A friend sent me this link to YouTube, and I won’t embed it, just the link, it’s here.

Anyway, this video has been watched over a million times! Now that YouTube is opening up the ad revenue sharing for videos, it actually means that it’s one of the first times in history that music videos could generate revenue.

Anyway, if you go down that route, you need to think in terms of generating clicks, that means music videos about pets, children, goofing, and doing silly tricks — watch America’s Funniest Home Videos or similar TV programs for inspiration. Or if you don’t get inspired by this, even if you could make money, I understand you…

I don’t think this music video will create millions of hits, unfortunately. But it was fun making it with my sons. I should make more of those — but the biggest obstacle for me is to figure out a cool idea behind the video, something odd and interesting, style what Beck is doing. Anything else just looks so stereotype today.

One of the many headaches most of us label owners have is the issue of releasing material that will stick around for a very long time. With this I mean that the material is not something that sounds fresh today.

It’s very easy to fall into this trap — you want to sound the same as everyone else, for example electro is a big thing just now, so let’s kick start a couple of crummy software synths with a saw oscillator and a nasty filter, and get the job done.

Or, let’s look at an example of an album that has stood the test of time, and is still fresh: David Bowie’s Heroes. When it came out, most of us just scratched our heads, what’s this thing, it was odd, totally unexpected, weird. But the album is still interesting after all these years. Another opposite are any of those ‘Best of Trance’ records, if you listen to the tracks today you just feel sad about all the effort going into something that is today digital fodder.

It’s really tough, you want to release unexpected and interesting material, but the audience is maybe not ready, or they actually finally enjoy it years after you retired, or even died. Or then you go with the latest trend from Berlin, London, or let’s say Auckland just to spread the trends out. Then you are part of the pack and you sell and get attention, but soon later you are just forgotten.

Again, if you release exactly what you want, and you don’t care, expect comments such as ‘this sounds old/weird/unconventional’, or ‘this is not exactly what we expected’, and a variation of these topics.

Oh, just make interesting music and don’t worry about fitting into the crowd. Don’t stay between the lines!

I just checked out SoundSnap, and created an account, as well as uploaded a bunch of sound samples to this place.

Basically it’s very similar to Flickr, but it’s sound related. You could download all kinds of sound effects, loops, single-shot instruments for samples and so on. And you could also upload your material, as long as you own the copyrights for that material.

Just read the fine print carefully, basically if someone else is using your material, you will not be compensated for this. Then again, it’s nice to be altruistic and give material for others, anyway. Usually, what I do with such sites is that if I use material from such sites, I also contribute, to keep the karmic balance, or even better, make it on the plus side.

One issue with similar sites is to maintain the quality, as the more its open, the more less quality material will be present at such sites. Then again, Flickr seems to work just fine, based on the tools there, so you could find really good quality material based on user feedback placed on entries.

We live in a really interesting post-modern world, where even high-quality sound samples are now available for everyone. It will most definitely increase the amount of music published, and I don’t think we are so far away any longer from the state where every consumer could make their own music — the truth is not so far away, already.

I was hoping to start looking into new Ableton Live betas, but they seem to have broken their nice tradition to release something each summer. I should write more about Live, in general. Meanwhile, here’s a series about music and money — it’s good to see where we all are heading. I would expect any musician at some point would like to be compensated for some of their work, not that releasing free music is nice, anyway.

This just posted article is a good summary of the oddnesses with the performance fees here in USA concerning radio versus net streaming. Basically, radio performances will not generate any royalties to the performer, only to the composer. The concept is that radio play is PR for the artists. Most of us would argue that those times are over by now with the advent of Internet.

It’s indeed time this is changing. In the electronic music world, it’s not that common to have separate composers and performers, usually it’s the same person or band. Anyway, I think the more clear trend is that the labels will have less and less to operate with concerning the royalties from performances. Another reason why big labels are in big trouble, as their business models were based on selling plastic platters and trying to sneak in with contract issues related to publishing rights.

What could you do just now? Well, to start with, if you create music, join any of the royalty companies, BMI and ASCAP are the big companies here in USA, and each country in Europe has their own specific royalty groups. There are some rules, but usually it’s something like that the person or band should have N songs available for public consumption. And remember, MySpace entries should also count.

The reason I recommend this is that these big royalty companies are the ones that will take care of all the lobbying, politics, administration and so on. It’s easier to let them handle it, than you get specialized in royalty legal issues, that might even differ from country to country.

It’s hard to know how much you could earn, but in some European countries radio play could generate more money than you expected.

I’m a member of BMI, as long time ago I liked their online registration system, but ASCAP is also good and they also have online registration now, Frank Zappa belonged to ASCAP, for example. Usually it does not cost anything to belong to these groups, but it could take some effort to justify that you are a performer with published material. You also need to show your social security number, tax id, and similar things.

After this you need to be very diligent and register any of your compositions on the service. Just now, at least with BMI, it asks for basic info such as title, artist, and additional info about the released product, length of time, and so on. Usually it takes me about 3-5 minutes to fill in the needed information.

As a result your song will also get a so called ISWC song identification id that are sometimes used with download services, and might play an even bigger role with future net-driven royalties and so on. Note, this is different from the ISRC id which is a track-based ID system, and usually the ISRC number ranges are provided to record labels, but anyone who has a label should get access to your private range.

I was reading this interesting blog entry by Marc Andreessen about how startups should be flexible with the initial product plan, and he quoted a really cool article from Randall Stross’ book The Wizard of Menlo Park, about Thomas Edison and the early days of the creation of the Phonograph.

Anyway, the press had a hard time figuring out what the usage model of recorded material would be — here’s the sample from the book:

[A description of the phonograph in Scientific American in early November] set off a frenzy in America and Europe. The New York Sun was fascinated by the metaphysical implications of an invention that could play “echoes from dead voices”. The New York Times predicted [in an eerie foreshadowing of their bizarre coverage of the Internet in the mid-1990’s] that a large business would develop in “bottled sermons”, and wealthy connoisseurs would take price in keeping “a well-stocked oratorical cellar.”.Such was the authority of Scientific American’s imprimatur that all of this extraordinary attention was lavished not on the first working phonograph made for public inspection, but merely a description supplied by Edison’s assistant.

…By late November, Edison and his staff had caught onto the phonograph’s commercial potential as a gadget for entertainment… a list of possible uses for the phonograph was noted [by Edison and his staff], assembled apparently by free association: speaking toys (dogs, reptiles, humans), whistling toy train engines, music boxes, clocks and watches that announced the time. There was even an inkling of the future importance of personal music collections, here described as the machine for the whole family to enjoy, equipped with a thousand [music recordings], “giving endless amusement.

Pretty funny, or what. Anyway, the whole new world of all-digital content has in the same way shuffled the decks concerning music distributions. I would not be surprised if we all five years from now would scratch our heads about the idea of distributing music as MP3 files.

There are so many issues totally unresolved: how is really any commercial value tracked in digital bits that could be endlessly copied, even with DRM? How to find content easily as digital content could be massively distributed and even created? Do people really like to have hard disk content rather than an object they would like to look at, collect in a book shelf, and so on?

Sorry about all the rhetorical questions and no answers — I just tried to show that we all are still in the very, very early days of the digital music revolution.

I give you one prediction. People like to share music in forms of showing their personality and what they like, if possible even in a creative and personal way. So let’s make it very easy for non-DJs to put together mixes of the music they like just now and would like to share with their friend, software like this will appear, maybe even in the form of Web services. If the produced content had meta-info about the musical parts, key, bpm, and then we had tools who could read this info and provide easy ways to remix it — style Ableton Live but very user-friendly… That would also mean an attempt to make an open format (most likely XML format) that defined song structures, parts, keys, warp points, and so on.

Homerecordingnetwork.com lists a lot of podcasts related to studio recording. I have not had time to check them out, as I’m still trying to finish all my to non-heard SonicState podcasts, but after that I will check out some of the others listed on this page.

Anyway, I’m now a firm believer in music technology podcasts, video podcasts are even better, but audio ones work out really well, as you could just play back various samples and tell what’s happening in general. And you can’t watch video podcasts while you bike.

As I’ve written before, there’s a place for even more specialized audio podcasts in the music business, for example related to dance music production.

Now, this entry should be posted while I’m flying back to California, so let’s see how the future posting feature works in WordPress!

One of the hardest thing I personally have to deal with concerning a record label is receiving and responding to producers who are sending tracks to my record label, PlanetoidPark. The reason is that I know all the hard work they all are putting into their product, and are proud of it, and now I sit here and need to get back to them with some kind of information what I think about it all.

To be more diplomatic, most smaller labels operate with a certain style they have in mind, often not even thinking about the commercial success. I can’t speak of all of the underground electronic music labels, but in my case I’m always interested in distributing records that should be heard because they are different and interesting, not that they sound exactly like the latest big sound from London or Berlin.

So, if I get really good tracks, but they are let’s say hard house that this label is not really focusing on, I need to get back to the producer and tell something. I dreaded writing such letters before, because it’s not fun replying something back after all the hard work that was put into the production.

Anyway, a month ago or so, after a lot of internal debate, I came up with a very good solution — at least for me. I tell them that this is what our label is looking for, and if they are interested in sending more material, something like this would be great, and then I try to listen to their original material and give them pointers how the material would be more in tune with my label. Sometimes I also give them pointers to other labels that I think their music would have a better chance at. I avoid at all cost to sound negative — because music is heard differently by everyone, and judging it usually is futile.

So yes, if you are working on something really interesting and different, do send in material. Also expect that you might or might not get responses from various other labels, it really depends on so many parameters why some labels are not responding, but just don’t give up, there are so many labels out there, and if nothing else, it should not be hard to create your own label or net-label today. The trick is to differentiate the labels from each other, hence why we sometimes are indeed very picky for this purpose.

But a good and different sounding track should always be released, that’s my motto.

Something that is nice with a vacation is that you have finally time to go through that big pile of books that have been collected next to your bed. And nowadays it’s the same with podcasts you have not had time to listen to.

I’ve gone through half of the Sonic State Podcasts that I subscribed to months ago, and I like them. It’s a combination of three to five audio pundits talking about new audio gear, plugins, old nostalgia trips, and so on. Sometimes it goes into totally non-audio directions, but then I forgive them as in the next sentence they talk about something intriguing concerning audio gear and techniques.

So yes, if you have time, check them out, they are up to 51 episodes as I write, and they are each 20-30 minutes long, so it should not take so long to catch up.

Which made me think. I’m sure there’s a time and space for more similar audio-related discussion podcasts. Maybe there are more you recommend — if so leave a message. Otherwise, let’s say if someone had time to put together a similar kind of podcast, using Skype, and talking about DJ and dance-music production related topics, I’m sure that would also become a very good thing. If someone starts it, count me in as one of the ones you could use as one of the pundit wannabes.

Ok, it seems like Beatport now only will allow new labels to be included either if they are big sales-wise, or are using an aggregator. An aggregator is a company that sits between the distribution and the label, making specific distribution deals to various distributors. Big companies like iTunes and eMusic already has had this system in place for a longer time.

What it means for smaller labels is that it will get harder to get into distribution rights with various big digital distributors, unless they just bypass the aggregators and use TuneCore, CD-Baby and similar services where there’s no need to have an aggregator. Or, make deals with aggregators. But, as I know Beatport does not have contracts with CD-Baby or TuneCore.

The problem with making deals with aggregators is that they usually also want the big fish, labels that have a large sell volume, to justify their administration costs. So for a new label it’s a little bit like the chicken-and-the-egg; you don’t get a deal with an aggregator unless you have sales volume, or are well-known of some reason or another. But to get to that point you need distribution so the sales will increase. The other problem I’ve seen with aggregators is that they are still very CD-release centric. For many of us producers, we and consumers like the model of releasing individual tracks, instead of CDs with filler material. But the aggregator models, in the cases I’ve looked at their contracts, favor CD-centric releases.

I don’t personally see any big changes with the current digital music business model — it’s common with evolving markets. In the early days it’s all fair game, any new game players have a chance to get into the club, later companies and markets consolidate and it’s again hard to enter it, unless someone jumps into a new ‘disruptive service’, let’s say ad-generated market sales using YouTube content.

So, if you want to start a record label — do it, it’s never been easier. But set realistic plans, expect to release quality material on a monthly basis, on a long term, and things will be fine as you get the reputation and the sales to get into the aggregators’ cone of interest. Success on a very short time frame is very rare, I’m afraid.

Here’s another tool that we use quite a lot, especially for the record label work and sharing of information. I was looking for way to find or write a custom database system for all the tiny bits of information that we need to share when working with label releases. But I realized after some hard thinking that I rather spend my few spare hours writing new songs than tinkering with a web-based database application that would require constant rewriting and tinkering.

So I just installed a wiki service on our account. I used usemod, been using it since the early days. You could also look at MediaWiki that Wikipedia is running. The biggest difference is that MediaWiki looks pretty, but requires database access (not hard, but another thing to worry about). While usemod is just creating files inside the directory it is installed under.

In either case, this requires some administration work and maybe a little bit custom programming, unless the ISP you are using already provides a wiki service of some kind. Also, you don’t want the whole world to know about your internal releases and other information, so you need to place this under a password protected login.

Anyway, such a freeform database service has so far worked really well for all the work we do concerning keeping track of lots of tiny bits of info — one of those things anyone running a label will notice takes more time than expected.

I’m not a member of Taxi, but I’ve been on their mailing list for a very long time, as the postings are very good, they talk about the music publishing business, and so on.

Anyway, some days ago I got a special deal for a free review of a track by a Taxi reviewer. So I scanned through material and found something, and sent it off today.

The problem I’ve had with Taxi, as I assume, is that film material sent in should fall into certain specific styles, if possibly mimic:ing existing artists and styles. And I just don’t have time to do that — the few hours each day I have for studio work is reserved for private and personal music, not sounding like let’s say Nine Inch Nails.

I’ve had some correspondence with companies licensing music to film/tv/commercials. On one specific case they asked me to sound like a contemporary drum&bass band, but I just balked, of the same reason. If I do music, it better be something unique and different.

Anyway, I could be wrong. So I scanned through my list of tracks that have not been released — they have piled up recently — and picked out one that was electronica, but could maybe be used for film or tv productions. I also sent in a letter explaining the current dilemma with us electronica producers, our music is fresh in the world, but not in USA, so we always have a harder time bubbling up.

Anyway, if I get any results back, and interesting feedback, I will share it. Meanwhile, if nothing else, subscribe to the taxi newsletters. They are free, and have interesting insights into how to sell music.

I think a lot is happening concerning consumers and audio just now. Many of you know of last.fm, pandora.com and now slacker.com. The idea is roughly the same — you create an account on these systems, define channels of music you like based on either artists or general genres, and then the service will stream similar kinds of artists and music. You have a chance to vote if you liked it or not, so the stream is constantly fine tuned.

I’ve been using an account on pandora for a day, and I made a very eclectic set of channels spawning from Todd Rundgren to Michael Mayer. I could combine your channels to a QuickMix channel where various tracks emerged. Due to my eclectic channel setup I got everything from New Faces (60ies) to very contemporary techno. It was fun listening, constantly surprised, but I had to vote out some of the more plastic trance music that bubbled up from time to time.

Slacker is very similar, you could signal what you like and what you don’t like. You could read more about their big plans about satellite-provided downloads to original hardware at their web site.

Personally, as a consumer I like this model, as I could pick up interesting artist and music. As an example, the Todd Rundgren channel suddenly played Feist - Mushaboom (Postal Service Mix) which was a fun idea of taking contemporary singer material and make an electronica mix around it.

As a producer and label owner, this is tough. last.fm at least has a way for smaller labels to provide music for their service. pandora expects CDs, and many of us new labels are not into CD distribution, so it means that we need to make compilation CDs from time to time. It’s also hard to bubble up in such services due to the massive amount of material they are most likely receiving. slacker.com I don’t even know about how they handle label relations — I suspect again that the big labels have high priority.

I would not be surprised if any of the existing underground dance music channels online would start with something similar — actually I blasted off emails to certain parties about possible opportunities here.

Anyway, we are drowning in music, and something like this makes it possible for consumers to find new music, so I’m all for these kinds of new services. They are also free for the basic service, and 128kpbs streaming is OK for work, so I can’t complain.

Yes, I know, the best approach is just to compose and release what one feels is important. But sometimes the marketing mind kicks in and reasons that ‘hmm, this track is not exactly what the dancing audience is tuned in just now…’

This has happened to be recently, and also in the past. As for recently, I did a set of happy dance songs, and in this current climate of Berlin-electro-dry-serious techno funk, I just felt, my right side marketing brain, that it would be an uphill battle to try to sell this just now.

So what happens is just to put the tracks on hold, on the hard disk, and wait 12-16 months or so. The interesting aspect of this new post-modernist cultural world is that the cycles of reinventing the past are very quick, so one could just be patient and wait until the cycle of ‘happy music’ is here, then do a little bit post-processing, clean up the sounds, and release the music.

This leads to good strategies how to save projects so they are usable a couple of years in future — more about that tomorrow.

We are talking about compilation mixes of tracks mixed together, and those could be downloaded from the web. If you have visited various underground dance music forums, such as protonradio.com forums, Global Underground and so on, you can’t miss seeing dozens or more postings of such mixes every day. We are drowning in them!

Long time ago, and should be still today, the idea with mix tapes was to promote songs, artists and labels. Even if uploading music without permission for others to download it is not legally OK concerning copyright laws, the labels tolerate this, especially if it’s a form of promotion. So if someone uploads a mix with not listing the artist, track and label, that promotion is not happening. So it’s not fair. Please always include this listing, so the information is then later gathered via search spiders, or is a form of web advertisement for the artist and the label.

Also, I think nowadays that the classical back-to-back mixing of tracks is not that exciting. Using Ableton or any other decent tool, any tracks could be beat-matched together, so it’s nothing special, really.

I’m usually excited about mixes where the mix artist has taken time to put together a really strange, beautiful or strong combination of material where the mix is suddenly something bigger than the parts. That means that you use your own loops to annotate the mix, and do all kinds of interesting cuts and changes in the flow. This is what Ableton and the other tools are for — not just to beat-match.

I do listen to mixes, either to check out new upcoming producers, or find out what’s happening in the big underworld dance world, where trends come and go like the morning newspaper. I also sometimes check out ‘live mixes’, recorded on the spot, to see how the DJ is doing the show — been listening to a live Speedy J techno mix recently which was very, very interesting.

Anyway, if someone wants to bubble up from the myriad mixes every day, they really need to do some homework and make sure that it’s something special. Sorry, so many mixes, so little time.

Here are some more mumblings from me about an important topic — promotion. You make lots of cool music, but if nobody knows about it, that’s sad, as music is to be enjoyed. This is a big planet, there’s always one individual somewhere, or many many, that would like to listen to your music.

Anyway, about web sites. To start with, get a good domain name, if possible part of your artist name or record label. The more unique and easy to remember, the better. If it is unique, the right site will quickly show up in any web searches. Compare “Cool Music Records” versus “ZharkMusic”. If you have not yet registered your artist name or label, do it ASAP. Also keep it alive, if you forget to keep the domain up and running, most likely some odd person selling snake oil will pick it up and use it for viral marketing.

Secondly, make it easy to find stuff on your web site, spend a lot of time making sure it’s easy to navigate.

It seems more and more artists and record labels use Flash-only sites. They look cool, but they are not that easy usually to navigate. Even worse, web search spiders usually can’t traverse the information at such sites, so you lose all the cool info that could point back to you from Google/Yahoo/Live, ack! If you know about site maps, make one and export it, the spiders will love using that one.

Put links from your site to any place where the customer could find or purchase your music, the easier the better. If possible one click away! Link to other interesting web sites, even the competition. It does not hurt, and if you help others, they will notice you and help you back. Also, if you want a higher hit rate with search engines, such as Google, the best is to get cross-links from other sites pointing back at your site, especially high quality ones. This is why it’s so important to put your URL in any promotional material, especially at digital download sites.

Update the look of the site at least once a year. Like a house, it needs a fresh cover of paint from time to time. Also update the contents at least once a week. The really good sites even have an RSS feed that shows any new changes, but usually those are tricky to put in place.

Hook a blog or a forum to the site. Blogs are easy. Forums are usually tough, as it really requires a lot of people to take part in the discussions, and you need to really make sure that the spammers don’t take over the forum. But blogs should not take so much effort, and it will get those interested to show up at the site over and over. A way to subscribe to a general email mailing list is also something very good.

So in general, refresh and get new content. A well-designed and maintained web site is the facade nowadays for the enterprise you work with. If it looks good, it’s a good marketing image that will help with the rest of your promotions, too.

Many artists and labels also use MySpace, or Myspace exclusively. It’s kind of OK, I like the free streaming of max four songs from Myspace and the social networking, but boy some of the pages look really over-the-top. Sometimes I wonder if that’s a good image for the brand…