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…

Any of you dealing with books knows about the ISBN standard. It’s really neat, you could do generic lookups of books and find the data on amazon. Or, if you use bookmooch, a nice service I recommend, when you place out books for the service, you just type in the ISBN number and you get all the relevant info from Amazon and similar services. Wikipedia also has a similar nice integration system for listing books based on the ISBN number.

So, what about songs and music tracks? The only official standard I know of is the ISRC standard. If you run a record label and don’t have an ISRC base number, get one now, it takes a short time and is free, and you could then use your record label identifier to create more ISRC numbers. After this you could identify each track by the ISRC number.

There are some commercial distribution sites that use ISRC (even enforce using it), but it’s not that common. This is a shame, as if ISRC — or a similar system — was widespread, Web 2.0 developers could write all kinds of really nice services. For example, if review blogs had the ISRC number listed, a smart system could find places wherefrom to purchase or download the music based on scanning through the blog entry. Just now such systems have to do intelligent data scraping and trying to identify the source based on artist and title, an even harder job as many titles and even artist names are reused over and over.

Something even more interesting would be if the ISRC number was embedded inside the mp3 or other digital formats, maybe even part of the audio track info, so removing or messing with the ISRC number would cause severe audio hickups. At least, if MP3 files had a default id tag with a unique identifier and enforced data entry — so they are valid — it would be a start. Alas, I don’t know how many burn in the ISRC number into their digital audio files.

Some CD audio tools such as wave burner makes it possible to burn in the ISRC value into the audio track itself.

Various performing rights organizations such as BMI also have their own special coding systems for registration of songs.

Anyway, my point is that if the book industry managed to standardized on a uniform way to identify books, the record industry should at least try to do the same, as the benefits would be huge. Until something like this happens, I’m trying to place ISRC numbers on all the releases.

You need a unique label whether it is your artist name, record label, group name, or your own alias. This is a very important marketing decision. The name will then later be the brand that defines what the label sound is, or what the artist produces — no wonder some producers have multiple aliases to separate their artist works from each other.

It’s quite OK to use your own real name as the artist name. Others like a proxy name, that’s fine.

To get a good name, first do a search based on your candidates. It’s not good to take an existing artist or label name. Use Discogs and any big online music distribution system to find out if the name is already taken. Even a small variation — let’s say Prinse — is not considered Ok. It might even lead to a law suit. The only way to really legally protect a name is to get a trademark on it, and this across multiple markets/countries, so it’s very expensive. Maybe that’s one reason why using one’s own name is somewhat legally valid, as they can’t take that from you.

The other way to find out about names is to do a web search and see what comes out. If the name is associated with something negative in a language, or even in English, then don’t use it. I recently saw a spam email about a perfume called Fracas, which was funny, as fracas means a brawl, a noisy fight….

The other input from the search is to see if you get any valid hits pointing back to your site or if you get generic hits. The more unique a name is, the better chance it will point at just the material associated with the record label, artist, or group. So that’s why it’s good to take a name and somewhat twist it, style Curve becomes Currve. Or combine the words together, such as what we did with PlanetoidPark, to make it unique.

Personally, in this internet age, I do think unique names will be more and more important, for quick lookups and finding material.

As promised I really want to dump any insights and lessons learned about starting a record label, in my case PlanetoidPark, stay tuned for releases out soon.

But first, about the motivation. Why should you start one? There are many excellent record labels out there, and believe me, most of them really want good material, if they get it, they are happy. And I don’t think they are out to squeeze out every single drop of money from the starving artist. Most labels are really tight operations, and the work for the love of music, a specific domain they want to promote and cultivate.

So if you don’t have a strong motivation, just go out there and find a good list of record companies and give them quality material. Also, remember, if you start a label, reserve at least 20% or more of your spare time to work with non-music work, that’s just how it is. If you are not prepared for this, don’t start a label, there’s nothing worse than a good intent that is just put aside and it slowly dies over time.

So back to the motivation. You need have a strong motivation or two to start a label. Money? Well, I don’t think most dance or electronic music labels are exactly enterprises that result in you becoming a millionaire, sorry. Fame? Try to list record label owners… Sex? Heh?

Here’s maybe a couple of more meaningful and realistic motivations.

You really feel that the dance music is moving with the speed of a glacier, and most music you hear is a variation of something else, and you want to create a future new path with music. Good. You know of many excellent artists that you would like to cultivate and bring forth, and let them do the music side. Yep, good motivation. You think that acid house still has a chance, just needs another angle and some new blood. Yes, good. You want to promote good music for the consumers, and you have a good plan how to do it. Excellent. You want to have musical control of the sound and music produced. That’s something I suspect is a very common motivation, and it also a good one.

Such pure motivations usually help a lot concerning kick-starting a label and getting attention. Being honest through the whole process also helps. The labels, distributors, artists and everyone are very much interconnected, so if the motivation is negative — let’s say something nasty such as stealing artists from another label — the reputation is very quickly tainted. There’s enough business for everyone, so it’s better to help each other out. So just share the resources and good results will manifest.
More later!

Ho ho, spent most of yesterday and today to sort out two tracks to be released very shortly, on PlanetoidPark. I just needed to get them into shape for promo purposes (the whole promo world is a subject for another article).

In my daily life as a software programmer it is very similar to the concept of “shipping products.” We really value engineers who have been involved in shipping products, instead of just doing stuff. The reason is that when building a product or application, the first 80% takes as long as the final 20% finish. Also, you need to train on focus and get the product out instead of putzing on it forever. It means tons of compromises and attention to detail. This is the reason I will place a “Ship the product” sign on my monitor from time to time, so I don’t forget what I’m getting paid for.

Seems it’s the same with record releases. At some point the tracks have to be released so someone out there has a chance to listen to it, otherwise it’s kind of futile — at least in my mind — to constantly collect tracks on the hard disk for no other purpose than to make them. But to get to that point, there’s that 20% that takes as long as doing the track in the first place.

I would recommend anyone actually to take this step to release records, either on a net label, or a private label, or try to get a deal with any excellent record labels. What happens then, when you need to release something, is that extra focus on details and things you never though about when doing tracks in the first place. What happens then is growth, you learn from the mistakes and could do even more cool tracks in future.

Don’t worry about critique, any artist out there has been criticized, if not anyone else, your mom (for wasting time on music, that happened to me, but then later she was very appreciative). But getting something out, that’s something that will make you personally grow.

The fruit company I work for gave us all the whole thanksgiving week off — thanks to the fearless leader! So I’m home, and could finally work on the www.planetoidpark.com project I started a year ago, but it went to the back burner due a lot of work that needed to be done in at daytime job.

So I have nine days, including the weekends, to work on making tracks for this record company project (more about that later).

Maybe most of you know the drag, when you work for yourself, there’s no manager, no schedules, deadlines, and things just will fall apart after a couple of days, you sleep until 11am, watch TV, browse the web, and so on. This time I will not fall into the trap!

Two things that have saved me so far (I have two tracks done in two days) is to have an make-believe manager. This manager of mine is really tough, he wants results, so I need to please him (he also has a female director, she’s more interested in the bottom line.) The other thing that helps to write a daily status report, using voodoopad, of what I have accomplished. If the list is short, the the manager will get after me…

I must say, I really admire self-starters and entrepreneurs, it’s very tough to constantly set goals for yourself, and drive things.

I’m again looking for a nice distribution model or company for distributing music via iTunes, eMusic, and so forth. It seems it’s one of the few ways to really get the music out there. I just read about TuneCore in the latest EQ Magazine, and I checked out the deal.

It’s actually quite nice, you could upload an album of material, even online in Apple lossless format, and they take care of the redistribution, with a fixed fee (unlike other services where they ask for a percentage of the income).

The only small drawback I saw was that you need to pay a yearly fee for keeping the album online, $7.95. Also, it’s still tricky to distribute online material outside the US markets.

Anyway, I will start going through two+ years of material, and clean it up, remix it, and publish a set of albums in the forthcoming months, and see how it all works out. So yes, I’m not a TuneCore customer, stay tuned for more information soon (there’s plenty of unpublished material on my hard disks, and my wife said that it’s better to get it out than to let it rot on the disks).