Just what the world needs - another music social networking site

Apple have just announced the creation of a new music social networking site that exists solely within itunes.

Wired has the scoop:

Apple audaciously seems to think the world actually needs another social network — one that you even need special software to be part of, to boot. With the introduction Wednesday of ‘Ping,” a music-centered community that exists only within iTunes, they are probably right — and then some.

At Apple’s annual music event in San Francisco CEO Steve Jobs described “Ping,” part of the iTunes 10 upgrade coming soon, as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/09/apples-ping-social-music-network-is-already-too-big-to-fail/#ixzz0ySrZD7XI

By Jez with No comments

Dirty Tricks - Part 2: Snakes and Adders

 In our last post about Nicky Kallongis' book Myspace Music profit Monster we investigated  Myspace as a hosting solution and method for reaching more listeners.  Nicky talked about using Friend Adders as a way of generating more "faans" annd exposure on myspace.

We decided we would give it a go for a short while and report back with our results.  Myspace has some strict rules about using Friend adders - specifically you cannot invite more than 350-400 a day or they will delete your profile.  In practice about 50-75 a day is the safe limit for friend adding.

Additionally some myspace profiles don't accept invitations from bands- or their profiles are private. You can't do anything about this - just move along and look at the next person in the queue.

In order not to jeopardize any of our legitimate accounts we used an alias that i set up to release some jokey Old Skool electro tracks - Trollingforlulz. 

We did a cursory search for myspace friend adders.  When approaching these sites you have to be careful as some of the sites feature adverts which are far from work safe. The biggest Google hit was for Friendfrost - which appeared to be an online repository for people to post their ID's rather than a friend adder per se.

By Jez with No comments

Dirty Tricks: Myspace, Monsters and Profit - Part 1

The subtitle of this book is "Easy online marketing strategies to get more fans fast".  I imagine this with a plethora of exclamation marks and ones after the title.

The author, Nicky (the knife) Kalliongis is apparently a respected industry insider. Having been strategist for EMI and Time warners as well as a respected producer for Whitney Houston, Air Supply, Run DMC, Faithless, Hall and Oats and Eros Ramazotti (there's more of those ones and excalamation marks). Now that in itself makes the whole premise of this book somewhat suspect to me - surely this is one of the very dinosaurs blindly struggling through the web 2.0 tar pits?

The book comes across as severely dated and very basic for everyone who's got any familiarity with the web. Some of the marketing actions such as using a newswire service like PR Web strike me as the actions of someone who doesn't really understand the viral buzz they keep talking about.

That the whole marketing plan centres around myspace, a now almost defunct medium is enough to get the alarm bells ringing.

Even when the book was intially released (2008) myspace was already on it's last legs ready for a kindly shotgun in the face care of Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp who took something they didn't understand and made it even worse filling it's pages with advertising and slow clunky loading applications such as Myspace chat and yet more adverts.

By Jez with 1 comment

Free online mp3 hosting...

So you've written your magnum opus.  You've spent a long time recording it, mastering it, sweating over how it sounds and now you need to get it out there on the web.  You can either purchase some webspace and build your own webspace or use one of the many free mp3 hosting or distribution services.

Why host on a third party website and not your own space?    The main advantages are:

• Free - you don't have to pay hosting charges to an external company.
• Bandwidth - 1000 downloads won't impact on your own bandwidth keeping those costs low.
• Website integration - usually the hosting companies have some way for people to embed you songs on their website.
• Social networking - some of the sites such as soundcloud are integrated social networking sites in themselves allowing listeners to rate, download or connect with artists directly through the site.  You can mass mail followers and allow people to comment - enhancing your social currency.

here are some of the options currently available:

By Jez with No comments