Photo: matthileo/flickr

“Why make your own website? You own it. You own the experience.” –Chris Vinson, Founder, Bandzoogle.

Since before you heard of Google, Chris Vinson has been designing musician websites. Like many today, he was in a band that needed a website. He did what anyone with enough determination would have done—he built it. 1000+ people were on his email list before email was a staple. Based on the success of his band’s site, he was later hired by his record label to build hundreds more. In 2004, he launched Bandzoogle—now a comprehensive, subscription, website platform for musicians.

“Decide an important action and encourage fans to do that action.”

Tracking website analytics for years, Vinson has concluded that “elaborate sites lose traffic.” Simple is better. Having a complicated, all-Flash website is self-defeating. “Flash sucks” was rule #1 in his 18-minute intensive at NMS about ‘how to make an artist website that rocks.’ He echoed these rules and really drove the idea of having exactly one concept per page. Have one call to action—e.g. ‘download this’ or ‘become a fan on Facebook.’

There are three phases according to Vinson: Attract fans from social networks a.k.a. “outposts.” Engage them with a “compelling fan experience.” Sell through simple calls to action. “Artist websites emphasize an artist’s own brand.” Make it personal. “Frequent updates = repeat visits.”

Bandzoogle founder Chris Vinson explains how to make an artist website that rocks. Photo: virtualmusictv/flickr

Brand isn’t something you sell. It’s not schilling other people’s products, and it’s not selling out. Brand is what you stand for.” –Liz Leahy, Co-Founder, Section 101.

What about fan mailing lists? What’s the right frequency? Ariel Hyatt suggests one email per month. Each should contain a single call to action—a different call to action each month. Disc Makers CEO Tony Van Veen said, “Retain mindshare. Don’t let them forget about you.” and “Add value in your communication.” Everything you do online is communication and should reflect your brand vision.

Alkaline Trio singer/guitarist Matt Skiba waves from behind the microphone at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco on Feb. 18, 2010. Five days later they released their 7th full-length album, This Addiction.
Photo: whenwedie/Flickr | view set
alkalinetrio.com | thisaddiction.org | blood-pact.com
Epitaph | iTunes | Amazon | Insound

Last month I wrote about five tactics for finding music blogs. Let’s revisit this addiction with three more massive resources and a hit of punk rock.

1. MOG Music Network is a network of music blogs integrated with the social music community MOG. An estimated 800+ external music blogs are now part of MMN—including ours—so MOG it up.

2. CaptainCrawl is an extensive up-to-date music blog aggregator similar to elbo.ws. I even like CaptainCrawl better because of its cleaner design. Thanks to MTT for dealing me this one.

3. Image search engines that crawl the blogosphere can help too. Search for artist images on Google, Bing, NachoFoto, and Picsearch. You’ll be able to discover the blogs that posted them.

From MOG to Twitter to Facebook to Tumblr to last.fm, fans have the voice. Don’t kick this writing addiction. Alkaline Trio hasn’t. That is, they haven’t kicked their addiction to writing pure punk rock. Feeling the need to get back to their indie roots, they started their own label, Heart & Skull, and partnered with Epitaph Records, to release their seventh full-length album, This Addiction.

Alkaline Trio is on the Warped Tour this summer. The more I listen to This Addiction the more I get hooked. What sets the Trio apart for me has always been their clever writing and live energy. If you’ve seen them live, then you know the real thing. IMO this is their best album since their BYO Split Series in 2004. You hear the honest, raw vibe they were going for, but it’s larger, more fluid, and upbeat now—it’s most reminiscent of those champion BYO Split Series or “War Brain” days. The new song “Piss and Vinegar” is a worthy sequel to “Cooking Wine”, which, like “Radio” or “My Friend Peter”, is a gateway drug into the heart of the Trio’s sound. It’s rad that Alkaline Trio produced This Addiction with Chicago engineer Matt Allison, who produced their early albums/EP’s. His mixing is straight up.

Bonus Tracks:
08. TinEye—reverse image search.
09. Twitcaps—real-time Twitter image search.
10. Twipho—search twitpic.com, img.ly and yfrog.com.

Sound Around: iPhone apps for bands.

Gee, Scott, what do you want to do tonight? The same thing we do every night, Steve—try to help music take over the world by building better mobile apps for bands and their fans!

In 2009, in a little place called Raleigh, North Carolina, brothers Scott and Steve Klein had been brainstorming tech startup ideas. Both were students at NC State, but with opposite majors—nearly yin and yang. Add entrepreneurial DNA, and they’re Pinky and The Brain. Scott (Brain) was preparing to graduate as a computer engineer, and his younger brother, Steve (Pinky), was studying business management/marketing. Their startup would be born, but the question was, what kind? Taking advantage of their student resources, they had access to mentoring and networking through the NCSU Engineering Entrepreneurs Program.

They started 2bros1blog.com to blog about what they learned on the startup road. Many early ideas were solutions aimed towards the university community. Scott had learned Objective-C, the programming language for iPhone apps, and they decided they really wanted to get involved with mobile apps. Everyone has a phone, and they always have it with them, right? But they needed to find the right niche. They thought about campus sports or news apps, but when they proposed building a news app for the college paper, they were met with perplexed stares. Scott and Steve realized that for their app service to fly, they needed to find people that were really interested in expanding and engaging their audience. Being music fans themselves, they took what seemed to be a logical turn that summer—towards musicians. Next stop, Sound Around.

Scott graduated in December, gave a speech, and started a job at an TransLoc—a startup that provides realtime location information to mass-transit users. He built their iPhone app. At the same time he and Steve (who was still in school and working part-time in Macaroni Grill) were developing what would soon be called Sound Around. At the turn of 2010, they took on 15 bands as closed-beta testers. In February Steve learned the ins and outs of web design and built getsoundaround.com.

With people skills and resourcefulness, they’d bootstrapped their expenses so far, but in early 2010 they got involved with TechStars in an effort to raise seed capital. In March they flew to Boulder and found themselves surrounded by like minds in the tech scene. Of 600 startups, TechStars funds only 10. Sound Around made it to the top 27 but not the final 10, and it was back to bootstrapping.

In a typical college scenario, the two brothers were living in a 4-bedroom apartment with two other students—David and A.J.—but when David moved out to live with his fiancé, Scott and Steve commandeered the empty room and converted it into a workspace—their current headquarters.

Having success with the beta apps, they started recording videos to demo the Sound Around platform, and, in the meantime started the application process for funding through another (more local) startup incubator, called LaunchBox Digital…which pretty much brings us to the present. Last night was a milestone for Sound Around. Their first apps were approved by Apple and are now live in the App Store. The party was on, but it’s only the beginning for Sound Around.

In the upcoming weeks, Sound Around will be running discount promos via Twitter. Stay in the loop: @VirtualMusictv and @getsoundaround.

Scott is on a 3-month sabbatical from his job at TransLoc to focus full-time on Sound Around. Steve would love to be able to dropout next semester and get Sound Around rolling without distractions. Funding would help them “scale faster” but with or without it they’re expecting to launch in public beta this summer. They considering finding a 3rd team member experienced in web and/or Android dev.

The ‘band apps as a service’ market is a wide-open frontier. There’s some fundamental characteristics about Sound Around that really make them stand out.

1. It’s the DIY mindset. Sound Around’s young, two-brother team is the core of all their development. They’re building it all from the ground up. By not hiring out their programming or design, they’ll be able to constantly address feedback and improve their platform. When demands of the app market change, they’ll be able to adapt the fastest.

2. Sound Around purely focused on developing apps for bands/musicians. They’re not leaving the music niche—immense as it is—and they plan on rocking it. MobBase is their only direct competition right now, and there’s plenty of room to coexist in this space.

3. In what I’ve learned about Scott and Steve, I can tell that they understand the importance of people in the mix. They plan on creating an interface for interaction—not one-way communication—and they have a lot of innovative ideas on deck.

4. Their pricing is user-focused. It’s not based on installs. Bands pay based on the number of fans that actually use the app each month. The starter $14/month plan covers 1000 unique app users per month. Above 1000 is $0.01/user until the next tier—$29/month for 5000 unique users.

5. Their mascot is a giraffe named Shirley. She’ll make you smile. :) Giraffes are a symbol of evolution, you know. She doesn’t always travel with the team of course, who’ll be attending events this summer, including Warped Tour in Charlotte, and would love to meet up.

Read more posts in Music Flux.
View more music photos.
Related: Connect with the Buzz in your Music Scene

1. High-Octane Friend-Filtered Content

The voices of consumessegers are magnified by the network. Facebook’s upgraded social plugins (e.g. the epic like button integration) are putting fan-driven music into overdrive by making it easier to share your likes with your friends. Take a look at likebutton.me when you’re logged into Facebook and you’ll find an aggregation of your friends likes. Ask yourself, what is it that people share on the web? The answer is better content. Whether it’s entertainment or information, people tend to share the content that they regard as better a.k.a. worth sharing. A lot of shared content comes from mainstream sources, however—like unknown awesome bands—there is plenty of awesome less-discovered content. With the new like button integration, Facebook is changing the mentality around sharing—it’s as easy as liking now. They’ve made it extremely easy to share. The outcome of this is higher-octane friend-filtered content which should help us discover the best content out there.

2. Different Strokes For Different Folks

For some, music is a career, for others it’s recreation, and many players feel stuck in the middle of the spectrum like a pedestrian on a highway median. The overall music scene is expanding and becoming more diverse genre-wise. There’s enough lanes for a steady flow, and that stuck feeling is mostly mental. Music selection is heading towards infinity. Listeners want what listeners want—each has their own taste—but they have to be exposed to it first (unless they decide to create it instead). Is there maximum amount of creativity in the world? Hell no! The roadblocks of physical world don’t always exist on the web. They are a mirage. But everyone sees from a different perspective. When you stop squinting and open your eyes wide, do you see the open road, of a traffic jam?

3. Fans Behind The Wheel

It all starts with a few people who believe in something to the point that they are motivated to share it with their friends. These fans create ignition sparks by influencing their friends. Who’s controlling the music-industry steering wheel now? It’s the fans who dominate social media and communication.

4. Where’s The Free Petrol?

Chris Anderson in 2008: From the consumer’s perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of “free” is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you. (Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business)

7:30 Kevin Breuner: I find myself kind of caught in the middle of that being an artist myself who is making music and putting it out there for sale. but at the same time, someone passes me a band that I’ve never heard of, and technically it might be illegal to download the tracks. But at the same time I’m thinking I wasn’t going to buy it anyway, it didn’t cost them anything to get me this copy, and I might actually show up to a show because of it. (CDBaby Podcast #086)

8:00 Chris Anderson: Every band that puts there music on MySpace, which is to say every band, is on some level volunteering to give their music away for free in one form to drive demand for the others. (CDBaby Podcast #086)

9:10 Chris Anderson: Free music has been part of music for as long as there’s been radio. Radio is free music. No one—I don’t know of anyone—who objects to their music being played on radio, even though they may often get no money from that, because they understand the marketing value. (CDBaby Podcast #086)

Kevin Breuner in 2009: The future of music lies completely within the artist’s hands, period. If they want to focus on selling recorded music and their fan base will continue to buy it, selling music will be a big revenue stream for them. If they are fantastic live and want to give away a track to entice people to come to a show, then live shows may be their big revenue stream, but it’s all up to the artist and what their fan base will allow. The future of the music business is NOT in the hands of companies who dream up business models that artist should follow. The future is NOT free music because some guy with a degree and years working in the industry says so. The business plays by the artist’s rules now, and that scares the pants off the gatekeepers that used to make a living deciding what the artists could do. (Music will be free + Touring is where the money is = BS!)

Digital freebies are essentially a free source of advertising, but only if there’s a method behind it. For example, there’s giving away an mp3 in exchange for an email address. Why’s email important? Ian Rogers, the CEO of Topspin Media (an avant-garde service for midstream–mainstream musicians), reported that close to one-third of their artists’ revenue is driven through email alone and stressed the importance of “being where the fans are.” But here’s a question—does a single fan today account for more, or less, net revenue in the long run? What free tactics do you have packed in your trunk?

Judo Paris Grand Slam 2010. Image: 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.

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.

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

Indaba Music is one of many web-based remixing applications.

Remixing in the current, virtual realm is enabled by online, collaborative, remixing platforms like Indaba Music and JamGlue. Remixing is widespread through networks that share collaborated audio like ccMixter and SoundCloud. Our Remixed section is meant to tune into remixes created using virtual platforms and collaboration networks. We’re open to covering remixes from all genres—the more diverse the better.

If you are interested in writing for this section, then please email virtualmusictv@gmail.com. Please review our content guidelines before submitting entries. Not a writer? You can help contribute by letting us know the remixes that you’d like to see featured. For your reference, the ongoing list of remixing applications and collaborative production networks listed below is viewable at Delicious » ryanve » remixing collaboration apps.