virtualmusic.TV » promo code

FL Beat It: why FL Studio is the best deal in the house.

Ryan Van Etten — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 19:07:27 +0000

Image-Line, maker of my favorite beat-making software, FL Studio a.k.a. FruityLoops, have liberated their 50% off sale. I’ve had the producer version since 2007, but I wanted to give you all the heads up on the deal. The best part about buying direct from Image-Line is that you get free upgrades for life, which is huge. The software is reasonably-priced to begin with, and every time a new version comes out you get it. Talk about a gift that keeps on giving. Compare that to other music software companies that charge you hundreds of dollars every time a new version comes out, and crash your system on a daily basis. I’ve used FL Studio since 2004 and it never crashes. Talk about solid. It’s easily the best money I ever spent on music software. The direct link to the sale is right here—it ends January 6*.

New features available in FL Studio 9.7 Beta.

I had used a free, probably pirated version initially for 3 years to create over 100 drum tracks. In 2007, I decided that if anything in this world was worth paying for, it was FL Studio. You have to respect how they address the issue of piracy head on. They know how to make a compelling offer. (Initially the current sale was available via the GroupBuy tab on their Facebook page.)

These are buttons in an elevator in Belgium, where Image-Line is based. They look like a drum pad—don’t they? photo: joaomoura/Flickr

In 2010, I hadn’t worked on many drums this year until FL Studio 9 came out. I installed it and within minutes I was ripping away with the new samples. I’ve rethought and evolved my whole philosophy on drums. Instead of making rock songs, I want to bring out the beat! I want to roll with The Chemical Brothers and bounce like turbulence. Inspired—by software.

Update 1/3/2011: The discount end date was changed from 12/30/2010 to 1/6/2011. Image-Line emailed, “This is your last chance to get in, or get back in, if you maxed out the CC last month.”

LA Event: New Music Seminar

Ryan Van Etten — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 15:45:47 +0000

details: newmusicseminar.com
date: February 14–16, 2011
city: Los Angeles, CA
venue: Sheraton Universal

Tip: Use promo code NMSLAB2399 for the 2-for-1 partner discount on the registration page. The $175 early-bird rate is available until November 26 when the price jumps to $245. Student rates are also available. The five main panels are The Music Business Isn’t Over It’s Just Beginning, A&R in the New Music Business, Touring in the NEW Music Business, The Creative Quartet, and The Breaks.

NMS NYC 2010 last summer: View the entire photo set here. Read our conference news coverage here.

Opportunity: Last summer I attended and covered the New York seminar but really, can Los Angeles handle me? I’d like to team up with 1 or 2 people in the LA area who’d like to to attend the seminar as press and help provide coverage for us to post here during or after. If interested please email me.

Update 12/7: Confirmed NMS Players

Andy Gadiel, Founder/President of JamBase
Ben Campbell, CEO of OurStage
Brian Carpizo, CEO of Eventric
Bryan Calhoun, VP New Media of SoundExchange
Chris Vinson, Founder/CEO of Bandzoogle
Courtney Holt, President of MySpace Music
Craig Kallman, Chairman/CEO of Atlantic Records
Dameon Guess, Jakprints
Edward Donnelly, President of Aderra
Eric Garland, Founder of Big Champagne
Ian Rogers, President of Top Spin Media
Jason Flom, Chairman/CEO Lava Records
Jay Frank Sr. VP of CMT
Kelly G, Music Programming at BET
Martin Atkins, Author, Tour: Smart; Invisible Records
Megan Jacobs, Booker for The Roxy LA
Michael Doernberg, Founder of ReverbNation
Pete Edge, President A&R of Jive Records
Richard Ellis, Founder/President of 12 to 20
Ted Cohen, Managing Partner of TAG Strategic
Tim Westergren, Founder/CEO of Pandora
Tom Jackson, Live Producer at OnStage Success
Tony Van Veen, President/CEO of Discmakers and CD Baby

Band Apps Get Sound Around [Launch]

Ryan Van Etten — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:26:51 +0000

Last week I told the story behind the new band apps-as-a-service startup, Sound Around, whose mantra is ‘iPhone apps for every band.’ Today they rock their full-on launch:

NYC Event: New Music Seminar

Ryan Van Etten — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 03:58:23 +0000

I’ll be representing VirtualMusic.tv at this year’s New Music Seminar in New York—a music business geared TED-like event. It’ll be my first time at NMS—I’m stoked to hear ideas and meet people. There’s a lineup of keynote speakers during the day, and performances at night. I’ll recap with an editorial. If you’re going—I’d love to meet ya’. Tip: promo code nmsny10 might still work for 2-for-1.

details: newmusicseminar.com
date: July 19–21, 2010
city: New York
venue: Webster Hall

Flashback to Madonna at NMS in 1984.

Read post-event coverage here.

Music Blogging Throwdown—Evading DMCA Takedowns

Ryan Van Etten — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:02:48 +0000

Dubbed musicblogocide2k10 Google deleted at least six known music blogs from its Blogger platform. Google posted an official response highlighting their current procedures for handling DMCA complaints that were last updated last summer—Google implies that they warn offending bloggers but cite difficulty contacting offenders in the past. They also include the link for filing a DMCA counter claim. It seems inefficient to do an abrupt shutdown only to have to react to counter claims, and obviously the warnings were ineffective. To set the record straight I love Google. I also love music and free content.

Judo Paris Grand Slam 2010. (Flickr/ryusha)

Now if I got an email explicitly saying “you’re breaking our rules and we’re going to shut you down” then I would react immediately but apparently these bloggers missed this chance. I’m sure Blogger’s TOS states that they have the right to delete violating blogs, and to protect themselves legally they delete them. But I find it hard to believe Google didn’t warn them. I think the bloggers had to have known they were in a legal gray area. They should have exported a backup of their blog.

The DMCA’s ‘safe harbors’ for online service providers give linkers a strong incentive to remove links upon receiving a DMCA takedown notice, because if they do so, they are protected from paying damages in any copyright infringement case. (EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann via BoingBoing in 2006)

Regardless of whether we may be liable for such infringement under local country law or United States law, our response to these notices may include removing or disabling access to material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and/or terminating subscribers. If we remove or disable access in response to such a notice, we will make a good-faith attempt to contact the owner or administrator of the affected site or content so that they may make a counter notification. (Google)

We need better laws surrounding internet music journalism that reflect today’s Internet behavior. We need better education regarding copyright so that writers know how to properly license intellectual property. Oftentimes music bloggers have gained permission to include mp3′s directly from the artist or their record label. The same may even go for some YouTube videos that have had their audio removed due to “copyright infringement.” Is anyone asking the artists or contacting the uploader first? Who exactly is making the complaints? Theoretically the DMCA criminalizes anti-DRM tactics and copyright infringement. In practice, is it working—or rather—is it worth it?

The trouble with filing a formal, legal DMCA counter-claim is, that most bloggers don’t know how. What’s more, many of Blogger’s DMCA notices allegedly omit the name of the offending song. Bloggers aren’t even sure what they are denying. (The Guardian)

From what’s being talked about from the blogs that did have their content removed, it sounds like the newer system (unlike the old system) did alert them to what was happening, but they just felt hopeless to respond. Google has put up a response, basically saying that if it doesn’t receive a counternotice, and it keeps getting DMCA takedowns on the same account, eventually it takes the blog down as a “repeat offender.” So we’re back to the point that I predicted in August, where your average everyday blogger has no idea what a DMCA counternotice is and how to use it — so it would be much better if Google made the process of filing such a counternotice a lot more intuitive. (Techdirt)

In order to prevent any legal confusion, I would include a disclaimer making it painfully obvious that that the artist (or label) gave permission to have the mp3 on the blog. Even better, I would use legal embedding tools such as Bandcamp, Soundcloud, or Grooveshark as opposed to a direct link to an .mp3 file. This saves bandwidth and covers your a**. In the case of Bandcamp, you would be helping the artist because Bandcamp downloads usually require an email address and ZIP code giving bands a direct connection to their fans and valuable location data. I think most Bandcamp artists would happily issue free download codes to mp3 bloggers. Another route would be to use Creative Commons-licensed content—there’s plenty of CC-licensed content on Jamendo.

All that said, the best solution is to set up a blog on your own domain with an opensource blogging platform like WordPress. But even still you should backup your posts. Blogger and WordPress both support exporting (backing-up) into a transferable .xml file. Mini-blogging platforms Tumblr and Posterous are also good free alternatives—Posterous supports transferring from another blog but I don’t think Tumblr does yet. See Mashable’s head-to-head comparison. Squarespace is a paid service that supports importing and is also worth considering as an out-of-the-box solution.

How To Backup or Transfer Your Blog

If you’re already using WordPress on a WordPress.com blog, I recommend buying your own domain and hosting. You remain in more control that way. Buy your hosting separately from your domain though—most domain registration services offer cheap hosting that sucks as an upsell. It’s worth paying for good hosting. Of course the DMCA could issue a complaint to you through you or your host, but it’s less likely and the complaint would be more direct to you and not through a 3rd party.

Using WordPress On Your Own Domain

1. Domain Registration: I recommend domain.com (Check retailmenot for discount coupons)
2. Setup Hosting: I recommend Dreamhost. (Promo code virtualmusictv to save $50).
3. Install WordPress: Follow instructions here.
4. Blog on.

Update 2/12/09: Last night Google put back one of the deleted blogs and updated their response:

3 iPhone App Creation Platforms For Musicians

Ryan Van Etten — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:11:06 +0000

Enter the mobile music frontier—the age of the app is here—and you don’t need to be a developer to create your own iPhone app anymore. Here are ~~three~~ four platforms that enable artists to build their own custom mobile applications.

iLike artists can create an iPhone app through their iLike artist account. This looks like the the easiest, most basic, and inexpensive of the three options. Your app automatically integrates with the media content in your iLike artist profile. Currently it’ll cost you a one-time $195 to activate your app. You can choose to make your app free with the clause that iLike may place ads in it, or you can sell your app in a 50/50 split with iLike. View details and video demo.

Mobile Roadie is a flexible service geared for musician iPhone app creation. Their app features are interactive and viral. They include deep social network integration with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Fans have the ability to stream content, comment, upload photos, and purchase tickets and merchandise through the app. A band can sync their updates with their RSS feeds and social-network accounts, or they can update them through Mobile Roadie’s content management system. Their current basic pricing for musicians is $499 set-up + $29/month (covers the first 1,000 installs of the app each month—subsequent installs cost 1 cent each). Extras include “push notification” which uses geotagging to target fans in a specific region. If you opt for Mobile Roadie then please use our 10% discount referrer code virtual or this sign-up link. Watch video demo. View apps created with Mobile Roadie in the App Store.

Kyte is an online and mobile video platform providing on-demand content delivery and feature-rich application development for iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and Nokia devices. Their mobile app frameworks page details the key features, add-on modules, customizations, and monetization possibilities of their apps. The modules include RSS, Twitter, multimedia chat, content streaming, downloads, comments/ratings, fan media uploads, events, location-aware services, games, fan club sign-ups, and mCommerce. Kyte no doubt offers an immense customizable feature set and it is presumably more expensive than the aforementioned alternatives. You have to inquire for exact pricing, but I believe that they charge on a monthly basis for their service at different levels based on features and usage. Update—I received an email response from Kyte with the following details: Kyte iPhone Applications are available as an add-on component to the Kyte Platform and cost an additional monthly fee of $600 per app. The Kyte Platform tiers start at $500/month (plus set-up) and go up into the thousands. Kyte is a power solution for musicians with a massive fanbase.

Did I mention that these services handle the submission process to the Apple iTunes Store for you? Please share how you’re using these for your band etc. Plus, what other platforms am I missing? Update: we were informed about a new 4th platform via the comment section below. Here’s the 411:

MobBase is an iPhone app creation platform designed for musicians and brought to you by the collaborative remix community MixMatchMusic. MobBase launched today and its options enabling musicians to connect with their mobile mob include streaming audio, RSS, Twitter integration, videos via YouTube, photo albums via Picasa, artist info, events, ticketing, and merch. It looks affordable too—their current pricing for free apps is $20 set-up + $15/month (covers the first 500 installs each month—an additional 1,000 installs costs an extra $5). For paid apps, the set-up fee is the same, the monthly rate starts at $20/month, and you keep all the revenue from the sales. Digital distribution company IODA has partnered with MobBase as the app solution for its artists and labels. More detailed coverage is at RWW. View apps created with MobBase in the App Store.