More details on preventing swine flu and other viruses beyond just washing hands.

Prevent Swine Flu - Good Advice-see complete article: http://www.livewellamerica.org/blog/?p=478

Dr. Vinay Goyal is an MBBS,DRM,DNB (Intensivist and Thyroid specialist)
having clinical experience of over 20 years. He has worked in institutions like Hinduja Hospital , Bombay Hospital , Saifee Hospital , Tata Memorial etc. Presently, he is heading our Nuclear Medicine Department and Thyroid clinic at Riddhi Vinayak Cardiac and Critical Centre, Malad (W).

The following message given by him, I feel makes a lot of sense and is important for all to know

The only portals of entry are the nostrils and mouth/throat. In a global epidemic of this nature, it's almost impossible to avoid coming into contact with H1N1 in spite of all precautions. Contact with H1N1 is not so much of a problem as proliferation is.

While you are still healthy and not showing any symptoms of H1N1 infection, in order to prevent proliferation, aggravation of symptoms and development of secondary infections, some very simple steps, not fully highlighted in most official communications, can be practiced (instead of focusing on how to stock N95 or Tamiflu):

1. Frequent hand-washing (well highlighted in all official communications).

2. "Hands-off-the-face" approach. Resist all temptations to touch any part of face (unless you want to eat, bathe, etc.).

3. *Gargle twice a day with warm salt water (use Listerine if you don't trust salt). *H1N1 takes 2-3 days after initial infection in the
throat/ nasal cavity to proliferate and show characteristic symptoms. Simple gargling prevents proliferation. In a way, gargling with salt water has the same effect on a healthy individual that Tamiflu has on an infected one. Don't underestimate this simple, inexpensive and powerful preventative method.

4. Similar to 3 above, *clean your nostrils at least once every day with warm salt water . *Not everybody may be good at Jala Neti or Sutra Neti (very good Yoga asanas to clean nasal cavities), but *blowing the nose hard once a day and swabbing both nostrils with cotton buds dipped in warm salt water is very effective in bringing down viral population.* Neti pots and sinus rinse kits are available at the drug store and are relatively inexpensive..under $15.

5. *Boost your natural immunity with foods that are rich in Vitamin C (Amla and other citrus fruits). *If you have to supplement with Vitamin C tablets, make sure that it also has Zinc to boost absorption.

6. *Drink as much of warm liquids (tea, coffee, etc) as you can. *Drinking warm liquids has the same effect as gargling, but in the reverse direction. They wash off proliferating viruses from the throat into the stomach where they cannot survive, proliferate or do any harm.

I suggest you pass this on to your entire e-list. You never know who might pay attention to it -- and STAY ALIVE because of it.

How to Promote Yourself Part 24: AllMusic.com

ALLMUSIC.COM

This site is, among other things, a huge database of who’s in the credits of all label released albums, as well as a number of indie projects. [Except they NEVER list the string arranger! :-( ] Anyway, you need to send them a physical CD, and then hopefully they will catalogue it and you’ll be a part of their database. The practical benefit of this is that Pandora only gets their summary info about artists from allmusic.com. So IF allmusic.com should decide to have a staff member write a review of your CD, and IF Pandora should add you to their playlist, then Pandora will actually have some info about your project for anyone who’s interested. Plus being on allmusic.com makes you seem more legit.


[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 23: Last.fm & Pandora

LAST.FM

If anyone who is a Last.fm member has ever listened to one of your tracks on iTunes, or on their ipod, it has been scrobbled [which on their site means “counted” or “tracked”], and you already have a profile on Last.fm. It’s weird to go to this site and find a page about your music that you didn’t know existed, along with fans posting comments etc. And it’s on the wiki principle, so anyone can update the info on the page.

So here’s what you do, you create an account as a label on Last.fm, and claim yourself as an artist. Then you may upload your original tracks and cover tunes to their system for airplay in their radio stations. This site actually creates radio stations according to an artist reference you give them, and they derive who is similar to whom with some type of analysis I have not taken the time to figure out. But it’s cool because you download the Last.fm software which can function either as a stand alone player, for you to listen to music that they send to you based on your “seed” for the station. OR it can work in conjunction with iTunes and scrobble what you’re listening to. So if you have uploaded your music to their playlists, then hopefully when someone starts a radio station of a similar artist, your songs will be played on that custom radio station. You can also designate any or all of your tracks that are originals to be a free download for people. [ It might be a good idea to choose one of your best songs to offer as a free download on your various profiles like this one, reverbnation, and MySpace. ] So if you connect this to your iTunes, and then play your tracks a lot in your iTunes you'll get more scrobbled songs, and your count will go up. And you want your count to be up because everyone who goes to your last.fm page can see how many plays you’ve gotten, and how many listeners you have.

PANDORA.COM

This is another site sort of like Last.fm but even cooler!! Pandora.com has a system of analyzing songs based on hundreds of “genomes”, which an actual human being will attribute to your music. You must send them a physical CD, and if they like it, they will analyze it and add it to their playlist. I sent them a CD, and after about a month, when I would type in “Worldwide Groove Corporation” into their interface to start a radio station, they had analyzed our music and knew what style to play. [They gave it characteristics like “latin influences”, “electronica roots”, “slow moving bassline”, “downtempo influences”, and “laid back female vocal”.] Then after about another month, they would actually put our songs in the playlist with the other stuff similar to ours. There’s no guarantee you’ll get added, but if you do, then when other people listen for artists similar to you, they might hear YOUR music, and it’s always accompanied by links to iTunes and Amazon so people can BUY your music.

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

The Other Side of the Fence

Hello, everyone!

Ellen here. It's been a while since I just plain wrote a blog entry. Life has been full of large events here, one of which has been actually handing over the reigns on our music. We have signed a deal with a record label, and are now a part of "the machine" so to speak. Now, to be clear, this is for the most part a repackage and re-release of our Chillodesiac Lounge, vol 1: FEVER record, with one new cover tune added, and two remixes added. We did need to drop two tracks from the original project, one for contractual reasons, and one simply to make room for the other new additions. But we hope that we will be able to get some truly new music out relatively soon. [There are several tracks in the works. We just have to keep doing the other money work, so... such is life at Worldwide Groove Corporation.]

However, now that we have a record deal, it's a very strange feeling to have someone else at the helm, but nice to get word of new progress that has happened without my own toil behind it.

So today, we were very happy to get word that we got added to 38 radio stations last week!! Here is the text of the update:

"September 1, 2009

WORLDWIDE GROOVE CORPORTATION
THE MIDNIGHT SESSIONS
LIAISON MUSIC

WEEKS ON PROJECT: 1


CHART NUMBERS
CMJ RPM ADDS - #2 Most Added with 38 ADDS


KEY STATIONS ADDING THE RECORD THIS WEEK
Bangor, ME - WERU
Bozeman, MT - KGLT
Carbondale, CO - KDNK
Charlottesville, VA - WNRN
Detroit, MI - WNMC
Hammond, LA - KSLU
Honolulu, HI - KTUH
Irvine, CA - KUCI
Miami, FL - WRGP
Minneapolis, MN - KFAI
New Brunswick, NJ - WRSU
Philadelphia, PA - WKDU
Richmond, VA - WDCE
Rohnert Park/Bay Area, CA - KRCB
Sacramento, CA - KSSU
Salt Lake City, UT - KWCR
San Antonio, TX - KSYM
Santa Clara, CA - KSCU
Santa Cruz, CA - KZSC
Tampa, FL - WMNF
Tucson, AZ - KAMP"

So, there you have it! And so it begins...

How to Promote Yourself Part 22: CDBaby & TuneCore

CDBABY.COM - Physical and Digital Distribution

Many people know about CD Baby, and from what I’ve experienced, it’s a great and reliable company. You can sell physical CDs for a one time $35 registration fee. They fulfill the orders and ship worldwide, and will even provide you with a credit card swiper for free to sell CDs and merch at your gigs. They keep $4 of each CD sale which seems reasonable, all things considered. They will give you the contact info for the people who purchase your CD. ADD THESE PEOPLE TO YOUR DATABASE.

What’s even better than their physical distribution is their digital distribution. It’s a free opt-in service, and it puts you through so many digital websites [including iTunes and Amazon digital, the two most important ones for U.S. based artists], you haven’t even heard of them all. The down side is that you do not have any control over the speed at which your music is submitted to these digital outlets, nor of how long it takes for your music to actually show up. The up side is they only take 9% of your digital sales, and they pay every week. So you only pay out if you’re actually selling music, and you’re not paying ongoing fees if your music isn’t selling. I would highly encourage you to avoid anything that will charge you a monthly fee for selling your music, as you can lose money very easily that way.


TUNECORE.COM - Digital Distribution

Tunecore.com is another option for digital distribution, and it works a little differently than CD Baby in that they charge an annual fee [maybe $10?] and then give you 100% of your digital sales proceeds. The up side is, that you actually have a little more control over who your tracks are submitted to, and you only pay for those channels. [Like if you choose iTunes U.S. and Europe, but not iTunes Japan, you only pay accordingly.] Plus you get all of the money from your sales. The down side is you pay an annual fee whether you’re selling music downloads or not, and if you do the math, you might need to sell at least a couple hundred downloads before you’d break even with what CD Baby would take from your sales. So it’s just whatever you feel comfortable with. I’ve not personally used TuneCore.com because you can have ONLY ONE digital distributor, but I’ve never heard anything bad about them.


[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 21: Mi2N.com

Mi2N.COM

This site has some newsletters, two of which are: i2N, INDIE NET NEWS - The Largest, FREE Source of Musician News and B2N, BUSINESS NET NEWS - The Largest Music Business & Technology News Resource. Now if reading that just made your brain shut down, wake back up. This is one great place that YOU can submit YOUR NEWS. You must have a well written press release, but if you submit it and it’s good, they will add it to the newsletter.

I actually got the headline of the newsletter once from a press release I wrote and submitted. There are some good books and articles about how to write an interesting press release. You must do more than say so and so recorded an album and you can buy it now. You can either tie in some random weird connection between one of your songs and something in the news, or have an event that benefits charity at which you will be performing, or something else that makes it interesting. You can CREATE a fund raiser if you want. Get the permission of a charity to use their name in promoting the event, get some of your other friends to perform at it too, and then write a press release about it and submit it to this and your local community calendars and newspapers. [Like if they bring a can of food for the local food bank, they get $5 off your CD purchase, etc.]



[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 20: LinkedIn & Plaxo

LINKEDIN.COM & PLAXO.COM

These are other networking sites, which are more about professional relationships, unlike Facebook which is much more social. It’s good to get profiles on these because you just never know who is on what site, and the more connections you have, the better. This CAN help you connect to friends of your friends who might be of assistance in your career, but another benefit is to simply get your name into people’s heads over and over. So if you’re connecting with someone on Facebook, then on Linkedin, then on Plaxo, and then on MySpace... you’re be more present in their thoughts. And if it’s someone you don’t KNOW personally, but you’d like to know OF you, then this is a good way to get your name to be more familiar to them. And people like what’s familiar. Look me up on these too, Ellen Tift.

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 19: TheSixtyOne.com

THESIXTYONE.COM

This site describes itself as a “game” technically, but it’s a platform to get your music heard. Basically, you upload your songs, and the people who have listener accounts “heart” your songs if they like them. If your song gets enough hearts, then it gets posted on the home page. Listeners only get so many “hearts” per day, so they have to choose which songs to use them on, but they will later earn “reputation points” and level up as other people heart the songs they previously hearted. The earlier they are in hearting a song, the more points they might earn from it later. You can set whether or not your song can be downloadable, but if your song is available for digital sale on Amazon, the site automatically links to it so people can buy it. BEFORE YOU SET UP YOUR ARTIST ACCOUNT, I’d recommend setting up a listener account and accruing points for a few days until you get up to level 5 at least. [You do that by listening to songs on “the rack” and hearting lots of songs.] Then once you have some points as a listener, create another account [with a different email address] as an artist. The reason you want to do this is that artists cannot “heart” anything. Then once you upload a song in your artist account, IMMEDIATELY log out, and log back in under your listener account, and be the very first one to heart your song. That way you can earn the most points from it as it gets hearted. I created an account in July 2008, and uploaded our entire record plus some remixes we’ve done. By mid-September, we got an email from a record producer who wanted us to do a remix of a band he’s working with, paying work. Plus we’ve had many people contact us as listeners who said they would buy our record on iTunes from that exposure. So it’s a good site. I have not found anything else like it. [UPDATE: OK, so I totally got busted on this site and they deleted both my artist and listener accounts. Proceed at your own risk, if you want to play it safe, just be an artist and let the fates do what they will, don’t try to work the system.]

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 18: MOG and Discogs

MOG.COM

“Mog” is referring to a “music blog”. This site exists for people to blog about and share music they like. You can create an account on this site, and blog about your music and other music similar to yours. You can upload images and even songs. Other people can subscribe to your mog and you can subscribe to theirs. I have barely done anything on this site personally, but it’s on my list, and well worth getting into. Also, I have not yet figured out where they draw their music files from, because some songs come ready for listening, and others do not have any play function. I believe they link to some other source to determine which songs have the play function. If you figure it out, let me know.

DISCOGS.COM

Discogs is a community-built database of music information. A site with discographies of all labels, all artists, all cross-referenced. You can personally submit all of the credits for your CD and also, if you like, sell your CD through their site, though I’m not sure that gets much traffic. It’s just another place to have information about your music show up in search results. You do have to meet a certain level of “street cred” in order to have your info be accepted, like it must be nationally available for purchase or something of that nature. But check it out and add yourself to the system if you can.


[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Pormote Yourself Part 17: Facebook & NashvilleMusicPros.com

FACEBOOK.COM

I’m sure everyone knows about Facebook. It’s always good to just keep your name in people’s heads to stay on their radar, and it’s all about connections, which is what Facebook is for, right? You can add your Reverb Nation widget to your Facebook page, and also your iLike songs. But more importantly, you should most definitely create a music profile for yourself on Facebook where people can sign up as fans. If you do that, you should broadcast it to your MySpace friends. In some ways this can be risky because if you have only 3 fans, and they all have the same last name as you do, you seem kind of pitiful. But on the other hand, it’s cool when people sign on as fans and you have no idea who they are or how they found you. And even cooler when they post comments to you! Plus you can import your blog via rss from Blogger or whatever site you use. Here is where I've learned the using the MySpace blog as my rss source is NOT good, as it doesn't let outsiders click through to read the whole post. So I transfered our main blog to blogger for the better rss feed.

NASHVILLEMUSICPROS.COM - FREE

This is a relatively new site, of the same concept as MySpace, but strictly for Nashville musicians. In fact, you must first get your profile approved by the site administrator to make sure there are only professional musicians on there. So it’s a smaller web of people, and more manageable than MySpace, and so far is spam free. Look me up on here too and be my friend, Ellen Tift.

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 16: GarageBand.com and iLike.com

GARAGEBAND.COM - Not affiliated with the Garage Band software.

One appeal of GarageBand.com is that you can create your profile and then enter your songs in their “song contests” to be reviewed and ranked by other members and hopefully climb their charts. [You either need to pay for the song entry or review about 40 songs to earn an entry.] I have found this process to be painfully slow and unrewarding to be totally honest. If you do decide to create a profile on this site, your songs will automatically be added to iLike, which is good because then people on facebook can add them to their profiles. However, the down side is, if you are on garageband.com then you are not able to do any direct interaction with your music on iLike.com, like uploading songs. That is lame. I am about to delete my garageband account because it hasn't really benefited me, and that will free me up to work directly with iLike.

iLIKE.COM

As a music listener, you can create your profile on iLike.com, and add the iLike sidebar to your iTunes program. Like Last.fm, it will give you the opportunity to be “friends” with people who have similar musical taste as you. But more importantly, it’s a good idea to create your own artist page on iLike.com. This will allow you to have people add themselves as your fans, and for you to send out notes to everyone etc. Your iLike page will also link to your main website, your facebook music profile, your garage band page, and your CD Baby page. And it will allow you to post to your MySpace blog from your iLike page. Nice! Plus you can manage your songs that are available for people to add to their Facebook page, and you can get updates on how many profile adds and dedications have been made on each of your songs. I confess that I personally have barely made use of the Worldwide Groove Corporation profile on iLike, but it’s there for me when I’ve got the time to work it.

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 15: Indie Music Reviews

INDIE MUSIC REVIEWS

Do a google search for websites and magazines that are willing to review music by indie artists, and see what their protocol is for sending in your music. For the ones that accept submissions, make sure your music is the right genre for them, and then put together a nice cover letter which gives them a brief description of your project, and TELL THEM WHY YOUR MUSIC IS RIGHT FOR THEIR SITE OR MAGAZINE. ADD THESE PEOPLE TO YOUR DATABASE. This is how we got a review in Electronic Musician Magazine. If you can get some legit reviews either of a live show or a recorded project, that’s material for your press kit, and worthy of a blog post and bulletin. Any good review should be broadcast to your contact list, because it’s all about perception. If your contacts perceive that you’ve got stuff going on, that’ll give you more credibility. But if they never hear from you or about you, they won’t think of you at all. You want people to think about you positively.

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 14: Google Alerts

GOOGLE.COM/ALERTS

Google lets you set up a google alert for any word or phrase you want. You can set one up for your name and another for the name of your record, and you will be notified when the google robot indexes any new sites with your name. It helps if you’ve got a word you’ve invented as part of your CD name, because then you know it’s definitely about you if it shows up. [I invented the word “chillodesiac” as part of our record name.] THIS IS HOW I FIND PEOPLE WHO’VE UPLOADED MY MUSIC FOR FREE ILLEGAL DOWNLOADS. You will want to be able to stop pirating of your music in its tracks, so be sure to set a google alert up, and it will come right to your email box. But also, it’s really nice when you get a google alert and find out that someone out there has blogged about your music. Then you can send them a nice note of appreciation.

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 13: ReverbNation.com = WIDGETS!

REVERBNATION.COM - Widgets!! Widgets!! Widgets!! and MORE!

This site is great because you upload your tracks and they generate lovely little music playing widgets which can be placed on any website that takes html. These widgets not only play music, but they can also show your performance schedule, and allow people to sign up for your mailing list, link to your youtube videos and offer free song downloads. And anyone who likes your music can place the widget on their site if they want, thus giving you more exposure, while allowing you the power to change the widget if you want. Since my record [Chillodesiac Lounge, vol. 1: FEVER] has cover tunes which are against the MySpace policy, I can’t put them on my MySpace player. To get around this, I have a Reverb Nation widget on my MySpace page so people can listen to my whole record. I also went a long time with a widget on my main website, since it was so much easier than creating a player myself for my site. I also sometimes paste in a widget when I post a bulletin on MySpace, so people can hear the music, or on a blog post. This is a truly great resource, and it’s totally FREE. As this site is developing, they are partnering more with MySpace, and now you can rss your MySpace blog onto your reverbnation profile, as well as import your friend count to show as “fans” on your reverbnation widgets. You can also import your twitter status onto your reverbnation page. You can also make this you hub of your mailing list and even choose to do digital distribution through them. I still choose CD Baby because there is no annual fee.

Unfortunately BLOGGER doesn't allow you to embed these widgets in their blogs, but MySpace does. You can see ours on our myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/wwgroovecorp

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

Listen to the newest "When I Fall in Love" Sneak Peak.

Hey everyone,
We're printing a final mix of "When I Fall in Love" [ft. Ingrid DuMosch]. This is the UNMASTERED VERSION. Just a sneak peak of something on our next release.

http://www.reverbnation.com/tunepak/1641271

Thanks for caring.

WGC

How to Promote Yourself Part 12: Ping & Tiny URLs

PING.FM

I love ping! Why? Because it provides me with the opportunity to update my status on several websites all at once. I can either send an email or text message, or log onto their site and post a status update or mini-blog and they do the rest of the work. It shows up on Twitter, Linked In, Plaxo, MySpace, Reverb Nation etc. If I wanted to, I could also have it show up on my Facebook account, but I’ve chosen not to do that for the following reason. All of those except facebook are my “artist” profiles, and therefore, I keep my status updates on topics that I feel comfortable sharing with people I don’t know. I actually don’t even know who most of the people are who follow me on Twitter, though I suspect most of them want to sell me either porn or pharmaceuticals. Facebook on the other hand is much more personal, and my status updates are often more personal than I feel comfortable just putting “out there”. I still haven't figured out how to connect ping to update the status on our artist page at Facebook, but that's on my list.

Tiny URL dot COM [AND BIT.LY AND OW.LY] I have to put "dotCOM" or else it gets edited when I post this. And apparently you cannot type tiny and url without a space either. boo.

So now you’re on Amazon and iTunes, and you want to link to your pages from your YouTube pages, but they don’t allow html. Yet if you just put a url [http://www.whatever.com] in your text, that becomes its own link. Too bad your Amazon and iTunes urls are 4,563 characters each. That’s where ..-dot-com [or bit.ly, or ow.ly] can be of assistance. You can generate a much shorter alias url to use, and it even allows you the option of creating a custom alias url which is much shorter and easier on the eyes. So you paste in: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw_0_17?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-music&field-keywords=worldwide+groove+corporation&x=0&y=0&s prefix=worldwide+groove+corporation And they allow you to generate http://www.tiny url DOTcom/YOU-Amazon or whatever you type in for the text after the slash. Lovely. This is also helpful in putting a url in your status updates, though some services, like Twitter, automatically generate a shorter url on your behalf.

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

testing the new blog

Hi! I'm testing this blogging site to see if it's indeed better for importing via rss to other sites like Facebook and iLike etc.

The Pressure is on... 3AM blog by Ellen.

The pressure is on... 3AM blog by Ellen.
Category: Music

Hi everyone!
Man alive have we been busy. Not only are we in the process of trying to find some space to relocate [and fixing up the current space to sell], but also we are under a sudden and fast deadline to finish up some new downtempo tracks for the next release. I can't divulge certain details yet until things are finalized, but let's just say that our team is expanding and that's a great thing for getting the name Worldwide Groove Corporation out there.

It's funny, tonight we opened up all of the song files we have started, all at various stages of development. Some are practically finished, others are a 30 second snippet of an idea, and one so far exists only inside of my brain, but is fully complete nonetheless. So we are assessing which tracks we can possibly have finished within the next 2 weeks, and having to make some decisions accordingly.

Some of these decisions have to do with track names. We have a few instrumentals which, when Kurt opened the file and started programming them, quickly chose random names like "2AM", "Nectar", and "Daydream". But we need to think big picture and about the flavor of our project. So far we have "branded" our artist releases under the downtempo lounge category, reconstructing famous jazz standards into chillout tracks. So the cover titles are My Funny Valentine and Fever etc. We named our originals things like "Mimosa" and "Midnight in Venice". So if we want to thing of appropriate song titles, they need to seem to fit with that general mood, and also fit the song.

Another interesting thing is that on the first record, I personally had primarily begun the programming and production on the first 4 tracks, workshopping my ideas and giving Kurt a good sense of my vision until he was fully on board with the concept and interested in working more on it. But this time around, life is quite different. Not only do I have a preschooler to entertain all day long, but the gear has changed, and I'm not as equipped, nor do I have long stretches of time, to sit and noodle around with ideas. But this time, Kurt is the one beginning ideas on tracks, and I feel a bit awkward and out of control on things.

It's also been an interesting show to see the flavor of the tracks we have started. Kurt's tendency on these has been to go for the slow to mid tempo, plateau feeling, espionage sounding tracks. Which can be very cool on a project, however, we don't have a very strong representation of the more fun and quirky side of things, like we had with Tangerine and Fever [More Cowbell Remix] on the first project. Both of which were very much my influence. So, I'm lobbying for a greater swing over to the fun factor, and hoping to get some electro-kitsch elements happening.

The bottom line is, when we are working on a track, I ask myself "does this music make this room seem like a cooler place to be?" Or "would I enjoy having this as the back drop to a small social gathering?" If it doesn't lend itself to that emotionally, then we tweak it until it does. There's one track in particular that has some string parts on it, which are cool, but they are too tense and not emotionally consistent with our other tracks. It's those big picture perspectives that make a huge difference in a project.

OK, I need to try to get back to sleep. I just thought I'd take advantage of my insomnia tonight and blog a bit.

Ellen

How to Promote Yourself Part 11: Twitter & TWT.fm

TWITTER.COM

Twitter is a site that simply focuses on status updates, and has recently been getting quite a bit of buzz. Other people can subscribe to your status updates, and you can subscribe to theirs, and this is what some call “micro-blogging” which is a fast easy way to share your thoughts. Some people hate it, others love it. I find it extremely useful, and have now put my twitter url as part of my email signature. You can rss feed your twitter updates to different profiles like Reverb Nation etc., so it’s less work, and it’s simply a way to keep your name fresh in people’s minds. Just be aware of who can see your tweets, and keep the content within the range of what is appropriate. I would also recommend keeping things positive and upbeat. You don’t want to establish your identity as a bitter and angry person. Also, think about how personal you want to make it. Hilarious as it is, [Fake] Tina Fey’s tweet which said “I don’t know why I even bother chewing corn anymore” may be a little bit more graphic and intimate than a musician should go. I’ll write more on that in another section. Look me up http://twitter.com/wwgroovecorp Another benefit of this is that you can follow key industry people on Twitter and get some very helpful information, like Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby etc.

THERE IS A PRINCIPLE IN MARKETING CALLED THE RULE OF SEVEN. IT BASICALLY STATES THAT IT TAKES A PERSON SEVEN REPETITIONS OF HEARING YOUR NAME TO REMEMBER IT, OR TO FIND IT FAMILIAR UPON RECALL. Actually, I think it may take even more than that in these days of people being barraged with information and advertisements at every turn. My reason for bringing this up is, if there is some way people can hear from you more often [but not so often that you become spammy and get rejected], then the more familiar your name will be, and people gravitate toward what is familiar. That’s why it’s good to get yourself into as many places as frequently as you can, in a positive way. Trying to blog regularly can become cumbersome, so just sending out occasional interesting status updates is a fast and easy way to put yourself into people’s brains, even if for just a few moments.

TWT.FM

This site is affiliated with Twitter and it exists solely for the purpose of allowing people to tweet a quick url of a song they want to share with other people, and then they can click on it and listen to it. I’m not sure at this time where TWT.FM gets their catalogue of music, though I do know that YouTube videos are on the list. So at the very least if you create a YouTube video of your song, that is one way to show up on TWT.FM.

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 10: YouTube.com

YOUTUBE.COM

YouTube and iMovie can be your new best friends if you use them to your advantage. Any time you’re in the studio working on your music, take video of interesting moments. Don’t feel the need to have the camera rolling all day long, just stage footage if you need to, that’s how they do it on TV. [I’ve had experience with 2 reality TV shows, and they were both totally NOT real! Everything was strictly for the camera and scenes that were supposedly impromptu were shot 4 and 5 times over.] Then you can edit a 3 to 7 minute “behind the scenes” or “making of” video and post it on YouTube. Be smart about choosing your title, description, and tags, so that it’s optimized for search results. Also, once you get your songs mixed and mastered, go ahead and edit a video to your finished songs. Even something as simple as the CD cover graphic in a static shot with the music playing is done quite frequently, and it’s just one more opportunity for free exposure. A video like this is also advantageous because it may be the only way you show up on some other sites that draw their content from YouTube, like TWT.FM [see following].

When Melinda Doolittle was at the peak of her American Idol fame, we put out a video podcast of us talking about what it was like to work with Melinda on our record. Totally true and directly tied to our music, and the last time I checked it had over 17,000 views. That’s 17,000 times someone has heard about Worldwide Groove Corporation and our record. We edited other videos of us talking, us in the studio, and just our CD graphic with the finished music. They’ve gotten up to 5,000 views each. This is all FREE exposure for our music.

When you’re editing the video just ask yourself what content would be interesting to a complete stranger who doesn’t know anything about you. Shave off every fraction of a second that you don’t need. Tell your story. Try to make it interesting. Surely you’ve watched enough TV to have an idea of how to pace the editing and make it keep moving. Take the time to do this because once you finish and it’s online, it will keep working for you even while you sleep. Then you can post these same videos to your various profiles like MySpace, iLike, Virb etc. And you can link to specific song videos from your ReverbNation songlist.

ANOTHER APPROACH: Everyone has heard stories of artists who become YouTube sensations by posting videos of themselves singing cover tunes either acapella or with a guitar, and suddenly they have a half million views. Some of these people are eventually found out to have already had a record deal and it turns out the whole thing was contrived. In these cases, much of that person’s appeal is gone since people like to think they’ve discovered something on their own. However, there are some other people like Julia Nunes [look her up and watch how she does “Accidentally in Love” and her “Answers to questions Part 4” videos to see a low frills, yet creative and entertaining approach] who have truly organically created a massive following simply by being consistent, entertaining, talented, and interesting. Not everyone has the personality to achieve this, but YouTube can be invaluable if you choose to utilize it and put in the time and effort. Stay true to YOUR personality and use your strengths.

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 9: iTunes & Links

iTUNES

You can read about how to get your music on iTunes in the sections about CDBaby and Tunecore. The reason I’m writing about it in the context of promoting yourself is to bring up the issue of actively promoting yourself on iTunes. One of the best ways to introduce your music to new listeners is to create iMixes on iTunes of playlists. A well constructed playlist of music that is similar to yours, and which includes one or two of your tracks can be a valuable tool. The trick is, you need to get your iMix voted on, so that it will show up on the pages of the other artists on that iMix. We are similar to artists like Goldfraap, Thievery Corporation, Zero 7, and Frou Frou. So if we were on an iMix with those artists, and it just so happened to be one of the “top rated” iMixes that they were on, then it would show up on their main iTunes page, or the page of the specific project the songs are from.


ITMS LINK MAKER

The url for this site is long and ugly, so just google the name and you’ll find it. This is the site that will generate the direct link to your music in iTunes, so that you can link directly to it from your various profiles for people to buy your music. Once you generate this url, you can convert it to something short and lovely at ...com or some other site like that which is great for texts and tweets.

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 8: All Record Labels.com

ALLRECORDLABELS.COM

This website has an enormous list of record labels, grouped by genre, and by city or country. When we got our 100 copies of our partial release printed up, we went through the list of labels in our genre, CREATED A DATABASE, and one by one checked out their websites. Many of them were out of business, but several were still going strong. For the labels that seemed right for us, we emailed them and asked permission to submit our project. In that email we gave them a short description of our record, and a link to where they could listen if they wanted to take the time. For the ones that responded, we then wrote a cover letter, mentioning how we’d communicated in email, and then again gave them a brief description of our project, and depending on what we’d accomplished at that point [like airplay and licensing], we mentioned some of that. Then we mailed them a CD WITHOUT THE SHRINK WRAP. [ALWAYS take off the shrink wrap when you’re giving your CD to someone in the industry, it’s a courtesy to save them time.] For the people who didn’t respond the first time, we emailed them again. If they didn’t respond after that, we left them alone. This is how we got 10 song licenses for various compilations before our CD was even finished. Having that to promote our full release was hugely valuable.

[Hi all, Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 7: Amazon, Barcodes, Soundscan

AMAZON.COM/ADVANTAGE

You can sell your CD through Amazon.com through their Amazon Advantage program. You simply create and account, YOU MUST HAVE A UPC CODE ON YOUR CD AND THE CD MUST BE SHRINK WRAPPED for this, and then they will order one or two copies of your CD for their warehouse. They pay you after your CD sells.

You will want to be on Amazon.com for more reasons than just selling your CD. [See what I will write for Pandora and Live365.] The down side is they keep over half of the money, and deduct the $35 annual fee from your sales, but the up side is, you’re on Amazon.com which puts you through to all of the other websites that are “powered by Amazon.com”. PLUS you can then create your own Amazon Marketplace account and sell your CD directly through their site. But you can’t do the Marketplace thing if there is no preexisting listing, which is why you need the Amazon Advantage account first. So, Amazon Advantage means THEY fulfill the order, and keep more money. Amazon Marketplace means YOU fulfill the order and get more money.

BARCODING.COM/UPC/

If you get a UPC code number for your project, you can generate the barcode graphic on this site for free.

SOUNDSCAN.COM

If you’ve got a barcode on your CD, you should consider registering it with Soundscan.com so it can be tracked. Who knows? Your project might be a hot seller and it would be a shame if no one was counting. Just because a site like Amazon.com may report your sales to Soundscan doesn’t mean Soundscan is keeping track. If they don’t know what project belongs to that number, they’ll discard the stats. So YOU need to give them the UPC code number and the title of the project. You can either print out your registration and fax it in, or register it via email. A&R people at record labels sometimes look at the Soundscan reports, and if they see a new artist getting lots of sales, it gets their attention. You just never know.

ANOTHER THOUGHT: The previous paragraph is based on what I’d been told over the years by my friends in the music business, however recent personal experience has made me think there may be another side to this. We have a guy who wants to sign us as an artist to a pseudo record deal, basically taking our project we released in 2007 [independently] and repackaging it with a few new songs. He expressed concern over our soundscan numbers because if they were too high, the label might not perceive this project as a “clean” release. So... do what you want.

[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 6: Cross Promote!

CROSS PROMOTE CROSS PROMOTE CROSS PROMOTE

Choose 2 or 3 important urls [like your home page, myspace, twitter etc.] and put them as your email signature. [I wouldn’t do more than 3 or it’s too much.] Link your MySpace account to your Facebook, iTunes, Amazon, Twitter, YouTube etc. pages. Link Facebook to MySpace and the others I mentioned. Put your other links in your video descriptions on YouTube, especially iTunes and Amazon or any other site where people can purchase your music. Tweet out various urls at different times through your twitter account. Link to all of your other profiles from your homepage. Occasionally post a short blog and/or bulletin with all of your profile urls. Make it super easy for people to find ways to buy your music, and be your fan. This is very important because it’s hard enough to build up your numbers [that the whole world can see] on each profile, but if people who like you on MySpace can then easily find you on Facebook or iLike and be your fan there too, that’s only going to help you.

[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

Geek Talk: Death of a Hard Drive

Death of a Drive

Kurt here.....So today was like any other Monday morning. I came into the studio to start my day of work, looking forward to working on a new downtempo track, and turned on my drives. I have a project drive that all my recent and current projects are on, and I have a dedicated drive that houses my entire sample library. It’s somewhere around 350 gigs of sounds. Well it didn’t spin up! I checked all the cabels etc. Nothing...pure silence. So I took the drive out of the case and used a contraption made by Weibetech that allows you to power bare drives up and mount them on your desktop via USB. I thought perhaps the power supply for the hard drive case had gone bad. However, the drive still did not spin up.

So that was it, my 750 gig Seagate drive that was only a bit over a year old was officially deceased. I went to Seagate’s website to enter the serial and model number and the drive is covered under a warranty so I will get a replacement.....but.....how will I work until then? There are no places in town to go drive and pick up an internal 750 gig ATA drive.

Well here’s the really cool part. I had made a “clone” of the drive earlier this month. There is a program called Carbon Copy Cloner that creates an exact clone of the drive, as a disk image. When the disk image is double clicked, it mounts on the desktop as any physical hard drive would. The name of the disk image is the same as the drive it cloned. So...I booted up Logic not quite sure if my EXS library would be there, or if Stylus RMX and Omnisphere’s libraries would show up in the plugs. To my delight, everything is working exactly as if my real drive were still mounted.

We all know it’s important to backup, and in my case, having a dedicated sample drive cloned as it’s own disk image saved my butt. So I would encourage anyone who HASN’T cloned your sample library, or other important data, to go download Carbon Copy Cloner. Did I mention it’s shareware?!! That’s right, they encourage donations, but you can use it for free! I also use a program called Super Duper for an automatic nightly scheduled backup of my project drive, which is backed up to it’s own disk image. Then of course TimeMachine backs up my Mac Pro's internal hard drive all the time, so between those three, I’m covered. Are you?

How to Promote Yourself Part 5: Blogs & One Sheets

DON’T FORGET TO BRUSH... I MEAN BLOG.

It seems that keeping an interesting and regular blog is now a requirement for anyone who’s trying to build a fanbase. Fans now expect to be able to stay posted on events, and even comment back, and yes, even get a response from the artist at times. You’ve got to win people over with your story, your personality, your life. If you’re in the studio, document that process, and even post in the studio video. If you’re doing studio work, tell about your latest session, giving interesting little anecdotes. Or even just give a great cookie recipe or tips on where to get a free meal on your birthday. Anything that might be interesting. Put this on your to do list. Just keep in mind that it’s open to the public, so don’t start slamming people openly unless you want to potentially burn that bridge.

Also several sites allow you to bring your blog in from other sites via RSS feeds. So if you post a blog on MySpace, you can bring it into your iLike, Facebook, Reverb Nation, and Last.fm profiles among others. Once you get that set up, it’s nice to not have to post it in multiple places, it just shows up each time you post it to MySpace. If this seems to labor intensive, at least consider “micro-blogging” which I’ll write about more under the Twitter section.


ONE SHEET

This is not one sheet. It’s A one sheet. A one sheet is something you’ll need if you want to pitch your CD to any retail store. I learned about this just by reading articles online. It basically includes the following information: a photo of your CD, the title, the track list, the playing time, a paragraph or two about your project, airplay or performances in the area that might drive people to buy it, press quotes, UPC code, wholesale price, suggested retail price. When you approach a store’s buyer about carrying your CD, if you don’t know what a one sheet is, you’ll look like you don’t know what you’re doing. If you’ve got a decent one sheet, they will want it to help make their decision. ADD THESE PEOPLE TO YOUR DATABASE.

CDs are quickly becoming more scarce in the retail market, and it was predicted that last Christmas would be the last Christmas that CDs are sold. These are interesting times of change to be sure. It seems, though, that there are still boutiques that are image oriented that carry music if it fits their image. We got our CDs into a very upscale men’s clothing store in Belgium simply because the owner contacted us on MySpace just to say he liked our tracks. I noticed he had a posh clothing store and responded by asking if he’d like to carry our CD. He decided to order 10 copies and see how they moved. It’s the only title they carry. You just never know!

[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 4: Domains and Business trappings

DOMAIN NAME & DEDICATED EMAIL ADDRESS

With all of the other options now available, having your own website is becoming less and less necessary. However, if you have not already done so, I would highly recommend reserving your domain name. The cheapest place I’ve found to do this is GoDaddy.com where you can reserve a .com for about $9 a year. Then you can forward that domain name to any site you want, so you could forward yourname.com to your MySpace profile if that’s all you’ve got. Also, get an email address that is whatever@yourname.com, that will be much better when you send a business email than some gmail account. That also gives another subtle indication that you’re here to stay. I believe there are some mail services [like aol?] that offer to give you whatever you want as the last half of your email address if it’s available.

But if you do want to go ahead and set up your own website, then you should also be able to use your domain name as the back half of your email address. YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY DO THIS. Imagine someone at a record label gets a package from someone. They’ve got a home printed CD label, a letter on plain white paper, and the person’s email address is “luv2sing87@gmail.com”, and it all came in a plain white envelope. That says amateur. Then contrast that to a professionally duplicated CD mailed with a professionally printed address label, a letter on matching letterhead, and the contact email is something@yourname.com. That will be taken much more seriously. That says you’re taking this seriously.

If you’ve looked into getting yourname.com and it’s not available, it’s quite common to have yournamemusic.com or yournamerocks.com. Or some other variation that still shows you’ve got it going on. I’d go for .com over .net. If and when you do set up your own website, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to order your CD, and make the link to purchase very clear on every single page. Get an account with paypal.com and go to the “merchant tools” section. In there you can generate a “buy now” button with all of the parameters you set for people to buy your CD and pay through paypal. Then once you do make a sale, be sure to ship it in a timely manner, and be sure to thank them for their purchase. ADD THESE PEOPLE TO YOUR DATABASE.


BUSINESS CARDS

If you don’t already have business cards, you should get some immediately. This too makes you seem more established, and it’s great to just pull one out quickly if you meet someone, and have them take it with them. It’s best to get a cellphone number and keep it forever. Put a cell phone number, email address, and website where they can hear your tracks on it. Don’t put your land line or street address unless you’re in a location you’ll be staying for a very long time. And don’t change your cell phone number if you can help it. There’ve been several times I’ve needed to track a singer down ASAP for a session the next morning, and the phone number I have for them is no longer current. I end up calling someone else because I need to get it booked.


LETTERHEAD

In this age of digital communication, you won’t be sending out snail mail all of the time. But when you do, putting your correspondence on your own letterhead makes you seem much more established and professional. Sending your press kit out with your logo on the address label, your letterhead, and your CD will give a much better impression than plain white printer paper and a plain white envelope.

[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 3: Database & Logo

DATABASE [It’s all about who you know.]

One of my weakest areas is taking the time to really organize my contacts. Relationships and contacts are vital. Absolutely vital. As you get more of them, you need to keep track of who falls into which category, and when you’ve communicated and what was said. Take the time to enter people’s info into your database, and come up with casual and friendly reasons to get in touch so that you stay on their radar. If you are not on people’s radar, you might as well be invisible. Walk the careful line of staying in touch without being annoying. DO NOT ONLY EMAIL PEOPLE WITH THE ‘Hey got any work for me?’ MESSAGE! That is not only annoying, but makes you look needy and desperate. Perhaps when you have something cool you’re working on, just send out a little email blast letting people know that you were honored to be a part of such and such, and they can check out the project at whatever website. And then, of course you can include all of your contact info in each email, or even attach your vCard, or whatever your address book program calls it. Reaching out like this is totally acceptable, and anyone in the business understands that you’ve GOT to promote yourself.


LOGO

You’ve probably not considered having your own logo, but the reality is that you are in BUSINESS, and businesses have logos. Having a well designed logo that fits your sound and personality can go a long long way. It can tie all of the elements together in how you present yourself. To have a great logo on your website, myspace page, CD, business card, letterhead, etc. makes you seem much more established and professional. Logos are tricky though, so be prepared to spend a long time developing what you want, and don’t settle for the “name swoosh”. [your name with something similar to the Nike swoosh] We spent about 5 months, going through 3 graphic designers and about $5,000 when all was said and done. But for that $5K, we got a professionally designed logo, business cards, address labels, and letterhead. YOU DO NOT NEED TO SPEND THAT MUCH. Give yourself time, but keep this on your to do list. It makes a DIFFERENCE!


[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 2: Photos

PHOTOS
Make sure you’re thinking big picture [meaning of your entire
musical presence... not a really large photo...] when you get artists
photos taken. [And for the love, please do not stand by a tree trunk
and smile at the camera.] You need to make sure everything about the
entire package all fits into whatever image you’re going for. It’s
good to ask yourself the question: who is my demographic? [Demographic
is a fancy word for the group of people who like a certain thing.] Are
you appealing to the Clay Aiken, Celine Dion crowd? Or the Snoop Dogg
crowd? Make sure you LOOK and DRESS like you SOUND. Then make sure
your pictures have that vibe. Don’t dress like a hard core punk rocker
if you’re singing adult contemporary love ballads. Your CD is a
product, a commodity, which needs to be marketed. And if you’re not
well defined and streamlined in your identity as an artist, you will
have a hard time finding an audience to which you will stick. And you
want to be very sticky! [And heck, if you’ve got money to hire
professional hair, makeup, wardrobe, art direction, etc. go for it.]

ABOUT RELEASING A RECORD

I’m going to leave the following paragraph, but even one year has made enough difference to change the situation in the industry. See below this paragraph for my updated thoughts.

[WHAT I SAID IN 2008: If it’s looking like your full record might take a few years to complete, [which is entirely possible because life happens] you might want to consider getting the first 5 or 6 songs mixed and mastered, and then print up 100 copies of a “partial release”. This will allow you to at least start getting it out there and get some momentum on it. We did this with our first 6 songs, and shipped the prerelease out to record labels and some radio stations that played our genre of music. [Good thing we did, since we had no idea it would still be TWO YEARS before we’d be finished.] From that we got 10 song licenses for various compilations, we got one song on the Banana Republic playlist, we got airplay on a nationally syndicated radio show, and we made some extremely valuable contacts which later paid off with CD orders when we had our full release finished. I am SO GLAD we did this!!! It’s the best decision we made. It might also give you just a little bit of satisfaction so that you’ll take your time and do the whole record right and not rush just to get it finished. Another option would be to call it an EP. But later after you’ve recorded more, put it ALL together because you can sell a full length CD for more.]

THIS IS WHAT I SAY IN 2009: In this age of digital music, it seems that the option of releasing a “single” or “EP” is so easy, it only makes sense to do so. If you only have a budget to get one song recorded and mixed by professionals, then go ahead and get a good looking graphic put together and digitally release that one song as a single. If you do it on CD Baby you only need to pay the one time $35 registration fee, and you can leave it out there forever without ever having to pay again. Then you’ll show up on iTunes and Amazon digital etc. Then after you get a few more songs recorded put them together with your previous single that you released, and put it out there as an EP. Then, after you record a few more songs [3 to 5], put those few songs out as another separate EP. Digital only. Then you can record a couple of more songs, and put it ALL together as a full length CD. Be sure, though, that you do have something previously unreleased on your new CD. One benefit of this is that when someone looks you up online, they see that you’ve released 4 different projects, which looks better than just one full length CD [even though it’s not really]. So it gives the perception that you’ve got more going on. One caution, be sure if you put it all together on one project, that the music production is cohesive, so they actually sound like they all belong on the same record. If your sound has changed over time, then keep the ones you like, and put them out on a new project, leaving the others off.

Don’t think that you don’t need any physical CDs for a digital only release. You will need promotional copies, so spend your money and make sure they look very good. That way when you mail your CD to sites like Pandora.com, it will be taken more seriously.

No one else cares about your music or your career as much as you do. Don’t wait for someone else to come along and do things for you that you think you’re not good at. Just work at getting better and do them for yourself.

[Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I
created for my college students and break it down into a series of
blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and
your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released
artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are
manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking
it down into bite sized portions. ]

How to Promote Yourself Part 1: Your CD

Hi all,
Ellen here. I've decided to take a very long handout that I created for my college students and break it down into a series of blogs. This is a summary of what I know about promoting yourself and your music online. If you or someone you know is a self released artist who doesn't necessarily have a plan of action after the CDs are manufactured, subscribe to this blog and read the series. I'm breaking it down into bite sized portions. So here is part one...


YOUR OWN CD


Clearly your songs need to be very strong and your music must
sound great. If you can afford to hire a professional producer, you
should definitely do so. Trying to make a record without a producer is
like trying to shoot a movie without a director. You might end up with
a finished product, but having that objective person looking at the big
picture and bringing it all together is extremely valuable. You want
your songs to sound cohesive so they all belong together on the same
record. You also want a producer who will make sure that YOUR VOCAL
sounds fantastic. Don’t settle for someone who gives you hot guitar
tracks and then just leaves you on your own in front of the mic when it
comes time to cut the vocal.



When it comes to music production, there are three factors: FAST.
CHEAP. GOOD. You can only have two of those, but you can’t have all
three.


If you’re not sure about a producer, just offer to hire them for
one song to start with and see if you like working with them. You want
a person that you feel comfortable with who will bring out your best in
the studio. Depending on the genre of music, you could easily spend at
least a couple thousand dollars per song, but that should include
paying the musicians, and you should strive to have full ownership of
the masters. If a producer gives you a lower rate up front in exchange
for partial ownership of the master, that’s also another option. The
scenario of a producer “developing an artist” and not charging them for
their services is what many people often expect, but producers need to
pay the bills too. Plus if you’re on their no-money work roster, you’re
going to come last, after their money work. You could find yourself
still waiting for them to finish your project two years after you
started. And it may not always be easy to find a producer who believes
in you enough to work with you for free. So if you want to get
something done in a timely manner, just pay them for their services,
and walk away owning what you did.


Having a GREAT MIX and MASTERING are of utmost importance. A
crappy mix is a huge indicator of amateur work. Your songs must compete
sonically with what the major labels are releasing. You cannot forego
mastering.

ARTWORK


When you meet a person for the first time, what do you notice
more, what their face looks like, or how their voice sounds? When you
are putting together your CD packaging, do not underestimate the vital
importance of having a GREAT CD COVER. Good artwork is essential. Spend
some time in the record stores looking at the CD covers of other
musicians in your genre, and get some really good references for
whomever is designing your cover for you. Something like this, though
always subjective, is AS important as having good production and
mastering on your tracks.


If you’ve done any cover tunes on your CD, you will need to pay
out the mechanical licenses before you can get your CDs duplicated.
Hopefully, all of these royalties are processed through the Harry Fox
Agency, and if you’re getting less than 2,500 CDs printed, you can pay
online at songfile.com. Otherwise, you’ll need to find out from the
song’s publisher who processes their mechanicals. Please learn from my
mistake and get several hundred ‘FOR PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY’ copies
printed up if you have several cover tunes on your CD. We didn’t do
that, we got 2,000 CDs pressed with really nice expensive digipak
packaging, had to pay mechanicals on all of them, [which really adds up
for 8 covers per CD], and then ended up giving away 600 of those CDs.
Soooo... we paid hundreds of dollars in mechanicals that we will never
get back. We should have gotten 500 CDs in a cardboard sleeve printed
for promos. Live and learn.


STAY TUNED FOR MORE UNSOLICITED ADVICE...

Are you a Twit? Or is it Twitterer?

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Category: Music
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WGC

A Valentine...

Still trying to figure out what to give your sweetie tomorrow? Nothing says young love like a good old fashioned MIX TAPE! And here's what you can start with...

Did you know "Besame Mucho" means "kiss me a lot"? Of course you did, because you're a smarty pants! Well we've got several new remixes of that tune for you to enjoy just in time for Valentine's Day!


Listen to it all here:
http://www.reverbnation.com/tunepak/1156511
Or check it out on iTunes:

Wouldn't it be nice to let your sweetheart know they still give you butterflies? Now we've got 15 different ways to say it, with 15 different remixes of the song "You Still Give Me Butterflies"! Check it out!


Listen to it all here:
http://www.reverbnation.com/tunepak/1156520
Or check it out on iTunes:


We here at Worldwide Groove Corporation wish you a fabulous weekend.

Butterflies Remixed Preview

Hey everyone!
We are so excited about these two remix projects! Between the two of them there are 15 DJs from 10 countries on 4 continents. Several of them are professional DJs and producers, but they also include an economist from Poland, an auto mechanic from Portugal, and a South African high school student! We love the diversity of these projects. Please check this out.

Besame Mucho Remixed Sneak Peak