The verdict is still out there about Twitter. There’s indeed a lot of less informative twitter posts out there, maybe a huge majority.

At the same time, the 140 max character limit is good, it puts pressure on getting to the point with each posting.

So I’m using it for classical micro-blogging about music and sometimes about related topics, or then not. I’m not using it for what I’m doing at certain times — that kind of information is seldom that interesting. Style: “working in studio..”, “now packing my gear for a gig”, “uploading music to myspace” and so forth.

But for small blog entries I think it’s excellent. Small blog entries work just fine with Twitter, especially references to other web pages.

The first thing good to install is a link to an URL shortering service, I use is.gd. One nice thing is that the base url is very short! Why waste characters on the base url when you want shortened urls, anyway…  Read the instructions here how to get a small javascript- based link to you bookmarks so you could just click on the link and immediately get a shortened url.

I still think the absolutely best way to describe music is to provide a sample of the track on the web site. This is how iTunes, Amazon, eMusic and similar commercial systems operate. Netlabels should do the same and just give up on the massive effort to use words that just are plain words, nothing else.

If someone really wants to write about the music, it’s fine, but let the artist or producer describe why she or he worked on the music, what was the intent, the inspiration, the message with the music and so on. That’s quite fine, and also very inspiring compared with going through page after page of meaningless word usage.

I would think that most of us dealing with electronic music — sooner or later — will drown in emails coming from totally unexpected sources, mailing lists we never subscribed to, for example. And a huge majority of those has to do with promoting either tracks or events.

Same with mailing lists and forums, after a while, more and more of the postings are related to promotion of some kind, rather than interesting information. Or those of us that have MySpace accounts, we provide friend access, and after a while most of the postings are promotions of some kind.

Now, I wonder, most of that will just make the reader annoyed, and that’s usually the opposite of successful marketing. I would think that most of us would only like to get such information if we really requested it.

This is the reason I’m not using any private mailing lists or pushing promos over mailing lists, or push promos to other accounts MySpace. There are some exceptions to this, but it’s mostly to do with announcing free content — everyone wants free stuff. Or then working for the good of electronic music, again it most likely has to do with something non-commercial and free in nature.

Anyway, there’s a very good technology that turns it all back to the consumer side, and that’s the use of RSS feeds. If someone wants to know more about what’s going on, they make a deliberate choice to subscribe to a feed, and then they get the material. Or, then just trust the consumers to find your information via net searches, or by visiting your sites.

It might be that such a solution reaches less eyeballs, but at least such a marketing style does not annoy those poor eyeballs drowning in promotion material.

If anyone is tired of such marketing strategies, just unsubscribe from such mailing lists, or let them know that this is not working. It’s very similar to spam, and nobody likes spam (or I would hope so).

Let’s look at some historical examples. Jimi Hendrix is for me the one that introduced the guitar-hero-improvisational style of rock. After Jimi Hendrix the guitar music was never the same. As an example, if someone has as many copycats as Jimi Hendrix, it’s a good sign.

Now, Jimi Hendrix didn’t just suddenly get his style, it was a combination of talent, hard work, and willingness to go beyond what other guitar players had done. So you can’t just invent a new style. It’s good to have talent, as well as work hard and experiment, and when you find the formula, fine tune it.

It also means that launching a new style is not a matter of days, it could take months and even years. Furthermore, the more influences you get, the better chance of building a new style, as it’s close to impossible to just invent something, most if not all of music is based on mixing together other styles.

Yes, I’m working on a new style, but it’s not yet complete, so I better not talk about it until the material is available!

Maybe I should switch over to another topic for a while… Let’s go through some interesting ways to use Ableton Live.

You know, it’s very, very easy to put together electronica-based tracks today. Long time ago I showed my 8-year-old son how ACID the audio application works, and he put together his own CD with five songs made of various loops. It was OK for an 8-year old musician, but nothing super-astounding.

Nowadays he’s into Flash animation and graphics, and here’s really where his talent is showing, as it’s really hard to put together interesting animation material.

So. To battle in the market wars of today and in future, with millions of tracks released each year, you need to be unique. If you have a talent, especially something that few others have, and it takes a lot of effort to put together, you have an edge. So use it.

One example is voice and singing, and it does not even need to be this kind of perfect voice, more a voice with a character. If you have this, and you know how to put together interesting lyrics, you have a big edge compared with the majority of electronica producers that don’t sing or use voice elements.

Another example is just the artistry of playing instruments, either keyboards or any other kind of odd and interesting instruments. If you could for example use personal bass lines in productions by playing electrical bass, that makes a difference. Or just plain good old chemistry of very good keyboard playing as part of the song, compared with a loop that runs over and over again with 1/16 notes lined up one after another.

Or, if you are a good arranger, go for it, work like any of the good movie composers, make arrangements special and big with interesting elements. Or, if you are visually inclined, work with artwork or videos for YouTube with your music material. And so on.

I do believe that in the age of so many content producers creating material the artists has to be unique. And having plus developing a talent (usually the biggest part is to develop it out) will become more and more critical concerning marketing and promoting your artistry.

Going back to our promotion and marketing track. Someone who has a cause, is on a mission, has a very clear focus. This means that the output and the outcome is very defined. It also makes such projects to stick out from the majority of mediocre material, even if the music is not so elegant, just the cause is the selling point.

Let’s look at some examples. Let’s say someone thinks that drums&bass is the most excellent music, but since Photek days few if any have dared to extend this musical genre. So this person is on a mission to make drum&bass the most excellent music out there, so even average consumers will get interested in this music.

The result is producting such material, finding artists, starting a label dedicated to this cause, interviews, club events, grooming new talent, and so on.

Even better, something like this might start a new musical style that is suddenly very popular, and those who were the pioneers.

It could also happen the other way around, it will take years for this to take off, or there are no visible results along the way. This is again where the passion and dedication will work out long term. So do not worry. Patience will pay off. Even if there are few results, you have an inner peace because you worked on something you truly believed in.

Let’s take a topic such as DJ mixes. We are drowning in mixes available online. If I go up on the proton radio forum, I’m drowning in listings and listings of new mixes available from many, many DJs. It’s extremely hard to be heard and seen in such a crowded field of available material. It also shows this new world order where most consumers are producers, and like to produce material, to other producers who also like to produce material.

So you want to do mixes and get others to listen to them? Ok — be different. Examples: make mixes that only have ancient tracks from the eighties with your own drum loop patterns everywhere. Scan for new material from net labels, spend a couple of weeks finding really interesting and totally unheard tracks, and release these. Make 2-minute cuts between every track. Make mixes where a large part of the instruments are real ones, sampled. Make theme-based mixes, such as sunset mixes, mixes about cars…

Make AAC-enhanced files with images embedded, and chapter sections, similar to the extended podcast format. Invent a new kind of dance movement and make mixes around that one. Make a mix where 80% of the material is actually from your own music. Use tools like Ableton Live to the extreme, back to back mixing of tracks is boring, anyone could do that.

And so on and so on. There are examples of similar mixes done by artists such as: Trentemoller, Steve Porter, James Holden, and so on.. There’s a reason these DJ/Mixer/Producers make mixes that people pay attention to.

No more Les Djinns mixes :-).

Ok, just now we have a musical world where there’s so much music, commercial and non-commercial, so that consumers have a hard time finding new music and new artists.

Usually they end up purchasing the same old stuff they had before due to this huge platitude of choice.

But those old artists also had problems long time ago even when the amount of artists and bands were much smaller in scope.

So! Be different. If you sound different, have a new angle, new kind of music, it bubbles up automatically, due to the force of it being different. It’s that’s simple. If sound different and unique, it’s your best marketing tool, whether it’s a mix, a remix, new tracks, a new scene show, video editing, movies, art, writing blogs. Be lucky if you are different, just getting there is a lot of pain, and usually at the end you need a lot of courage to be different, too — as the pioneers usually have arrows in their back they also have first access to new land.

If there’s one thing I wanted this blog posting to elevate, it’s just to be different and unique. Start there with your promotion and marketing.

I might even add that in this new age of postmodernist reconstruction of content over and over again, so many computers and little talent, you have to be different in order to have a voice.

Next we will talk about all kinds of ways to be different, even commercially viable solutions.

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.

Some other notes from my side. I tend to create project or pseudonym names with a story behind it. Genietronix is for example a tech house name I use for tech house productions. The story behind it is that the venture capitalists here at Sand Hill (that’s where most of them reside here in Silicon Valley) is providing millions and millions of dollar to this startup biotech company they believe are working on new bio technologies. While all the money is actually used for music productions done in a secret studio inside the startup. This way you have a feeling for what do do next, or inspiration about new songs (like Nanotec that I will release today out for the promo circuit).

The Nanotec track was actually inspired by reading a collection of Nanotech short stories — NanoTech edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, if you have a chance, it’s fun reading, mind inspiring what one could do with tiny machines crawling everywhere. There’s a huge universe on the microscopic scale, we sometimes forget that — hey, that might be another starting point for a new track…

Many of the ideas and names that bubble up in my head is from reading books and watching movies and other TV programs. So don’t just get stuck in the studio for days, open up the mind and do a lot of reading, watching programs, or attend all kinds of non-music events, as well.

You could create a lot of good names by taking one or two existing names, and change the spelling just a little bit, like the Genietronix name, but the main idea was that the Genie is out of the bottle, and its tech centric. “nix” is also very techie, Unix and so on… So figure out what you want to achieve, and the project name will soon bubble up from the subconsciousness, as long as there’s a good idea driving it all.

Pheek

Just a couple of other notes from me. I don’t mind scanning for good/new artists, so posting on forums with track info — your myspace account or something similar — is Ok. However, if it takes lots of work to get access to the track, such as logging into file sharing services, I back off — sorry don’t just have enough time. So make it easy for anyone for finding your music.

Also, if you want to release commercial tracks, you should guard such material, do not let it loose on P2P or even let others download such tracks. You could put up one, two or three-minute samples of the track. Or then, if you want to share it, that’s fine, but it’s not a commercial track, then. After a possible release, it’s also understood that you don’t give out the track, defeats the whole purpose.

Try to avoid trying to sell the track to multiple places at the same time, if you get multiple offers, it’s not fair when the labels put effort into working initially with you, and you had multiple people working on a record deal for you. Just stagger out the effort, one label at a time. If someone does not respond within a reasonable time, where I think max ten days is the limit, go to the next one.

But as Pheek said, if you find the right label that matches your music, and it’s good, it should work out fine.

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.