I can recommend entering this if you have an interesting sound or music project that fits one of their categories, which range from product to development, marketing to art.
Some of the people I work with at MTF Labs have been recipients of this award in the past. Four MTFers won the ISAbell awards and more were highly commended runners up.
Pictured above (seated L-R) are Vahakn Matossian (Human Instruments), Tim Palm (DJ Arthro) and Tim Yates (Drake Music and Hackoustic) who won for their brilliant accessible music product LoopFree, which was invented in the #MTFLabs in Stockholm 2018 and further developed with the support of an MTF Prize awarded by KTH Innovation.
Standing is Mordechai Braunstein whose CyMagic project brings the experience of music to deaf children and educates about the science of sound and vibration. An early version of CyMagic was tested at MTF Stockholm, then developed and showcased at MTF Pula in 2019.
Rani Dar (Play This Wall) and Viktor Löfgren (Thrive – Youth and Integration) also had projects selected as finalists and runners up, which was a remarkable achievement.
I haven’t asked you to review a site for a while, so I thought I’d get your take on this one. Put It On claims to be a home to the World’s Undiscovered Artists, which, depending on your point of view makes it either sound like a treasure trove, or a creative ghetto.
What do you think? Vibrant community? Showcase opportunity? Admission of defeat?
This is a follow-up post after yesterday’s piece about who you should send promos to. While we’re thinking along those lines, I thought I’d also get you thinking about your other possible points of influence.
It’s a great idea to send free promos to your friends and acquaintances and get a bit of buzz happening that way – but there are other things you can do to start that conversation going in ways that can spread your music and your brand to new audences.
If you’re in a band, and you play the kind of music that’s most likely to be enjoyed by university students, then I’m clearly not your target audience. I’m a 41 year-old guy with a wife and a teenage son. But, if you think about it long enough, you’ll realise that I do happen to come into contact with several hundred of your target audience members on a fairly regular basis…
As a result of the Humphreys and Keen thing over the past week, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about promos – free copies of albums sent to people in an attempt to find and build an audience – with the end goal of selling some records.
When I ran an independent jazz label back in the late 1990s, conventional wisdom was pretty simple: press 1000 CDs, and send out 100-200 of those copies as promos to influential people with radio shows, television programmes, newspaper columns and so on.
It was a bit of a lottery, and usually your record would either get a cursory mention in passing, or – most often – no mention at all.
The more astute reader might have noticed that I have retired New Music Ideas – the spinoff site from New Music Strategies. Its purpose was to act as a place to review and alert the readership to sites and services that may (or may not) be helpful.
It occurred to me recently that as there is such overlap between that site and this one, it didn’t make any sense to keep them separate – so from now on, this is where those reviews reside. But here’s the twist. I don’t do the reviews – you do.
I link to the site, post a short sentence or two about what it purports to be – and you let me (and everyone else here) know if it’s any good, if you’ve had any experience with them and if there are other, better services around. I’ve imported all the other reviews I did from the old site to here – but here’s the first at its new home.
Music Submit takes your music and sends it to genre-specific radio stations, online music magazines, online music directories, blogs, podcasts, indie record labels, and other electronic music media. It starts at $35 for 100 submissions, and tops out at 1000 submissions for $210.
Essentially, you’re outsourcing something that takes time, research and effort. But is it worth the money?
I know what’s on your website. It’s all that great stuff your fans like so much, right? Music, videos, photos, blog posts and so on. It’s a veritable goldmine of information, images and media. Anything they want to know about you, they can find out. Anytime they want to see you, that’s where they can go. Any desire to hear your recordings can be instantly gratified.
But y’know, there’s one thing your fans want from your website – perhaps even more than you and your music, incredible as that may seem. And I bet you’re not giving it to them. In fact, I bet they don’t even realise they want it.
Its aim is to provide useful resources, advice and strategies for innovation and success in the independent music sector in a rapidly changing technological environment.
NMS examines emerging technologies (and buzzwords) such as AI, blockchain, metaverse and 'Web 3.0', but focuses primarily on sustainability, music as a tool for social change, participation, equality and inclusion, and the ways in which music technologies can build better worlds.
