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)

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I’m desperately trying to cut into my over populated desktop RSS feed reader as I really do not have the time to wade through the amount of subscriptions that I have in there. What with FeedDemon pop-ups and Tweetdeck its like having bloggers ADD (on steroids) and having too much information at your fingertips is as self defeating as not having enough.

Well over seventy percent of my feeds are music related, be they music news, music industry commentary,tech and MP3 bloggers and music 2.0 (is that term still in use?) evangelists. Very few of them are from traditional music biz news outlets like Billboard (USA biz bible) or Music Week (UK equivalent). Simply because I think that  much of the mainstream music press are as behind the rest of us as the recording industry itself. With some exceptions of course.

Walled garden restrictions to content are a major sticking point for me.

Probably the best place to start vacuuming up those music news resources is at Guy Kawasaki’s excellent  Alltop Music, though my main ‘complaint’ is that I have to visit each individual link to grab the RSS feed. A nice touch would be to have the feed URL next to the publishers headline.

Anyway, so I decided I’d do just that. Gather all the most useful and essential music/tech/social media (they blur into each other these days) related websites and blogs together in one big huge collection that I use on a regular basis through the beauty of RSS feeds. So I’ve done a bit (a lot!) of feed harvesting and squeezed everything into an OPML file for data portability.

I’m including an OPML download link so you can import all the feeds within seconds into your RSS reader of choice, whether that be via your desktop app of choice, Google reader online or a Firefox add on (like Sage). There’s an OPML file for each category to import or the whole bunch rolled into one.

Each category has an OPML link so you can grab the feeds by category. Do leave a comment if I’ve missed anything of note (I probably have).

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I was looking at the hard-drive on my laptop yesterday in an effort to try and clear up some clutter so I made an issue of listing all the software apps I actually use on a regular basis and dumped all the ones I never use.

I’m a software junkie I guess so I collect a lot of novelty apps that I dont need at all

Publishing Online

First and foremost one of my most useful online ‘apps’ (well its not actually an app as such, more a service) is my webhosting account. For anyone experimenting with various websites as I do a hosting account is absolutely essential.

Just for the record I choose a Hostgator reseller account (though there are thousands of companies out there offering similar services) which gives me the capacity to host hundreds of websites all with their own online control panels and with a whole bunch of storage space and very generous bandwidth.

One of the most useful aspects of my webhosting account is the fact that I can have a new blog or website online within minutes, literally. Hostgator are one of the many webhosting companies that use an online script installer called Fantastico. You access Fantastico via an online control panel, called CPanel (what else?) and it will install a selection of free scripts with just a couple of clicks basically.

Those scripts include blog/content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Mambo, Geeklog and Drupal (amongst others). I choose WordPress simply because it has a massive support network, free plugins and themes and its easy to learn and manage.

So an artist management company with multiple bands could have separate blogs installed for each artist in minutes. And sites can be updated from any browser, anywhere. I swear by WordPress, this blog is hosted on that platform and I have used it for almost four years now.

Extra Blogging Tools

I use Windows Live Writer to write posts offline and also the Live Writer Firefox plugin that enables me to quickly write a post on a page I might be viewing if I’m online. If you use Flickr for image hosting then I recommend the Flickr Uploadr app which sits on your desktop and enables you to simply drag images from your hard drive into your Flickr account. Windows Live Writer has the ability to insert Flickr images at a snap too.

RSS Tools

I’ll scan feeds daily to look for inspiration and ideas and the RSS tools I use most are FeedDemon as my main desktop reader, Sage for browsing in Firefox and Google Reader online. Sync all three accounts by exporting all your feeds in an OPML file onto your desktop then importing the feeds into your other readers. If I can get my head round that then so can you! Here’s some YouTube help.

Audio Video Tools

For Torrent files I use UTorrent, for ripping audio and video from web pages I use Orbit. Uploading music to sell online? Then you’ll want an MP3 encoder that’s better quality than the encoder built into iTunes. CDex is a freebie that uses the acclaimed Lame encoder and will also rip to the higher quality Ogg format.

If you want to do simple audio editing (ringtones, mp3 editing) then Audacity is another great free tool with multiple uses like simple recording or encoding old vinyl and cassettes into digital files. There’s even a VST plugin. I use it in particular to try out drum breaks as it has a really neat looping function.

Ripping DVDs? I swear by Magic DVD Ripper used in conjunction with the Cheetah DVD burner. Hey, they’re not system hogs and they just do what it says on the tin.

Related Reading

10 Must Have Office Apps (ReadWriteWeb)
Software-Hack The Day (HackTheDay.com)
Downloads (Lifehacker.com)