Need help winning Joe Bonamassa's Blues Masters Competition

Hello my name is Hollaman Lindsay and I am asking all of you to see if you can possibly aid me in my attempt to win Joe Bonamassa’s Blues Masters Competition. The first round for this contest is based off of viral popularity and how many views and shares your audition video gets, now I aint sayin that I cant generate that many views and shares because I dont have the talent, Its just that I live in Hiram Georgia and we got more stock in rakes then we do computers so its hard for me to find many people around me to support it. So I am inquiring you to see if you can help me get my name out there and get my audition video views and shares because if I can get past this first round and make it to guitar duals I think I got it made in the shade.

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Music Marketing 2.0: Bethel Music Leverages Affiliate Links to Boost Revenue

Musical group Bethel Music now earns additional revenue on top of music sales by promoting its newest album–For the Sake of the World–through refer.ly iTunes affiliate links, giving them more resources to make the music that they and their fans love.

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Microphone Marketing

A microphone is actually a miniature speaker. It works like the human ear; it “listens” for sound waves, then translates and reproduces the signal to send it to the brain (or sound system). Until a microphone is used to magnify a person’s voice, it is just a speaker. A microphone is great for certain applications: events where a speaker or singer need to be heard or for grabbing someone’s attention. The problem is that unless it is a message that a person is listening for or wants to hear (such as a concert that the person has paid for), the message can get tuned out just like all of the other noise in our lives.

Think for a moment about the messages you hear when you fly somewhere. Every two minutes in the airport terminal, a voice interrupts the music playing overhead to announce a “high priority security alert,” only to tell you that it is important to watch your bags. These messages tend to get ignored. When you board the plane, flight attendants ask for everyone’s full attention while they go through life-dependent emergency procedures (they even ask for you to follow along in the safety guide). However, if you look around the plane, you’ll see that hardly anyone is listening – people are reading, listening to music, or distracting themselves with little games. Even though our lives may depend on knowing these procedures, our eyes tend to glaze over and we think “I’ve heard it all before.” Yet, we music marketers kid ourselves into thinking that certain ads will be given the attention we hope simply because it’s being broadcasted.

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Internet Promotion from Zero in 2011

I know similar articles to this have been posted here many times, but I thought it would be worth giving my take today, right now, with my perceptions, right or wrong.  So please comment & debate.

Recently a friend of mine was asking where he should post up stuff for his brand new band (no web presence yet at all) given the decline in MySpace.  So I came up with this as my list in order of importance.

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Heads Up: new online Music & Culture magazine with print aesthetic

EyeSeeSound, three DIYers with a love of music and culture, have relaunched www.eyeseesound.tv as an online Music and Culture magazine with the format and aesthetic of print magazines.

Focussing on independent and DIY bands and artists the magazine, Heads Up, offers an opportunity for music and culture lovers to discover new bands, short films, animations, artists, photographers and designers through a stylish and innovative approach to website design and functionality.

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Comparing Music Marketing Platforms/Services

A few weeks ago I got to present at PodCamp Nashville. The topic - comparing three different music marketing platforms. Bandcamp, Reverbnation and TopSpin. They’re summarized below.

Going by the Twitter stream and this blog post, the biggest take home most of the audience apparently got from my presentation was:

1) “As a musician, your biggest competition is porn. And if you’re paying for porn, you’re doing it wrong.”

2) “Have A Plan.”

Well, one out of two ain’t bad….

The first bit of wisdom was based on an Ars Technica Bit Torrent downloads graphic I had in my slides:

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in Band Website Tips, DIY, Distribution, Music Strategy, Promotion, Web 2.0, digital music, direct to fan, music marketing, music promotion, social media for musicians | tagged Ars Technica, Band Equity Score, Bit Torrent, Hypebot, Nashville, Nashville Tech Feed, Plan, PodCamp, Porn, TopSpin, music marketing, reverbnation

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Maximize Your Dead Myspace Profile (For Artists)

Nearly every active band/artist/musician today has a profile on Myspace and they’ve spent years building up their friend count trying to impress labels and radio stations. Now it’s 2011, everyone has moved on to Facebook or Twitter and these acts are left with thousands of fan connections on a dead social network. What a waste. It doesn’t have to be this way! Here are some tips on how to make the most of your fan connections on Myspace.

Myspace is still a popular music destination. It’s high domain authority lets Myspace rank well for many search keywords, which means lots of targeted traffic to your profile. Visitors to this page are probably not a “fan” yet and it’s unlikely that many visitors will “friend” you. So, make sure you’re leading potential fans to where they will make a connection, whether its Facebook or your mailing list. 

Myspace isn’t totally dead yet, it still has 28 million users a month according to Quantcast. You should spend a little time updating the few fans who still use it. Use a service likeping.fm or artistdata to save time if you must.

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Is the Internet Dead or just Dead to Artists?

Is the internet dead? This has been a question I have been asking myself for a few weeks now. If it’s not dead is it just going through changes like most businesses do? I have read several articles of late that seem to think that it is dead and that the future of the internet will look much different then it does today. So what if it’s dead, how does that impact us? Do we even care?

I’m looking at the internet through the eyes of someone working in the music industry, as a recording artist, a studio owner and a music publisher. What was once the supposed gateway to music business success is closing and its closing fast. In fact it may have never really been open at all.

We have all heard the stories of how a band was found on myspace and then international fame soon followed. I once bought into this, but now I’m not so sure. How true can this be? Success in business has always been built on hard work, time, effort, energy, preparation and education. There are always the stories of overnight successes but even then all of the above things were at some point involved. No one can succeed at anything if they have never put forth any effort to succeed can they?

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The Virtual Tour, Parts II and III (OR: Keep Your Studio Slippers On!)

To successfully promote your music you need to be able to influence potential listeners from all across the web. A new and potentially effective method of increasing the recognition of your music, influencing new listeners and spreading the awareness of you, as a band or musician, is to set up a virtual tour.

In this article we look at why you should be setting up a virtual music tour, how to find blogs to host your tour and how to get the most out of the experience. In the final paragraph I share a trick that has proved to be a very powerful way of encouraging listeners to interact and leave blog comments.

What Is A Virtual Tour?

The basic structure of a virtual tour is a collection of different types of web/blog posts, hosted on a number of different sites/blogs, all promoting your band and/or music. A simple example: the tour might be six different blogs to each post about your band/music, each posting on six consecutive days. Another example might be four different blogs, one standard website, and an announced and date specified new video post on your youtube channel, over a one week period.

The idea behind a virtual tour is that the musician/band has a chance to influenc

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'BandPage' On Facebook; Is This What Will Replace MySpace?!

MySpace, once the best place for anything music related. If you wanted to hear audio from your favourite musician or discover up and coming talent, MySpace was the place to go.

These days however, MySpace is full of musicians promoting to each other. And that wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it led more sales, but the truth is most of the people on MySpace are only in it for themselves. The ‘real people’, the potential fans, have more or less all left, choosing to instead use the multimillion pound social networking website Facebook.

Those forward thinking musicians instantly jumped onto the Facebook train, hoping to pick up fans with their newly set up ‘Facebook fan page’. But while Facebook has allowed musicians to create their own fan pages from near the beginning, it’s never been a complete music solution… That is until now!

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Facebook Has Fan Pages: Use Them!

Here at Music Without Labels & Beat-Play, LLC we currently represent 320 independent musicians, offering free promotion. There are currently way too many artists today not utilizing social media the right way to promote their music. Facebook has had fan pages for close to 2 years now so don’t represent your band under a “personal” profile. Take a look at the reasons why it is not beneficial to build your music recognition on Facebook through a personal page.

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Collaborative Music Licensing for Co-Writers

Online music collaboration and licensing - made easy

Notethrower.com Overview Tutorial from NoteThrower.

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Online music licensing for films, tv series, commercials: here's Have a Sync

Have a sync (www.haveasync.com) is the new tool for music licensing, designed and managed by Bixio Publishing Group. It allows directors, advertising agencies, music consultants to find the perfect music for films, documentaries, commercials, TV series and other audiovisual productions. The research is intuitive, fast and efficient, thanks to the innovative Sync Cloud system. All the tracks on Have a Sync are available in full-track streaming. For most of the tracks, the licenses can be purchased directly online for both  publishing and master rights.

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Rock The Biz - watch all about: "Tips&Tricks", "Future Of Music", "Income" and more

Finally all our chapters of Rock The Biz - the documentary about the new musicbusiness in Europe - are online. Feel free to watch here 4 further chapters for free:

Tips & Tricks:

Professional musicians, labels and player in the musicbusiness give hints, on what to focus, go’s and no go’s and many more

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