Phew, well now I’ve actually finished a blog post for the first time in over a year (hey I’ve been too busy over at Twitter) I thought I would ‘weld’ together my three lengthy posts on digital music distribution and put them out there as one lovely PDF!

Now take into account that I haven’t reorganized anything so you’ll be getting them in chronological order from the top. I’m going to post it at Google Docs so feel free to grab. This is just the rough’ beta mix’ as I do intend to tidy it up and reorganise very soon. Feedback please!

Grab it here: The Buzzsonic.com Ultimate Guide to Digital Music Distribution Extra!

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)

Google is broken this morning, EST 10.18am.

Was looking around for Pro Tools 8 M Boxed/LE prices this AM and headed to Google search to check the shopping comparison for the iLok USB key. Surprised to find that the manufacturers site had been tagged with the dreaded Google malware ‘kiss of death’ page. Searching around for other terms brought up the same results.

Even Google’s own paid shopping links were being redirected to the malware page. Last gasp try to search for my own music as 99th Floor Elevators. Every search result for that term got the malware redirect including the link to my video on YouTube.

Headed to Twitter to see what people are finding.

Breaking:What’s The Matter With Google? (Geekbrief.TV)
The Day Google Broke (The Next Web)
Google Broken (Google News Search)

Late last week Google quietly acquired data visualization software tool, Trendalyzer from its parent company, Gapminder. They are already making the tool available for free here and the software developers have moved into Google’s Mountain View HQ.

Trendalyzer generates moving graphics and other novel effects in the display of facts, figures, and statistics in presentations.

The Official Google Blog reports, “We hope to provide the resources necessary to bring such work to its deserved wider audience by improving and expanding Trendalyzer and making it freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes.”

via Paid Content

Related Reading
A Word In Motion (Official Google Blog)

I mentioned the Gmail for your domain service back in July last year and things have moved along nicely since and now come under the umbrella of Google Apps which include being able to offer users all the features of Google email and Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets branded with your own domain name. The Google Apps Premier Edition sign ups remain free until the end of April so its a great service for clubs, schools, small enterprise and groups in either the premier (with 10gb email space per account) or the freebie edition.

Another new-ish feature for Gmail users (or at least some accounts, its still in beta, naturally) is the ability to download POP3 mail from other email accounts. In particular this could be useful if you own a few domain names and need to be able to send and receive mail from several accounts all in one place. At the moment you can add a further five POP3 accounts to your Gmail account. Used in conjunction with Gmail Manager its saving me a bunch of time by alerting me to not only my Gmail accounts but email from five separate domain names too.

To check if the extra POP3 features have been activated on your account open up your Gmail, go to Setting>Accounts> and look for “Get mail from other accounts (download mail using POP3)”. Its worth shelling out the $5.99 it costs for a domain name from somewhere like 1and1 to plug it in to your Gmail account to get all the benefits of the Google service but with your own personal name.

Google have quietly added a new Beta service to their wildly popular email service Gmail. Gmail for your domain is a free beta service giving website owners the chance of offering Gmail services to their readers. Simply put you can soon be dishing out email accounts @yourwebsite using Google’s hosted service, complete with 2gb of storage, calender and chat features.

The only difference from the main Gmail accounts is that the storage allowance is fixed at 2gb whereas the Gmail accounts storage increases automatically as your space depleats. We’re testing the service right now here at Buzzsonic . All the best email names at Gmail are gone by now of course so if you’d like the same service but with an easier to remember email address contact us here (email at buzzsonic.com) with your preferred email name (@ Buzzsonic.com, not Gmail remember !) and we’ll get back to you asap.
Related Reading
Gmail vs Windows Live Mail vs Yahoo Mail betas (The Inquirer)

I was given a good excuse today to put some of the newer video search options through a stiff user test. My wife is a massive fan of the Fox TV medical drama ‘House ‘. Starring as the lead character is English actor Hugh Lawrie. Back in the UK, Lawrie is more famous for his comedic character acting and plummy English public school accent.

A culture shock for me then trying to take him seriously with the American accent that is layered on thickly for his latest character Dr. Gregory House, after spending years watching him make me laugh hysterically in ‘Jeeves and Wooster’. Getting to the point, I thought this would be an excellent challenge to try and find a clip from ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ to prove to my wife that yes indeed, he really was English.
We simply entered, Jeeves and Wooster in the search box and waited.

Engines Running…

Yahoo’s much vaunted updated video search was first. Four results and bingo, a clip with Hugh. Unbelievably the clip with him is from a Russian P.G Wodehouse fan site and is dubbed in Russian.
The AOL owned Singing Fish (also used by MSN for their video search) turned up two results, one a ringtone. Blinkx TV had nothing, their TV search and archive was limited to mainly US programmes. The new Google Video search option fared no better returning one result, a mention in a news clip.

Where too next ? Alta Vista and All The Web are both now owned by Yahoo and as such returned the same four results as their owners. And here’s where the options start to get thinner on the ground, outside of trawling P2P networks.

Talk of tentative connections (or is it degrees of separation, now we’re bombarded by social networks?). ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ was based on characters, Reginald Jeeves and Bertie Wooster from P.G Wodehouse books. He is the quintessential “gentleman’s personal gentleman” and is Wodehouse’s most famous character and also where search engine Ask Jeeves sourced their name.

Related

Yahoo and Blinkx Launch New Video Search Options [Buzzsonic News]
Search Battle Heads For Video [Wired.com]
Will Video Search Pay Off? [Internet News]
AOL Revamps Singing Fish Audio Video Search [Buzzsonic News]

News search experts have long been wishing for Google News search results to be dished out as RSS feeds. For a company usually renown for its forward thinking innovation Google have been slow to usher in any serious useage of RSS feeds, mainly because the search power house has been actively supporting the rival syndication format Atom.

No sooner said than done. ScrappyGoo is an unofficial app that lets you search Google News and generates a unique RSS feed of the results. By default, each feed has sixteen entries and uses standard boolean operators.

ScrappyGoo uses Gnews2RSS, an open source, experimental PHP script developed by British programmer Julian Bond . He’s already run fowl of Google when he was hit with a cease-and-desist order last year.

And then there was two. Just as I was finishing this post another Google RSS news generator came to my attention. The GNewsfeed from Justin Pfister also offers geo targetted results.

Thanks to John Batelle’s Searchblog

Related Links

Google Moves to Block RSS Scraping [Internet News April 2004]
Google News RSS/RDF Feed Generator [XML Mania] now blocked
Google Mulls RSS Support [CNet News]

It wasn’t that long ago that you had to make do with a paltry 2mb (Hotmail) or 4mb (Yahoo) email storage. Google came along and moved the goalposts with GMail and an account rippling with 1GB of space (now up to 2gb and climbing). Going back to use my old Hotmail account recently I was told I had to sign up again as I hadn’t used the account for longer than 30 days. I didn’t bother. There’s no flashing banner adds at GMail either.

I dont care for every Google development though. The ‘Web Clips’ RSS feed at the top of my Gmail account is pretty much redundant for me as is the ‘web accelerator’ introduced recently . What with the Google Toolbar, GMail notifier, Picasa 2 and Google’s desktop search tool the search giant are getting enough stats from me.

Of much more use to me is the tiny 125k freeware app from Dane, Bjarke Viksoe. The GMail Drive shell extension is a little Windows app that lets you access your Gmail account’s 2 Gigs in Windows Explorer, as if it were just another hard drive on your computer. You can drag and drop big or small files to your Gmail drive, and access them from any computer connected to the web via the Gmail email interface.

Somebody else has already produced a ‘Pocket GMail’ app for PDA owners based on the open source libgmailer formatted to fit on Pocket PCs. There’s even a version that enables users to check their accounts using a WAP enabled phone.

Download GMail Drive Shell Extension

Related Google Reading

GMail Drive Shell Extension [Viksoe.dk]
GMail File System [Richard Jones]
Creepy Gmail [Gmail-is-too-creepy.com]
The Controversial Google Web Accelerator [Pandia.com]
Google Software Downloads [Google.com]
GMail Invite Spooler [Isnoop.net]
The GMail Resource [GMailResource.net]
Google Community [GoogleCommunity.com]