I thought I’d try the Bandcamp ‘share’ widget right here on my New Music Strategies page for a few reasons.
First, I’m doing some advisory work for Bandcamp (Disclaimer!), and I feel like I need to push this thing to its limits – and tell you all how insanely great it really is (and I’d genuinely say that even if I wasn’t helping them out).
Second, I really love the new Sola Rosa record and thought you might like to hear it.
And third, I wanted to actually get a bit of music onto New Music Strategies for a change. Hope that’s not too competitive or too much of a change of gear for you. I figured you probably like music just as much as I do.
Enjoy. And go get your own music up on Bandcamp too.
By the way – let me know how you get on listening to a whole album from within a blog page. Does it work for you?
Ourstage: “Your tastes will not just generate exciting new music for you to discover, it will also help take deserving artists to the next level of their careers. So go ahead and let your ears decide tomorrow’s hit-makers today. ”
After receiving a bit of encouragement (let’s not call it nagging) from a bunch of musicians who love the SoundCloud service, I’ve added a Dropbox to my sidebar. There it is, just under the Search bar. That way, if you want to send me one of your songs, you can just click it, upload – and I’ll get it in my Soundcloud Inbox.
I quite like the service – even though you can only upload 5 tracks a month without paying. It’s useful for promo-ing, for sharing tracks with people you’re working with and also for putting songs on your own site (though Bandcamp does that one better).
There seem to be three main approaches that independent artists take to the idea of record labels these days.
The first is that record labels are the best way to get your music out to the public. The internet is all well and good, and we are in favour of it, but people in record labels know what they are doing, they understand marketing, they have things like connections, promotion strategies, radio pluggers, PR, graphic design, branding, distribution, chart registration, barcodes, licensing, finance, and deals on pressing all sorted out. We’re going with them. 20% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
The second is that we live in a post-label world. We are all about DIY. There may be artists signed to record labels and that’s fine for them, I suppose… but this is a brave new era and we’re going to self-release. We’re not unsigned – we’re independent. We have all of the tools at our disposal to record, release, distribute, promote and make money from our music on our own terms, beholden to nobody, keeping all of the intellectual property and making all of the profits ourselves. We’ll do it on a tight budget, but we’ll do it because we are empowered to do so.
The third can be broadly categorised thus: We’re going to release through a Netlabel. As soon as we can figure out what a Netlabel is, that’s what we’re going to do.
Cherrypeel is the democratic music revolution, apparently. And by democratic, they don’t mean that it brings access to the excluded and disaffected; that it levels the playing field so that the powerful elite are not unfairly advantaged, or that it gives power back to the masses – but rather, it’s democratic because it has voting in it.
Visitors to the site can vote on songs. Most popular songs get recommended to other listeners. You can upload your songs to it and people can vote on them too. Add songs to your playlist, and stream them from the site.
Less a democracy and more a beauty pageant? A great way to help the best of the best rise to the top? Powerful means to promote your music? Interesting opportunity to discover more music you’ll like? What is this place?
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.
