Latasha Alcindor’s Inspiring Story From Deep Depression To A $10K Angel Investment Article

I grew up in a home with two parents who sold me the dream anything being possible. There was no prison for my passions, no cage for my creativity, and I’ll thank them until my dying day for their unwavering support in all my hopeful and hopeless endeavors.

Many months ago, I wrote an article praising the parents rappers who were the backbone careers during the early, uncertain stages. Parents who supported before any money or fame, simply the wind beneath wings that could potentially soar or possibly never leave the ground. I applauded the mother Kanye, the parents Chad Hugo, the grandmother Big Sean―but deep down I knew these stories were rare, and not the norm. It’s hard enough to be an artist, but even harder when there’s no solid foundation to stand upon, no real system support.

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Conversion in a Box: Why 'Website Visits' Are a Worthless Metric for Musicians

A few weeks ago, our good friend Wes Davenport put us on to a new service called ‘Conversion In a Box’, which is a simple email-for-media form creator aimed at helping musicians to easily create a newsletter sign up form for their website that offers a download in exchange for an email address.

While most email services offer some sort of opt-in form, and many do also include an e-for-m option, it’s not always the easiest thing to set up / customize. For instance, Mail Chimp offers a great newsletter service but won’t allow you to upload a song directly to their server so if you are going to offer a song download in exchange for an email address, you’ll have to find somewhere else to actually host that song.

Conversion In a Box on the other hand will host your files, allow you to set up a highly customizable sign-up form in mere minutes that can be embedded to any website with ease. And for those of you who already have a newsletter set up through another service, the email addresses you collect here can be easily exported in .csv format and imported back into your newsletter service.

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How Do You Get Someone to Read Your Email?

I love this meme. I can still hear the AOL sound clip in my mind saying “You’ve Got Mail!” Back then, email was such a phenomenon (especially through AOL), that a film plot with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan was built around the concept. Not long after, email became so common and inundated with spam that most users end up ignoring most messages that come in.

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