RadioIndy Internet Musician

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Where do you find new music?

There are great opportunities to make your music available online. The big challenge is finding ways to convince someone to listen to one of your songs. The first step in this is assuring that you are promoting yourself on sites where people go to find new music. Where do you go to find new music? That's probably where your fans go too. 
Here are a few sites where people go to find new music: Pandora.com, Rhapsody.com, YouTube.com, itunes.com, justclickradio.com, and RadioIndy.com (OK we've got to do some self-promotion). It's difficult to get promoted with big-names on Pandora, Rhapsody, and itunes. Of course, for JustClickRadio and RadioIndy you can be promoted by subscribing to our MegaBLAST promotion by clicking on the GET PROMOTION link on the right hand side of the RadioIndy home page. YouTube provides an opportunity for promotion as well. You can promote yourself on YouTube by adding one of your music videos as a video comment to the video of a similar big-name artist.
Where do you go to find new music? Post a comment to this email blog post. 

Is alternative going Internet only?

Earlier this summer Chicago alternative radio station Q101 was taken off the FM dial, remaining as an Internet only station (see http://q101.com/2011/07/15/q101-becomes-q101-com/). With the movement away from rock radio stations to other formats, and the Internet savvy alternative rock fans, the future of alternative rock on conventional FM radio is in question. This is probably good news for indie alternative rock bands, since they have more access to Internet radio. What are your thoughts about the future of alternative rock radio?

MySpace - Celebrity-driven entertainment site - What does this mean for indie artists?

MySpace, once the dominant Internet music site, is being sold for a small fraction of what News Corp paid for it in 2005. News Corp. acquired MySpace for $580 million and is selling MySpace to SpecificMedia for $35 million apparently. SpecificMedia is an online advertising company that wants to turn MySpace into a celebrity-driven entertainment destination. At the forefront is Justin Timberlake, who will apparently lead the creative direction of MySpace under SpecificMedia. You can see an interview with SpecificMedia's CEO about the future of MySpace on CNBC at this link http://www.cnbc.com/id/43595618.
It will be interesting to see whether the new MySpace.com, which has been the major online indie site since mp3.com's demise some years ago, will remain a major indie music site. What are your thoughts?
We think that a celebrity-driven entertainment destination doesn't sound much like an indie site, unless it connects indies with celebrity artists. For this type of promotion check out our big-name match service at this link: http://www.radioindy.com/RI_musicians_page.html.
Provide us your comments about what the future of MySpace.com as a celebrity-driven entertainment destination means for indie artists by replying to this post. 

Online Music Moving to the Clouds

A recent article in the Chicago tribune (http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/sc-cons-0623-tech-cloud-players-20110623-4,0,2869687.story) summarizes the cloud music services that have been launched in the last year or so. Cloud music services are services that allow a listener to upload or purchase music that is stored on a company server. The listener has access to these music files any time they are connected to the Internet. High tech heavyweights Apple, Google, and Amazon all have recently launched cloud music services. The article additionally summarizes the more popular on-line streaming services , such as Pandora.
As far as indie music and cloud music services, it seems to be a good thing because anything that is good for music is good for indies, as long as indies are not excluded. As long as your listeners listen to sound files of your music, you should benefit from cloud music services' that give your listeners easier access to your music. 
What are your thoughts about cloud-based music services and indie artists? Let us know by replying to this post.

Cloud Music Keeps Growing

Recently Google added it's own cloud music service. This comes a few months after Amazon's cloud music announcement. It is believed that Apple will soon launch a similar service. The main shortcomings of Google's service at this point is that it doesn't allow you to simply identify music in your collection and add them to your cloud library directly from the cloud, without uploading them. Furthermore, it doesn't allow you to buy songs and add them automatically to your cloud library. However, it's clear to see that the future of online music is headed to the clouds. Read more about Google's cloud music service here http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Googles-Cloud-Crescendo-72443.html?wlc=1305435222. Let's work together to find ways to make it easy for people add indie music to their cloud library.

Amazon Launches Cloud-based Music Service

Amazon has launched a new online music service. The new music service is called Amazon Cloud Player. It is a companion to Amazon's new cloud storage application, Amazon Cloud Drive. With Amazon Cloud Player you play songs that you have stored on the Amazon Cloud Drive. You get 5 gigs on the Amazon Cloud Drive for free. That's about 1000 songs. The player works from either a PC, a tablet, or a smart phone. You can upload to the Amazon Cloud Drive, songs that you purchase on Amazon.com or MP3 songs that you have stored on your local drive. Then you can check them out with the Amazon Cloud Player.
Have you checked out Amazon's Cloud Player and Cloud Drive? If so, please post a response to his blog post.

Smartphone Sales Top PC Sales

According to a number of news reports (see example here) over 100 million smartphones were shipped globally during the fourth quarter of 2010 (an 87% jump from the year before) compared to 92.1 million PCs (a 3% increase over 4Q 2009). It's clear that smarphones are becoming much more common gadgets that your fans are using to check out the Internet and probably your music.
GOOD NEWS - IF YOUR BAND HAS A FREE ACCOUNT ON RADIOINDY, YOU HAVE A FREE MOBILE PAGE FOR YOUR BAND COMPLEMENTS OF RADIOINDY!
Check it out today, by going to your RadioIndy page and clicking on the box on the right side entitled "FREE Mobile App." If your band isn't on RadioIndy.com, sign up for a free account today and get an instant mobile app for your band as you use our easy-to-use tools to create a RadioIndy page for your band in minutes.

Pandora on your phone and in your car - and RadioIndy mobile for every band

RadioIndyInternet music site Pandora.com has a mobile version that is designed for all the major smartphones. Check it out CLICK HERE. In fact Pandora is getting preloaded in many new cars (check out the USA Today story CLICK HERE). In the past we've discussed Pandora, which seems to be semi-indie friendly in that it's kind of a hassle, but you apparently can get them to check out your music to possibly include in their streams. Have you had any success getting on Pandora? Let us know by replying to this blog. Don't forget that if you've signed up for a free or paid account on RadioIndy.com, you have a mobile web page. Check it out by going to your RadioIndy page and check out the box on the right side entitled "FREE Mobile App." We are pretty certain that the over 8000 indie band mobile web pages on RadioIndy is the largest collection of indie band mobile web pages in the Universe.

Billboard Launches Social Media Music Charts

Billboard launched a new chart at the beginning of the month based on the social media activity of big-name artists. Check out Billboard's Social 50 at
http://www.billboard.com/charts/social-50?tag=chscr1#/charts/social-50?tag=chscr1. The chart is based on an artist’s popularity based on fan activity across sites like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, etc. If you're interested in this sort of information for your band, check out our RadioIndy universal artist pages. You and your fans can easily track your activity on multiple social media sites from your RadioIndy universal artist page, which you get by signing up for one of our promotional services. For more information, check out http://www.radioindy.com/RI_musicians_page.html.  

Happy Holidays - MegaBlast promotion for 50% off

There's just one week left in RadioIndy's holiday promotion. Get MegaBLAST Promotion gift cards for 50% off. The MegaBLAST gift cards give you instant access to 1 year of our ultimate promotion for a low, one-time price. You can learn more at http://www.radioindy.com/holidays/home.html, or order it today at http://www.2checkout.com/2co/buyer/purchase?sid=105817&quantity=1&product_id=143.