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.

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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 rambled on here about finding flights and deals online in the ‘traditional’ manner using meta-searchers so you dont have to visit each individual travel site etc, but there is an even more time efficient way by using RSS. I’m assuming that readers have some entry level knowledge of RSS, if not, read this to get some background on the format that’ll help save you bundles of time.

I use the Sage RSS reader in my Firefox browser. Its a great lightweight way of reading RSS feeds without having to log-in to an online reader or fire up a desktop stand alone ( I use Feed Demon for more heavy duty feed trawling). Once you’ve installed Sage in Firefox you can open it in a browser sidebar to view your feeds.

The “big three” online travel agents, Travelocity, Expedia and Orbitz all now offer various RSS feeds.

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Joining in the fray of predictive holiday and flight search is Hotwire, following on the heels of Farecast and Fare Compare. A Fare Prediction shows if the lowest fare is rising or dropping over the next seven days for the specific dates and cities searched (according to the Farecast website). So, in laymans terms they basically ‘predict’ when its cheapest to go.

Hotwire’s offering is called Trip Starter and my seaching for a trip to Las Vegas from my local airport at Fort Myers returned a graph showing airfare and hotel price fluctuations by the month.

Best time to fly, according to Trip Starter is January, February and September. Best time to stay, July, August and December. They advise to avoid the crowds, go during the first three weeks in December or on weekdays in July.

One advantage Trip Starter has over its rivals is that by plugging in the results to Hotwire affiliate Trip Advisor they are able to offer local guides, events and maps, something Farecast and Fare Compare dont offer right now.

Courtesy iExploreFlorida.com

A lot of fuss yesterday caused by a sensationalist Guardian headline “YouTube Overtakes MySpace”. Writer Mark Sweney writes:

“YouTube has established itself at the top of the league of the new generation of community websites by becoming even more popular than MySpace, according to research.
The video sharing site has taken a 3.9% share of global internet visits a day compared with 3.35% for MySpace, according to internet analysis company Alexa.”

What the article fails to tell readers is that the figures were taken from the small percentage of Internet Explorer users who have the Amazon owned Alexa toolbar installed on their browser, hardly an exhaustive user demographic. A fact only Mashable and GigaOm seemed to notice.

Related Reading

YouTube vs MySpace (GigaOm)
YouTube Now More Popular Than MySpace (Mashable)
Who’s Video Is It Anyway? (BusinessWeek)
YouTube Is World’s Fastest Growing Website (Mashable)
MySpace’s Trip to the Top (Slashdot)

Here’s a great example of buzzword overkill. Tioti ( acronym: Tape It off the Internet) apparently started as an online joke back in November last year hyped as an electronic TV guide for the world – with links to BitTorrent files and also social applications for P2P discussion and sharing. The idea was taken seriously by some and went into proper development.

The homepage right now is little more than some basic info and the ubiquitous “give us your email address and we’ll tell you when we’re ready” invite box.

“Built using the robust J2EE Spring framework and making use of AJAX interface hotness, TIOTI brings Wiki-style content editing for you guys, plus tagging and RSS up the yazoo. We currently index 16,000+ TV shows – 88,000+ episodes – and we are matching everything up with an ever increasing number of content sources.”

So basically another You Tube wannabee with a bit of Tivo and BitTorrent thrown in for good measure. Throw in a site built on Ruby On Rails and Ajax, promised RSS feeds, IM and VOiP and you have a veritable quilt of Web 2.0 buzzwords.

Mashable.com have a more indepth look at the beta including screenshots. But there’s going to be thorny copyright issues for sure (as with You Tube). Om Malik mentioned the problems online video companies like Google Video and You Tube have with policing content earlier this year.

“I am not sure if this is a problem that is going to go away. Online video companies will have to figure out a policing mechanism… after all if CSI shows start showing up on Google video (not the store), Google’s partners at Viacom are not going to be too thrilled. Similarly SNL videos now for sale on iTunes store, available for free are going to become a headache of sorts for folks at You Tube.”
Related Reading

BitTorrent Meets YouTube (Mashable.com) July 14 2006
The RIAA Says No Dancing to Music on You Tube (TechDirt.com) June 14 2006
A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It (NY Times) Feb 20 2006
Google, YouTube & the Darkside of Online Video (GigaOm.com) Jan 15 2006
What is Web 2.0 (oreillynet.com) Sept. 30 2005

Back in the day, Ajax was better known as a household cleaning product, or even a leading Amsterdam football (as in soccer) side, nowadays its an overused buzzword for (hold your breath) Asynchronus JavaScript and XML a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The first use of the term in public in this context was by Jesse James Garrett in his February 2005 article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications.

Anyway, I’m one of those people that buys a lot of domain names so I know searching for a new name has always been a little ‘clunky’. Of course there’s an increasing amount of search solutions using Ajax to make the experience a bit more aggreable. Squurl.com seems to be the nicest looking so far with a number of options from the neat drop down under the search box. Opinions at community tech news site Digg seem to suggest that Squurl is a carbon copy of the similar featured InstantDomainSearch.com . They both point to Yahoo domains for suggestions (should your search prove fruitless) and they both point to the useful ‘hack’ site Xona Domain Hacks which suggests alternative URL mash ups.
Domain Resources

Whois Domain Tools (DomainTools.com)
AlexaHolic.com
Ajax Powered Domain Searching (Lockergnome.net)