, ad-supported sharing, free-loading, livable wages, the necessity of labels and publishers as investors, etc..

Click to read more ...

How Google And Search Engine Optimisation Changed The Music Industry

There are many technological developments within the last ten years that have changed the way we interact and consume media. Development such as facebook, twitter, (myspace), tumblr and youtube have emerged and have become an integral part of how society interacts. However, one of the crucial elements that is often overlooked is the impact that google has on how things spread and the content that is consumed.

Click to read more ...

How to Get Gigs on Sonicbids

A while ago, I wrote this article about How to Get Better Results From Your Sonicbids Submissions. Since then, there have been a few changes to the site (both for promoters as well as performers). All of the advice from the first article still applies so if you haven’t read it, take a look at it first.

Here’s some practical advice for those of you who would like to use Sonicbids to get gigs and what my thoughts are on it (both as an artist as well as a promoter):

Click to read more ...

Bandzoogle: “Your website should not be a blog”

Bandzoogle is one of the most effective platforms for musicians to build their website and manage their direct-to-fan marketing and sales. Their platform is one of oldest web hosting tools available for musicians and I have created a few websites through them myself.

Bandzoogle sites are very easy to create, stylish and they come with some great built-in features.The service is free to try, and offers affordable monthly subscriptions plans, with great customer service. Below is a brief Q/A that I recently had with Bandzoogle’s CEO David Dufresne.

Click to read more ...