lowstring

An interesting view on the future of the music biz

For all of the bands that are using wordpress to power their website, here is another neat little tool to save you some time. The Myspace Crossposter Plugin for Wordpress allows any Myspace user (not just bands) to simultaneously post to their Myspace blog when publishing a new Wordpress post. Now you only have to worry about posting news in one location!

Speaking of ways to interact with Myspace (while not actually having to go there), the Myspace API has officially been released and I have started to mess with it. Functionality is pretty limited right now, but maybe in the future they will add more features. I want to see (or build..wink wink) a centralized web app for bands that will interact with all of these different sites making it easier for bands to update content.

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.
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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…)

Another year gone by and another year without a full length release. This is proving to be much harder than I thought! I have been working on the same album for over a year now and have not made much headway. I think that I need to write a plan, with smaller goals that are achievable, and help me get this first one under my belt.

On a positive note I did achieve some goals that I set for myself in 2007.
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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.
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