I’ve pretty much neglected the comments area on this blog, probably because there was never much activity. But as the blog starts to pull in more readers this year there’s been more feedback and I was beginning to realize how crap the default WordPress commenting system is. Ideally I was looking for a plug-in that offered threaded commenting to keep the conversation flow more fluid and easier to follow.

I’d seen Disqus on a few other blogs but was unaware of the speed and efficiency of this neat little WordPress plugin.

In about half an hour I’d downloaded the plug-in, installed it and set it up. The other really neat feature is that Disqus will import all the comments already on your blog. It makes it more user friendly with its threaded commenting.

Its also integrated with the option to include Facebook Connect so people can comment using their Facebook login details rather than having to go through the new sign up process just to comment. Will have to see how much, if any difference this makes, but whatever, am really loving this set-up right now. Highly recomended.

While I get my lazy ass into gear with two new posts over the weekend I thought I’d do a shameless piece of self plugging (which is very rare for me by the way!) and highlight a couple of posts on this blog from last year that have kinda got buried by more recent posts.

In more recent posts this year, by far the most popular (which surprised me) has been (with this months actual page views March 27th 8.25 est):

10 New Music Industry PDFs That’ll Make You An Expert (1130) followed by:
Resources To Help Get Your Music in Films ans TV (460)
200+ Music Industry, Marketing, Social Media and Tech Blogs That’ll Make You A Media Whore! (397)

Some Other Posts You Should Read…

How To Get Your Music Distributed on iTunes (And Keep Most Of The Money)
This is a year old now but never more relevant than today as the onus on digital distribution gathers pace.

Its Official, Vinyl Not Dead Shock
My defence of the vinyl format vs the iPod! Kind of.

How To Press Up a Vinyl Single and Add Instant Kudos to Your Release
A detailed look at how (and where) to get your vinyl records pressed. There will be an updated round-up of distributors shortly.

The Best Music Biz Book You’ve Never Heard Of
I hold the KLFs legendary book, ‘The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way)’ in high regard. I followed the instructions it lays out in simple terms and didn’t hit number one, but managed to get into the UK top 30. Others have followed suit. Whatever, its a great fun read which is how I wish all music industry books were written. They’re not.

More soon………….

Now I’ve used the word ‘music industry’ here to encompass anything connected to digital music stuff, music 2.0, social media, whatever you want to call it. Truth is, the keyword today is convergence.

But if you’re struggling to come to terms with new terminology, new technology and new services I did a comprehensive scan of resources you can print out on PDF that’ll really set you up with an information boost if you’re playing catch up and haven’t got the time to dig around.

There’s some fantastic resources out there and some inspirational writers like Seth Godin, Andrew Dubber, Gerd Leonhard, Derek Sivers and even digital distributors Tunecore all offer some brilliant insight and the best news is its all out there for you to grab free as a bird. And legal too!

Promotion

Music Industry Survival Guide. This compact guide from digital distributor Tunecore crams a lot into its 30 pages covering college radio promotion, iTunes promotion, street marketing, music discovery, mp3 blogs and press and media tips. Some people actually charge for this stuff. There’s seven PDF guides from Tunecore including a vinyl 101 for bands/artists wanting to press up vinyl records.

Their other guides cover mastering, publishing, copyright and mixing.

Mastering The Music Website Cycle.  EasyB.com make e-commerce software for artists to sell music direct from their own websites. The handy 36 page guide goes into some detail on how to make and manage a successful music download website. They draw up a checklist of plans for structure, content and design. Again, some great pointers for many who may find the task a little daunting.

The Leading Question-Voice Of The Fans. This survey undertaken by UK digital music industry company Musically was aired at Midem this January. 1300 music fans were questioned across the USA, UK and France.

(more…)

Being in a band, your time is very important. If you are an indie musician your day-to-day can possibly consist of a day job or school, then you need to make time for songwriting, recording, Myspace-ing, Tweeting, booking shows, editing video and fending off e-mails and other online networks. Knowing that your time is important, it is easy to brush off the fans, especially the ones that you do not see everyday, week, month, year or even, ever. That does not mean that they are not important.

Now more than even your fans are vital to your success. They are the ones that dictate your income. You NEED to keep them happy. There is no excuse, no communication gaps or barriers stopping you from developing relationships with every fan that wants one.

(more…)

With all the hype about ‘music 2.0′ tools, hosts and websites for musicians, bands and artists, its quite possible that you could easily forget one of the most important aspects of having an online presence as a band/label/DJ/creative. Its strictly old school too. Its your own domain name.

I wrote about it last month here and this is just to expand on the advantages. OK, you have your MySpace sub domain name, one at iLike, Multiply, iMeem and all the other free social music sites. Great, but unless you’re paying for a premium service there’s a possibility that any of these services could disappear down a dotcom black hole. OK then, maybe not MySpace, but its a crowded marketplace and sites do go dark.

“Dec. 2, 2003 was doomsday for independent music. As of noon Tuesday, Mp3.com closed its server and deleted its roughly 750,000 files, marking the end of the largest catalogue of free Internet downloads from hundreds of thousands of unsigned bands..” (from the Eagle Online)

(more…)

Hit Singularity have a great article on how to market your band without having to spam MySpace. ’10 Fast and Free Strategies To Market Your Band (Without Resorting To Spamming People On Myspace)’, in it they highly recommend starting your own blog.

“In 2009 the single most powerful bloc of people in the music industry are music bloggers. If you are written up by 40 blogs then your album will sell twice as much as it would otherwise. Music blogs are a far more powerful promotional tool than MySpace.”

So says a study by New York University which you can download as a PDF here. 

If you’re wanting a bunch of MP3 blogs to approach with a promo drive there’s a list of over a thousand MP3 and music blogs at aggregator Hype Machine.

The Buzzsonic.com blog runs on the latest version of WordPress, which if you didn’t already know is a beautiful piece of open source freeware. You can get one of these on a sub domain via WordPress.com or, better idea, you can host your own WordPress install on your own domain name.

First things first. Buy your own domain name (if you don’t already own one). I’m now using Google Domains, not just because its Google (they actually go through Godaddy anyway) but because the domain (a worthwhile spend of $10) comes preconfigured with Google Apps and email.

You’ll need a webhost next. We use Hostgator, simply because they’re very fairly priced, are reliable and more importantly have great support if something goes wrong. A lot of people make the fatal mistake of choosing a webhost on lowest price and then discover that the only support is via an email address that never gets answered. You get what you pay for.

A typical hosting account here will cost from around $5 to $13 for multiple domain hosting. Another important part of Hostgator’s (and many other hosts too by the way) service is that they use the online website manager CPanel which has a really great add on called Fantastico.

Fantastico is basically is a script auto-installer, so forget any messy FTP uploads of source code. A WordPress install is literally ninety seconds away.

For a more pro look you’ll need to add a nicer looking theme/template to change the WordPress default look. Thousands of freebies around, start here.  We use one from the rather cool Design Disease.

The only other thing we did here was add a few plug-ins like Sociable, Social Homes Widget, the MyBlogLog and Last FM widgets. Most of the other stuff I’ve added using the built in WordPress text widgets which you can drag into the sidebars in the admin area.

And that’s it. Buzzsonic.com cost less than $20 to set-up, the only other cost is time and imagination.

Related Blog Promotion Resources

Fantastico!Installing WordPress in CPanel (Information Marketing Central)
NYU Researchers Study Music Blog Buzz (Coolfer.com)
Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music Sales (NYU-PDF Study)
Hype Machine Top Music Blogs (HypeM.com)
20 Tips For Pitching Bloggers (TheFutureBuzz.com)
5 Remarkable Things You Should Learn From Music (And How You Can Apply Them To Your Blog) (DailyBlogTips.com)
Tips For Starting Your Own Music Blog (Squidoo.com)
Hit Singularity (Hit Singularity)
100 Social Media Resources For Musicians (GenYRockStars.com)
Social Networks For Musicians (SocialNetworksForMusicians.com)

I’ve been using Twitter ‘seriously’ (I’m not sure how you measure that) for a few months now but I was a slow starter as I previously mentioned here.

I think at first the problem for me is that it just seemed like it was going to be another web 2.0 novelty that’d I’d quickly tire of and abandon after a while. I did abandon my Twitter profile leaving myself hanging with less than ten followers and half a dozen posts.

Not for the first time, I was wrong. There are just so many tech and music people ‘twittering’ it kind of reminds you of all the Google euphoria when the search engine was so ubiquitous that ‘to Google’ became a verb.

What helped me a lot was seeking out the help of a bunch of people that did ‘get it’ by searching Google (as always). I thought I’d gather together a bunch of the best online blog posts and articles that I found in my research.

How To Use Twitter For Music Promotion (About.com) Twitter.

About.com Music Careers writer Heather McDonald is always very concise in her writing, unlike me. Once signing up for Twitter Heather recommends, “looking for fellow music types. Music fans, journalists, artists, labels, etc – these are the people you want to follow you.” She continues.

“Twitter can be a great way to not only keep fans informed about your news but it can also make them feel closer to the whole process when you tweet about things you’re working on as you’re doing them. The trick is not to go too far and overload people.”

(more…)

I wrote about some more ‘leftfield’ music marketing ideas earlier this week and continue here with some more brain storming that may give you some leads.

99th Floor Elevators-'Hooked'

One thing that has really taken off in the last year or so with artists is free album downloads, with high profile artists like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails getting the most column inches.

NIN’s album ‘Ghosts l-lV’ was Amazon’s best selling album of 2008 despite the fact that the album was legally available as a free download on filesharing networks.

It was significant also in that it was released totally free of record label shackles, Trent Reznor instead choosing to use digital music distributor Tunecore to make the 36 tracks available for download.

The band are said to have made close to two million dollars in a week from selling high-end limited edition versions of the album. The follow up album, ‘The Slip’ uses a similar marketing tactic.

Now obviously anyone reading this isn’t going to have that kind of following but artists can still use the same principles on a smaller scale. I’m trying it myself by giving away some of the original dance mixes of 99th Floor Elevators ‘Hooked’ here. A package that includes five different mixes and even the original promo video which you can see just above.

You can get individual mixes (as 192kbps MP3 files) or the whole package as a zipped download. There’s even a Bit Torrent link here. Download and seed.

Does this devalue my old mixes? Well no, its a ‘risk free’ introduction that will hopefully grab some new listeners who’ll be stimulated enough to be interested in the forthcoming newer mixes and also helps keep the name floating around the web in between new material coming out later in the year. People can also head to Amazon to buy other material on CD and download.

I used UTorrent to make the Torrent, instructions you can find here and here. I used Drop.io to host the MP3 downloads, a great straight forward service with no sign up required and no waiting through crappy ad loops that you find on free file hosts like Zshare.com

The message here? Speculate to accumulate to put it simply. Despite lots of negative press CDs are alive and well, vinyl is having a revival, fans ARE still willing to pay for quality music in premium packaging. Ex-Strangler Hugh Cornwall is the latest ‘name’ artist to try this route with his album ‘Hooverdamn’. Where, besides the free MP3 version you can grab the album on various vinyl, CD and DVD packages.

Download the 99th Floor Elevators ‘Hooked’ original remixes and promo video here or here. Or via BitTorrent here.

Contd tomorrow………

Related Research
How To Create A Torrent (Torrent Freak)
A Beginners Guide To Bit Torrent (BitTorrent.com)
How To Make A Torrent (UTorrent.com)
More Bands Oasis, Jamiroquai To Follow Radiohead (Daily Telegraph)
Steal Throwdown’s Music Please (Mashable.com)
Free Music Initiative Has Sparked 119% Rise In Sales (Mashable.com)
Why We’re Releasing Our Latest Album For Free On The Internet (HarveyDanger.com)
Band Recognizes Free, Unencumbered Downloads Are Part Of A Publicity Campaign (Techdirt.com)
Radiohead Shocks Record Industry With Free Download Of New Album (Zeropaid.com)

I’ve been blogging erratically since 2004 but find it hard to maintain enthusiasm and to find inspiration on a consistent basis. My blogging ‘career’ has kind of been like my music career in as much as I find it a waste of time just blogging/releasing music just for the sake of it. Its nice to at least try and be profound.

The other thing that has got in the way is my nine to five job (I envy those who manage to write full time) and more often than not, other online distractions and social media. I spent a stupid amount of time trying out every social network going, falling out with them, then jumping onto the next band wagon.

Twitter, blogging and networking on steroids

I was trawling my over loaded RSS feed reader of choice (FeedDemon for the desktop, Google Reader for the web and just to make sure Sage, in Firefox) and came across a J. Angelo Racoma blog post on Blog Herald,  ‘Don’t Give Excuses, Just Blog’ , in the post Racoma writes, ” The point is that if you’ve been busy, then you shouldn’t have to explain yourself. Just write. Just publish. Just blog.”

And he continues, ” But then the deeper issue is that the fact that you haven’t been blogging lately probably means you’ve lost interest or focus in your blogging. The solution here is to set a schedule and stick to it. Find a good pace, so you won’t have to force yourself to write when you aren’t at your best. If you can publish one good post per week, then do so. Quality trumps quantity. But regularity is important, too.”

Coinciding with reading that I’d just started using Twitter again. I’d signed up for Twitter probably six months ago used it for about three days and jumped ship and dismissed it as another web 2.0 novelty. Until my interest was re-tweaked by all the web chatter on the micro blogging format, seemed just about every big name in the blogosphere was using it and using it daily.

Going back to my forgotten profile I started to write about things I’d found online and things I wanted to share, things that gave me inspiration. I spruced up my background wallpaper using one of the many custom profilers (a new cottage industry not seen since MySpace ‘peaked’ a while back). And bingo. You know what I suddenly got it. My followers blossomed from 5 to 105 (and continues up) and it suddenly became clear that Twitter was like the networking perfect storm. On steroids.

What makes Twitter even more persuasive is the sheer amount of tools, online and desktop apps, WordPress plugins and hyper active community available. There is just no way I can get bored with this one. Its like one of those old hyper-active forums I used to hang out at but more addictive, faster and simpler.

So, with the inspiration I gathered from Twitter, I’m taking part online again and for me Twitter is all about taking part, sharing and grabbing snippets of wisdom and blogging leads. If you’re like one of those kids who used to share mixtapes, Twitter is kind of like that but sharing online inspiration instead. Most of the time. I’m learning to sweep aside those, “I’m just making some toast” type posters!

What I’m Using

I’m still getting into the swing of things and don’t really understand this # hashkey business yet but right now I’m using two desktop Twitter clients, Tweetdeck and Twirl. I can also tweet using my IM aggregator Digsby. I use Twitter Tools and TwitMe on my blog and have been playing around with various web based helpers and add on’s like Mr Tweet, Twitpic, Twitterfeed , TwittyTunes and TwitterCounter.

Twitter is a fantastic marketing tool, a terrific way to spread your message to many people at once, in an instant. But to do that, you need to build a following, you need to “find” other people who will, in turn, find you interesting enough to follow.

Related Resources

Developing Your Twitter Muscles (TwiTip.com)
Construct Your Own Top 10 Must Follow List As It Relates To Your Own Niche (TwiTip.com)
Finding Twitter Stars (KeithHopper.com)
How To Use Twitter For Music Promotion (About.com)
Can Twitter Be Used For Music Promotion (14Sandwiches.com)
7 Reasons Why Everybody In The Music Industry Should Try Twitter (Midemnet Blog)
Musicians Twitter Roadmap (MusicThinkTank.com)
Twitter on Mashable (Mashable.com)

Since the blog makeover a couple of weeks ago I’ve been bombarded by comment spam for some reason. Its one of the things that makes blogging work and not fun. So, I finally activated Askimet (Automattic Kismet to give it its full name) on my WordPress install (didn’t really pay attention to it before for some reason?). Its actually working wonders right now and since activating the plug-in its halted more than 2,200 of the most bloodcurdlingly despicable types of spam you can imagine that up to now I’ve been having to edit manually daily.

Askimet comes installed by default in Word Press but you have to activate it in the Plugins area in your admin area and get a free APi key. A five minute task that’ll save you hours of work weekly.

Related Links

Askimet FAQ ( Askimet)

Here’s a really useful widget for people with blogs or multiple memberships at social networks, bookmarking sites and the like. If you’re like me you probably have profiles at a bunch of different websites, Flickr, MySpace, Digg, YouTube and such. With ShowYourself you can combine all your profiles on the web into one neat looking widget that you can put on your blog, your MySpace page or anywhere on the web.

With developer Dustin Bachrach’s app you type in your usernames for the sites you use and clear the checkboxes for those you don’t. The ShowYourself widget-builder lists around two dozen popular destinations, from AIM to Last.fm to YouTube, and you can easily add others.

Via Lifehacker.com

Related Links
Yahoo Widgets (Yahoo.com)
WordPress Widgets (WordPress.com)

I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what was causing the Windows Live Writer to crash everytime I tried to insert an image into a post. I back tracked a couple of days to see which recent Firefox plug-ins I’d added and it turns out it was the MySpace toolbar I mentioned here causing the problem.

So, out goes the toolbar and there ends the head scratching. Though at least one good thing came out of my search for solutions, discovering Flickr4Writer.

I’m toggling between using Windows Live Writer for posting right now vs. using the Performancing Firefox add-on ScribeFire. Though for the last two days the Live Writer has been crashing everytime I try to add an image to the post. After losing two hours work yesterday I was on the brink of dumping the app completely and returning to ScribeFire.Having second thoughts Writer is simply fuller featured and offers things like the ability to add images to posts (ScribeFire doesn’t) and preview the post in your blog before publishing (much like WordPress does in the admin panel), two features I cant really do without.

Also ScribeFire doesn’t seem to have a minimize option so you either have to put up with it hogging the bottom of your screen, or you save and close. Obtrusive and I hate obtrusive, its what sends me rushing to the delete option!

Anyway, the crashing. Until I find the conflict (it used to work fine) I found an excellent plug-in which works around the problem Flickr4Writer.

Flickr4Writer is a simple plugin for Windows Live Writer that enables you to browse Flickr and insert an image from Flickr into a Writer post. The project is part of CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site.

This one is really down to individual needs and every user is different but here’s what Add-Ons I’m running right now as part of my ‘ultimate’ browser set-up. Naturally my browser of choice is Firefox and has been for about three years.

First I dumped the default Firefox theme and installed Noia 2.0 Extreme which is a little more streamlined and sharper looking.

I read way too many RSS news feeds daily and if I’m not using my desktop reader of choice, FeedDemon (which has recently replaced RSS Bandit) Sage is a brilliant RSS feed reader and manager that tends to be less resources heavy than the desktop equivalents and sits in the sidebar of Firefox. (more…)

I mentioned this WordPress plug-in briefly in yesterdays post here , though I didn’t elaborate much. But anyway, Postalicious is another useful plug-in that you may find of use if you’re running a WordPress blog.

Postalicious is a plug-in that automatically posts your del.icio.us bookmarks to your blog. I’m using it here and it works great if you are running Firefox with the del.icio.us browser extension. That way you can add bookmarks as you browse without visiting del.icio.us and at the end of the day the plug-in will add your daily finds as a post. Neato.

Related

Absolutely Del.icio.us Tools Collection (QuickOnlineTips.com)
Del.icio.us Firefox Extension (Del.icio.us)
Del.icio.us A to Z By Function (Econsultant.com)

I’ve been using the blogging software WordPress for around three years now and in all of that time there really is nothing to touch it. Why? Its free (Open Source), it has a massive user base and support network, plug-ins, mods, widgets and themes galore, oh and did I mention it doesn’t cost a penny?

Of course free doesn’t always mean great but in this case, you get what you don’t pay for. I have tried literally hundreds of mods over the years, different themes/skins and modifications. Basically I like to tinker and I think I’m getting closer to my ideal WordPress install (at least for my needs).

Buzzsonic.com (as of today) runs on WordPress v2.0.2, so its not the latest install (which is v2.1.2). Anyway, I thought I’d list my top ten (or eleven!) modifications which I’m finding the most useful right now. This could well change soon but these are what I consider the most useful WordPress mods.

1. Glossy Blue Theme- For a simple, quick overhaul of the default WordPress look this neat two column Web 2.0-ish looking theme is one of the easiest ways to get a cool looking make-over. A close second was Glued Ideas Subtle which you might go for if you prefer a three column look. Honorable mentions go to Misty Look and Semiologic (I’m using an older install of this theme here). (more…)

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror looks at how the increased bandwidth of a popular blog can throttle a Website and offers some tips. In one way its a nice problem to have as it means you’re getting traffic but there are some straight forward tips here to cutting down on bandwidth usage. The biggest culprit for many is images, there are enough third party image hosting solutions (Flickr is the one which immediately springs to mind of course) around for that to not to be an issue anymore. Also as Jeff mentions, your RSS feed is a bandwidth leech. Again services like FeedBurner can snuff out this problem.

Of course we’ve never had Website meltdown here at Buzzsonic, though we got an indication of how bandwidth can spike within minutes of a popular story being linked to by a news site when Slashdot picked up on a story and bandwidth usage went up fifty fold within hours.

Related Reading

We Got Slashdotted and Survived (Buzzsonic.com)
Using Amazon S3 As An Image Hosting Service (Coding Horror)

OK, its been a long time since I even looked at this blog, let alone posted to it. Main reason? Well, I simply had too many projects running, including four blogs and two directories, so cutting those down is going to help to prioritize. Oh, the full time job kind of gets in the way too! So its down to Buzzsonic and iExploreFlorida.com only now and I’ve been trying two blogging tools that I think are going to help in shaving off some time wasting. I’ve been using Windows Live Writer to do my posts at Florida Travel Hacks which has actually been great, though I’m now also trying the Performancing plug-in (since renamed ScribeFire) for Firefox which is enabling me to blog using the browser rather than having to log-in to my Word Press admin area.

Live Writer also has a Firefox extension which I’m going to be trying as well. So, will be adding feedback here and seeing if a favourite emerges. Post wise, I’m pretty much going to be covering the same stuff though will adding more resources for fellow bloggers. Stay tuned !