lowstring

An interesting view on the future of the music biz

After a few months on Ursession I have pretty much given up on the site. I realize the site is still in beta but I do not see the allure for any band to waste too much time on the site. Don’t get me wrong, anybody listening to your music is a good thing, but I wouldn’t rely solely on Ursession.

My main problem with Ursession, besides the fact that it looks like it was designed in 1995 is that the voting system is totally unrealistic and reminds me of tagworld. Basically a new user that signs up will be inundated with emails that say “hey I checked out your music and left you a vote, return the favor and vote for me”. People are for the most part generally nice, and if they get an email like this, they will “return the favor” without evaluating the artist’s music, which just inflates the voting results and creates false numbers for both the artists. The artist that sends out the most emails, 90% of the time will end up with the most votes. Notice this band/artist’s music and quality of this music has never even entered into the equation.

If you go to Ursession and listen to some of the “top” artists you will soon realize that they aren’t the “top” artist because of their music. Is Ursession going to give a record contract to these people? I highly doubt it.

Ursession is just another ill fated attempt at creating an online community for music/musicians in an already flooded market and won’t succeed, “revolutionary” or not.

urSESSION Pre-launch

To tell you the truth I had pretty much forgotten about urSession because it was supposed to go live late last year, but to my surprise I received an email inviting me to join the pre-launch of their site over the weekend. What is urSession? UrSession is a “revolutionary” website/label envisioned by Shavo Odadjian (System of a Down bass player) that features user generated and rated content. Artists and Bands can upload music and/or videos showing off their band or individual talents. Other users can then vote for and or rate this uploaded content. An online talent show or just an online version of American Idol? The winner(s) will get a chance at a urSession label deal.
(more…)

I have been using mint to keep track of website visitor statistics ever since Shaun Inman released it. One of the cool things about mint is that you can install different plugins to extend features in mint. In the mint world these plugins are called “pepper“. I came across a pepper that would allow users to track myspace visitors and display the results with mint. After a few quick steps I actually had it working. This pepper is really rather simple but at the same time genius (at least I think so). (more…)

Seth has listed 15 Music lessons on his blog. Interesting read, and worth checking out.

I personally like #13 (the second #13 mind you…… which he may change to #14 when he notices his mistake)

13. Whenever possible, sell subscriptions
Few businesses can successfully sell subscriptions (magazines being the very best example), but when you can, the whole world changes. HBO, for example, is able to spend its money making shows for its viewers rather than working to find viewers for every show.

The biggest opportunity for the music business is to combine permission with subscription. The possibilities are endless. And I know it’s hard to believe, but the good old days are yet to happen.

I personally think that in the not so distant future, music/media will be delivered digitally via a subscription of some sort. Music will become a utility, much like cable tv….etc.

Recently I have been exploring different digital download paypal scripts that would allow me to sell digital files directly from lowstring.com. I decided to use an open source option I found at bradsucks.net. Brad (also a musician) was nice enough to offer up a script he compiled for doing just what I wanted to do. You can download the script yourself here: http://www.bradsucks.net/projects/bsdds/. This script is pretty straight forward, but does have some bugs that I had to fix. There isn’t much documentation per say, but if you know anything about php you can figure out what is going on. Mainly the bugs were just some path issues.

Feel free to visit the new Lowstring Media Store and check it out. The store is a work in progress as I am still tweaking it, but it does work. If you have any problems with it, feel free to drop me an email and I will try and resolve your issue. Most of my songs will still be available via a free download, but I would appreciate that if you enjoy the music, please feel free to donate some money to the cause. If you would like to donate and not purchase a song/album then feel free to use the donate button in the sidebar. Money earned will go towards the release of my first full length album, which I am hoping will be ready early 2008. As always thanks for visiting the site, and spread the word!

Recently I was asked to design a website for a local drummer in Rochester NY. He is fairly well known for being a great drummer, and he actually has laid down some drum tracks for us. Being the nice guy that I am, I offered to host and set up the site for free in return for him playing drums for us.

This is not the first time I have been asked to set up a band site, but this is the first time I am actually not in the band, so if something breaks or needs updating, I won’t be around to help. So ease of use was my first priority.
(more…)

Lately I have been checking out various ways to sell my original music online. I think the days of selling a physical CD to someone is limited, and with new online services coming out every week, why not take advantage of them?

Obviously the most successful online music store to date in my opinion is the iTunes music store. But how do you get your bitchin new album up on iTunes? Easy! Enter Tunecore . In fact Tunecore will put your music up on most major online music stores including iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, MusicNet, eMusic, and Sony Connect for a small fee of course. Tunecore does charge a one time fee of $0.99/song when uploading to their system as well as a $9.98 maintenance and storage fee per year per album. Each store you want to upload your music to will cost you another $0.99 per store. For example: if you had a 10 song EP, and wanted to sell that album at 5 different stores, it would initially cost you $24.83, and then $9.98 a year after that….not bad, not bad.

Myspace is becoming a popular site for music, and I actually have been finding bands that have better Myspace pages than regular websites, so it is not surprising that Myspace has recently offered an online music store add on that you can incorporate into your profile (or any other site for that matter). Myspace relies on Snocap to handle the sale, storage, and download of the music. Sign up is free, but Snocap does take a cut of each sale. From what I could find on the Snocap site, they charge $0.39 per download….. Ouch! So if you are selling an album for $9.99 you would actually only end up getting about $6. BUT the kicker is that you set the price at which you want to sell your music. So Snocap’s Mystore is an option, with a plus being you can incorporate your “Mystore” into any site, not just Myspace.
(more…)