Personalities Of The On-line Music Sites

Today has been “update the music sites day”  in honour of my new release.  It is also laundry day (in honour of my social obligation to wear clean clothes).  The two compliment each other, since uploading songs and information to sites involves much waiting.

I had pretty much forgotten how many sites I had stuff on and how nutty they were to operate but I did want to write about them.  I suppose it is also “blog about it all” day.  “It all” will be RouteNote, Soundcloud, Vibedeck, PureVolume, Reverbnation, Bandcamp, MySpace, Grooveshark, last.fn, Jango, CBC Radio 3 and SOCAN.

My first mission was to get songs and art onto RouteNote.  This is a pretty uncomplicated process.  The hard part is waiting for all the 320 kbps mp3 files to upload, trying not to press anything to goose the process along like one always has to do with YouTube and such.  RouteNote provides UPC and ISRC codes for you if you want and then you wait for a bunch of days (7 in this case!  Awesome!) for the album to show up in iTunes and the like, worldwide.  They also have an artist store set up for me.  I paid nothing for this to happen, they will take 15% when/if I sell anything and once sales have gone over the $50 threshold, money goes to my (required) PayPal account. This truly happens.  It happened to me.  Amazing.  I like it.

http://routenote.com/r/Mike%20Irwin/5051813598050

Next, I put a song up on Soundcloud.  I would like to put more there, as it is easy, easy, easy to do Unfortunately, Soundcloud has a time maximum for material.  It turns out that with all my other songs up there, I only have 8 minutes of room left.  Soundcloud will give me more room for a fee of some kind.  Soundcloud will not be seeing that from me just yet.  I wanted to use Soundcloud because it makes uploading to Vibedeck very simple.

http://soundcloud.com/mirwinindustries

Fortunately, uploading to Vibedeck  is  even easier than Soundcloud, although, if you already have songs on Soundcloud, Vibedeck will very painlessly import them and link to Soundcloud in case someone wants to buy your music.  Vibedeck is completely free to use.  100% of your sales goes to your PayPal account, there is no fee for uploading or having your site.  Vibedeck will take your money to promote your music or add features to the site but I didn’t even check.  I can’t afford to spend money selling music that may just be to lousy for consumer consumption!  I mean, who knows?  Almost everything I heard on the Grammy Awards would have made me change the channel on a radio or any other device so, clearly, population-wise, my music taste  judgement is not realistic so my thinking that I could produce a more suitable alternative is most likely delusional.  Until the data comes in, who knows?  Where was I?  Oh yeah: Vibedeck is great to use.  Still, haven’t seen any dollars from it.  I need to tell people about it and then they have to make an effort to go there and even then, maybe they don’t like spending money online (if they like the music, that is).  There it is.

http://vibedeck.com/mirwinindustries

I went to PureVolume next because I remembered (!) it to be very simple to upload music with.  It did not disappoint  me.  I think it is the best for ease of operation.  One may easily link to iTunes or Amazon should one like what they hear and must spend money.  However, no one has ever been to any of the three PureVolume sites I have set up for each of my bands.   Oh well, I think they exist…

http://www.purevolume.com/mirwinIndustries

Next, I put a song on Reverbnation for free downloading.  That’s easy to do too.  People will check out my Reverbnation sites; that’s the best part.  Also nice about reverbnation is the merchandise generating capability of it.  You can design tee shirts, mugs, caps, all sorts of  junk, and actual shrink wrapped cds with artwork and such.   I have no need for these things but I imagine they would be neat.  I designed some stuff and it is for sale.  Whoopee.  Reverbnation will take your money to distribute your music like RouteNote does.  They will also take your money to promote your music somehow.   These places always want you to collect emails so you can harass your fan base about your next gig or release.  Yuck.  I don’t do gigs anyway.  They are expensive.  As for any potential fan base, I prefer to passively harass them (should they prove to exist).

http://www.reverbnation.com/mirwinindustries

Bandcamp was my next mission.  Bandcamp is an artist store like Vibedeck and RouteNote Direct.  Bandcamp is a nice looking site with all sorts of places to put descriptive information about your awesome self.  It is easy to use, it takes 15% off each of your sales (you set the price, or let the buyer set the price!) and into PayPal goes your hard-earned monetary stuff.  It has all kinds of  rules about how much it takes per sale, you know, once you get to $5000.00 of sales, their cut is reduced to 10% or something like that; again, not something I can be concerned with now as I have seen no downloading activity on my site.  There’s a bunch of deals like that, though.  It has a great “stats” section.  It shows how many times anyone has searched for your band, any of the song titles and any of your tags.  Bandcamp is special because it will not let you upload mp3s;  you have to upload lossless formats only.  They then deliver the download in .wav, .aif, flac, or anything else I guess.  What that means for me right now is: it is taking a very long time to upload my album. Agonizing.  However, if I was nuts about a song, I’d want a high-resolution copy of it too.  I never even heard a high-resolution copy of any music until I made it myself or cds came along.   Hours have passed and I am 5 songs away from completing the upload to Bandcamp mission.

http://mirwinindustries.bandcamp.com/

In the meantime, I put a few new songs onto MySpace.  MySpace is the most popular site and I get to hear lots of really neat bands there.  Using it is not intuitive to me at all and it is usually a frustrating game of discovering what has been changed and all the ways in which it does not do what I want it to do.  They, like Reverbnation, send me a weekly update about site activity, listens, friends, fans, downloads and the like, so that’s good; it is non invasive.  I hate updating it though.  I usually just give up.

http://www.myspace.com/mirwinindustries

Still waiting on Bandcamp, I went to the Grooveshark site.  I was apprehensive.  The Grooveshark uploader is a java thing that I have found to be unfriendly to operate.  Once you have chosen the files to upload, you are required to enter the song and album titles (with no copy or paste).  Will all the songs upload this time?  Maybe…Will only one upload, leaving you to redo all that song and album title stuff?  It is likely…it is likely you will have to upload them all one at a time.  OK.  Once that is done, will all your songs actually be on the Grooveshark site when you check it out again?  Maybe…Any way, it was very good to me today, everything uploaded as far as I can tell.  But they have to take 24 hours to process it all so I am now waiting to see if anything did, in fact, upload.  There’s a good chance it did not.  Why bother?  Grooveshark is a popular music player that will play your music if it is similar to another artist someone has chosen.  The trick is for you to decide who you sound like.  I have not mastered this trick.  I try not to sound like others.  Nonetheless, I managed to choose some artists I like.  Grooveshark also lets listeners create song lists using keywords.  If  one of the titles of my songs matches the chosen keyword, it gets into the arbitrary list.  Grooveshark will take your money to promote and master and distribute your music.  Otherwise, it is free.

I still have last.fm, ArtistIntersect and Jango left, besides the CBC radio3 and my SOCAN info to update.

I’m getting tired of this but I should add that last.fm is the most frustrating of the lot.  I don’t know what to make of it yet, frankly.  I think it might be good sometime but I can’t say yet.  It will be ignored today.  No link.  Last.fm couldn’t find a match.  That’s funny, I can sign in and see me there.  What the what?

ArtistIntersect is sort of regrettable.  I did a search for Chris Squire (what a great sound he has) and found him on ArtistIntersect.  It turns out that ArtistIntersect is part his, and it is new somehow, so I set up a site there.  By then, I was pretty burnt out on this stuff and I fail to see any advantage to this service.  It looks like a free webpage, though it never comes up on a search (well for “mirwinIndustries”…”Chris Squire” shows up fine).  Hmm.  Just as well, it looks disappointing.  Whatever.  It too will be ignored.

Jango is like Grooveshark but more.  They will play your music within other music similar to yours and listeners can “like” it and/or become your fan, whereby you can get their emails and all that junk.  It gathers lots of demographic information from your plays and listener reactions, puts it all into graphs, and you can figure out who you most sound like and who and where to target market your tunes. Cool, huh?  However, you must purchase “plays” on the streaming radio station-like thing.  “Mike, you don’t have any money; why are you talking about this?”  Well, if one looks around, one can find introductory offers with some free plays.  Once your songs are uploaded, someone might happen across it and play it anyway.  They might become a fan.  Later for this too.

http://www.jango.com/music/mirwinIndustries?l=0

CBC Radio 3 is a very nice Canadian website geared towards indie bands.  One may freely join and create playlists.  Musicians may freely join and create webpages with their songs and information.  When you put your song there, a possibility of actual radio wave transmission (on CBC Radio 3!) of your song exists.   As a Canadian, I am deeply stirred well beyond my capacity to write in a suitably evocative fashion.

http://radio3.cbc.ca/#/artists/mirwinIndustries

SOCAN is easy.  It has a great site to use.  It is the performing rights organization here in Canada.  I’m doing it because of CBC Radio 3, and I worked on a song with The Hicks that is in a movie called Embedded.  Other than that, time will perhaps tell;  I just play the game best as I can.

Look at all those words.  They warrant a conclusion.  Bandcamp is done and so is my laundry.  The end.