Slash's Arcade Rocker app

The newest game is worth playing at despite anything though (especially at the $.99 price tag). Slash’s Arcade Rocker allows the guitar legend’s die hard fans to play along with three pre-loaded songs from Slash’s solo début album – By The Sword, Watch This and Doctor Alibi – as well as any Slash song in their music library (and not only Slash, just as in the regular AR you can play thousands of songs if they are in your iPod music library).

In addition to the music/rhythm game, the Slash Arcade Rocker app provides access to the latest news, blog, tour dates and other exclusive content from Slash’s official website, which was as well developed and is hosted by Ultimate-Guitar.com as part of its partnership with the guitarist.

“The Arcade Rocker iPhone app is one of the coolest apps I’ve seen yet,” said Slash. “I’m having a blast with it!”

The mobile version of Slash Arcade Rocker is available for iPhone/iPod touch/iPad users from the iTunes Store for $0.99 (a limited time offer). A free online version is available at slash.arcaderocker.com.

Don’t be greedy for a buck :) Share your thoughts in the comments if you buy the app!

Mistake #10: Not having a compelling image that is congruent with your music

Most musicians (and bands) severely underestimate the importance of their image. Yes, music is about ‘music’, but music business success is about a total package that includes music, image and visual stage show among other things that need to be fully developed in a congruent way.

Photo credit: Ryan Russell

Mistake #9: Trying to ‘get your name out there’

Although this seems to be a main goal of most musicians and bands, it is the wrong approach to start with. Before trying to be seen and heard as much as possible, it is often more important to focus on ‘converting’ the people who hear and see you into becoming actual fans. This ‘conversion’ is the first key to your promotional success, NOT getting seen or heard as much as possible.

Mistake #8: Believing that social media websites are the keys to online music promotion for musicians and bands

Social media websites are a tool. They are ONE piece of the online music marketing puzzle. Music industry companies (record labels, artist managers, booking agents, etc.) are far more interested in the popularity of YOUR website, not how many friends you have at MySpace, YouTube, Facebook or any other website that you do not own and control. Want to impress the industry with your band’s promotion? Build your website traffic.

Mistake #7: Not investing enough time into building your music career

Most musicians spend most of their time on music, but put very little effort into the many other critical elements needed to make it in the music business. If you are already a talented musician, you should invest at least 50% of your time into starting or advancing your music career. If you are still developing your musical skills, you should still invest around 25% of your ‘music’ time into building a future music career.

Mistake #6: Surrounding yourself with people who are negative, lazy and lack ambition

If you are very serious about becoming a professional musician and building a great career in music, then you absolutely must surround yourself with like-minded musicians.

Mistake #5: Having merely mediocre live performing skills

Many musicians, who are not yet in a good band, put off developing their live performing and stage presence skills. This is a big reason why talented musicians don’t get into really good bands that they audition for. Your music may be good, but a live ‘show’ requires more than great music. If people only wanted to hear the music, they would listen to you at home. Both fans and record labels want (and expect) to see a REAL show. Neglecting this area results in talented musicians and bands becoming quickly forgotten.

Mistake #4: Focusing on increasing the ‘quantity’ of fans instead of the ‘intensity’ of your fans

The ‘number’ of fans you have should always be your secondary focus (not your primary one) if you want to become successful in the music industry. The fact is, it is not the number of ‘fans’ that matters most, it’s the number of FANATICS which will contribute more directly to your success (or lack of it). This is particularly true in the beginning of a band’s music career. Focus more effort on converting your existing fans into raving fanatics. Learn to do this and the number of your overall fans will increase through powerful word of mouth.

Photo credit: weheartit.com

Mistake #3: Not enough cash flow to support your music career

Like it or not, it takes money to build a music career. Even if other people/companies are paying for your record, tour support, merchandise, etc. you still need to have the freedom to pursue opportunities as they come. Sadly, many musicians miss opportunities because they can’t afford to take advantage of them.In addition to a decent income, you also need the flexibility of being able to take time away from that income source to go into the studio, go on tour, etc. That is why learning how to teach guitar is such a great way to achieve both if you learn how to become a highly successful guitar teacher.

Mistake #2: Not enough depth in your music relationships

There’s an old expression, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” In music this is often modified to, “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you.” The truth is, it’s not about either. The most important aspect of connections within the music industry is how deep are the current relationships you have now and will develop in the future. You don’t want to simply know people or be known, you want people who know you to have a real deep connection with you so that you are always on the top of their mind when opportunities present themselves. Ask yourself, “What can I do right now to deepen my existing relationships further on an ongoing basis?”

Mistake #1: Having a fundamental misunderstanding about what record companies look for – and expect from new bands

This is a huge topic, but in a nutshell it’s very useful to think of record companies like a bank that lends money to people or small businesses. Record companies make most of their decisions about whom they will work with and what the terms will be in much the same way that a bank will determine who they will loan money to and what the terms of the loan will be. Both record companies and banks basically want to see 3 things:

1. How much value do you bring to the deal right now.
2. How much risk do you bring with you right now.
3. How much potential value and risk might you bring to them in the future after they invest in you.

If you want to buy a house, the bank wants to know a lot about the specific house you want to buy and EVEN MORE about YOU. Record companies are the exact same, they want to know about your music, your talent and your band, but they also care as much (or more) about YOU (and your band mates) as people. What about YOU makes a record deal a good or bad investment for them.

About the author: Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He mentors musicians online to develop their own professional music careers and provides free music career resources.

Photo by: Steve Wampler on Flickr

Thankfully for the more corporate enterprises, though unfortunately for the independent musician, the aforementioned big guys have started to see the benefits that can be reaped using the internet. Public broadcasting is a much wider option on the internet than it is in more conventional methods, such as television and the radio. General view counts will usually be lower on the internet, but only as long as popularity is limited. Once a broadcaster reaches a reliable, wide-reaching audience, the potential for reaching even higher view counts than television. One of the main reasons for this is that your chosen piece of music is constantly available, rather than being singularly broadcast. Much less money can be earned by showing off your music online, but once you reach a certain level of popularity the income begins to fly.

In taking advantage of this, some rather interesting stuff has found it’s way on to the internet. My main example here would be things like ‘Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog’. This is a web broadcast musical, forty-two minutes long and released in installments. Rather than just music, the internet allows the perfect tool for anything that can be created, regardless of budget, cast or preparation. Advertising in these manners is usually done entirely through word of mouth. However, since the company making the video or music file already have a considerable amount of capital behind them, they can put their work out for all sorts of international syndication. While they will undoubtedly spend much more money putting their work onto television, it could easily garner a much reduced reward when it comes to the outcome.

Creating music videos, at a low budget, is an incredibly common thing for any band or musician to indulge in. While some promoters are internet based, and can thus advertise your work all across the internet, but there are still limits to it. On the internet, everybody is on an even playing field. You put your work out there, usually in the same places as most of the more popular content, and hope that it draws attention. From there though, it’s out of your hands. The content can be passed, traded and downloaded, regardless of file size or type. This, though, is where the independent musician has an advantage.

For the independent musician, peer to peer file trading is the absolute best thing for their continuing popularity. If it’s just one or two people pooling together to throw out a track, it’s no big loss to have it traded for free between a few dozen people. For the big company throwing it’s weight around, they’re looking at a gigantic loss between the flight of thousands of free copies.

In a digital economy, big business still loses millions, while the independent musician has nothing but gains.

Tom Colohue is a fiction writer and music instructor from Blackpool, England. Though his main works are in the realms of fantasy, he also writes modern fiction for multiple websites, as well as theoretical and practical music lessons for magazines.

Read also: Effects Of The Internet: Musical Mobility, The Effects Of The Internet: Contract Giveaways, The Effects Of The Internet: “Making It”, The Effects Of The Internet: Music Distribution

Remember when you’re talking with music execs that your band is like a company. You have to convince them that you are worth investing in, and you do that by talking in business terms. Any executive is going to be impressed by someone who knows what the record label is looking for and possesses it in abundance.

1. Your music doesn’t mesh with this record company

Photo credit: tumblr.com/tumblelog/teemafia

The structure of a record company is actually a funny thing; even though we think of record labels as being huge, monolithic structures, they aren’t quite that. When people talk of getting signed to a major label record deal, they usually aren’t specifically referring to one of these labels (EMI, Sony, Warner, Universal). What they are usually referring to is a contract with one of the sub-labels that the major owns.

Major labels operate in such a way that that the chief label is usually more of a holding group than anything else. They have various kinds of labels underneath them, to specialize in certain types of music. Most major labels have smaller labels that specialize in rap, R&B, country, and rock. Your job is to find a label that focuses on your own musical direction. Do a little research. If you’re a death metal act, send your demo in to a label that specializes in metal. Match your strengths with theirs, and you become more attractive to the company. There’s also the added advantage of fewer levels of bureaucracy to wade through at a smaller label.

2. You don’t have a distinct identity

Photo credit: Emerson Merrick on Flickr

Who are you exactly? What do you play? What kind of people do you appeal to? These are the types of questions that you have to answer to appeal to record labels. If you’re torn between metal and acoustic folk music, you’re obviously going to alienate fans who would be drawn in by one or the other, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be this obvious. If you switch the type of music you play from one night to the next, you run the risk of driving away fans, even if it’s something as simple as focusing on crazy instrumental solos one night and focusing on simple, understated lyrics the next.

This isn’t to say that you can’t be an artist and combine your influences: going back to the example of folk and death metal, you can combine the two to form a cohesive whole, and attract fans to the music that that produces. You have to have your priorities straight: are you a pop band that has solos, or are you an instrumental improvisational band that has some pop melodies? Without a distinct identity you can’t sell yourself to your fans or the music company.

3. You don’t have a vision

Photo credit: weheartit.com

This is strongly linked with the last point. Where do you want to see yourself in four years? Give yourself an achievable goal, high, but within the realm of possibility. Do you want to hear yourself on the radio, or do you want to tour non-stop? Your vision of the band is going to decide what it grows into and where it grows to. If your focus is on touring, you need to focus your energy in that arena and partner with a record label whose emphasis is on high-touring groups and whose strengths match your desires. If, on the other hand, your desire is to chart on the Billboard Hot 100, you want to push your music and energy towards that goal. Think about what you want to do when you’re creating your music and looking for a label-your music should match where you want to go.

4. You don’t have any contacts with the music business

Photo credit: paperdolls.tumblr.com

This is a relatively easy thing to accomplish, compared to all the soul-searching that the previous points would take. When you know of the sublabel that you want to recruit, find out who the people are. Look them up on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any networking site. If you’re friends-of-a-friend, you’re in luck. Make friends with promoters in your area. Talk with the people who run the concert venues; they can connect you with touring bands, their managers, and perhaps even minor label workers. Make 50 e-mail addresses and write 50 different sets of e-mails to employees of the sublabel. Be creative. Woo your contacts.

5. Your stage show sucks

Photo credit: fuckyeahindieboys.tumblr.com

This point seems rather obvious, but some musicians simply don’t realize what their stage show fails to produce. Pantera labeled for years and were dismissed as crap because of faults in their live show. After they got together with Phil Anselmo they cleaned up their live show and signed to a major label, with tremendous success. Live shows are often the first point of direct contact for a major label interested in a band. Make your shows interesting: liven things up. There are already myriads of articles on this topic; there are so many things you can do to improve your performance from crowd interaction and style of playing to lights and special effects.

6. Your demos are crap

Photo credit: owlbookdreams on Flickr

Besides stage shows, this is the other point of first contact with labels. Sometimes bands will actually cut a few songs and send them in without objectively looking at the results (something that hurt Lynyrd Skynyrd in their career). A crappy demo tape will sink any chances you’ll have with a label. In the same vein, a demo can also lose a lot of what it is that makes your band unique. Whenever you’re cutting a demo, be sure that it captures your identity and vision from points 2 and 3. Even if your live show and your songs themselves capture you as a band, your demo may need some tweaking to show that to the label workers. It may even be something as simple as tweaking the levels—double-checking your work is worth your while.

7. You aren’t popular enough — you don’t have enough fans

Photo credit: no3rdw on Flickr

This may seem like a “duh” idea to most people, but it’s not quite as cut and dried as it may seem. Panic! at the Disco was able to sign with a label before they ever played a live show. You may also be in a town where there aren’t as many people as a city, so you can’t acquire the volume of fans that other bands can. In this case you have to show the label that you have the ability to draw in a high percentage of the people around you. A band from nowhere with 500 fans is more attractive to a label than a big city band with the same amount.

Make your case with the label executives: tell them about your drawing power. It’s a principle to start small before you expand on a much larger scale, and if you can make the case that you succeeded on at your own small local level, it can be very persuasive to the executives. But this doesn’t mean that you should content yourselves with the fans you already have. As a musician you should constantly be trying to reach out to fans in any way you can, through myspace, by posting videos on youtube, giving free concerts, playing at fans’ birthdays, writing thank you songs, etc. Again, there’s a wealth of material written on how to connect with fans.

8. Your music’s good, but I fell asleep when I was talking to you

Photo credit: Laurence 2 on Flickr

Somewhat linked to stage presence, this deals with the fact that some people can play guitar like gods but are incredibly boring to talk to. They lack any charm or charisma when they’re involved in a one-on-one conversation, and this is a kiss of death for any major aspirations for success. If you lack this skill, that puts a cap on the top end of your success, which decreases your value in the eyes of the music industry. Improve your personal skills. Act confidently. Reading up on how to handle interviews will help you out in this area.

9. It’s the Recession, sorry

Photo credit: andrewinpompey on Flickr

This is the dumbest excuse on the list. This is simply an excuse for something else. If you are attractive to a company, they will sign you. This just means that you’ve got to work more on the other items of this list than you would otherwise. Sell yourself to the company, use items 1-8 to prove to them that you’re well worth the investment. You’ve just got to be more persistent and make them see the incredible opportunity they have to invest in you as an artist.

10. You’re from the middle of nowhere

Photo credit: Simon Pais-Thomas on Flickr

This is a point that’s been made easier to overcome through the digital revolution, but is still one that can handicap your desirability to record companies. The obvious answers to this are to move somewhere else and to tour frequently in larger cities to put yourself in front of a large group of fans and record executives. You can also help to overcome the obscurity of your origins by pushing a lot of your music on the internet and promoting things that way, but this alone probably won’t cut it.

If you want to strike it big, you’re going to have to have a decent-sized fanbase in a city to prove yourself to a major label, but you can also go through the stepping stone model by signing to an indie, using that label to help you out touring and recording, and then once you’ve established a large enough base, signing with a major label.

Conclusion

These are ten of the most important reasons that record labels will reject you. If you can successfully work each of these factors to improve your position, you can make yourself very attractive to a record label. Good luck – remember to use knowledge about the labels to your own advantage.

Ben Histand is a fourth-year Business student with an interest in finding out how pop culture works, and has spent entirely too much time finding out how Marvin Gaye is the same as Led Zeppelin, and why Led Zeppelin sold a whole lot more albums.

By the way, just as with our Arcade Rocker game, you (precious Dotted Music readers) hear about this project first.

What is UGT?

Ultimate Guitar Tabs is an easy and convenient application for viewing guitar and bass tablature and chords. What differs it from similar apps in the App Store is that this is the only mobile application giving you an unlimited and licensed access to the world’s largest database of tabs from Ultimate-Guitar.com. Everything is legal. And it’s relatively cheap, you can buy the app for just $1.99.

Here are the main features to get some of you hooked, hopefully:

• Simple Search. Find Tabs quickly by entering artist name or song title.
• Advanced Search tool. You can search for Tabs by specifying Tab type (guitar Tabs, chords, bass Tabs), part of the song (intro, solo, chorus), difficulty level, tuning, and rating.
• Favorites. Add any Tab to your favorites to make them available for offline browsing.
• Tab Packs. Collections of pre-selected Tabs that are preloaded into the application. Tab Packs are based on skills level (Easy, Medium, Advanced), music genres (Rock, Metal, Punk), and special occasions (Love songs, Xmas songs). Tab Packs are frequently updated.
• Top 100 Tabs list for each Tab type (Guitar, Bass, Chords or overall).
• Auto-scroll feature. View Tablature in the text viewer using the handy Auto-Scroll functionality – The App will scroll Tabs for you!
• Portrait and Landscape modes are available. You can scale Tabs too.

Here Come The Screenshots!

Share your thoughts! Found any bugs, glitches, or just have an idea on how to improve the app? Please let me know via the contact form or in the comments below.

During the week, I have discovered three brand new movies that I take the liberty of describing as “inspiring” even before actually watching them (yet). Here they are, for your consideration:

72 Musicians

72 Musicians asks the question, “Why the hell do we chase this music dream, anyway?” The film was made and released by Topspin’s VP of Product Design Bob Moczydlowsky, so the creation, pretty obviously, uses Topspin platform for marketing and distribution (which is a unique and a promising collaboration on its own).

The documentary chronicles the struggles of 72 Kansas City musicians, “speaking with a single, anonymous voice about art, poverty, booze, lies, class, hardship, food and failure. Oh, and day care. And rock ‘n’ roll.” It features interviews and/or performances from members of Spoon, White Whale, The Architects, Coalesce, The Get Up Kids, The Republic Tigers, Mac Lethal, The Life & Times, Roman Numerals, SSION and more.

The movie has been released in a variety of formats, from an $8 iPhone version to HD downloads and DVDs with T-shirts and posters, to 50 DVDs in bulk, all the way to a $400 version which comes on a hard drive with all the assets, Creative Commons-licensed to edit and release your own version. Go read more at Topspin’s Ian Rogers‘ post here.

Don’t Quit Your Daydream

Don’t Quit Your Daydream was created by Los Angeles-based musicians Clark Stiles and Nathan Khyber from the band The Good Listeners and was produced in association with JLoar, Inc and Adrian Grenier’s Reckless Productions.

“It is a story of two musicians approaching their 40th birthday unwilling to relinquish their love of music. Not wanting to give up the dream of being rock stars after hitting 40, the duo set off to do what most said they couldn’t – record the album of their dreams on the road and document every second creating this film. Leaving their day jobs behind, they set off on a 24-day cross-country road trip in an RV recording and filming both the album and documentary, Don’t Quit Your Daydream, while spanning 12 cities across the heart of America.

“Stiles and Khyber were on a mission to find the answer many musicians search for: why risk it all for a pursuit in music? To answer this question, Stiles and Khyber set up their recording studio in each city, collaborated on a song with a local musician and asked them why, like themselves, were they drawn to do what they love most… which is to play music.”

The Runaways

The Runaways is the music-fueled story of the groundbreaking, all girl 1970s rock band, with Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning starring as Joan Jett and Cherie Currie. The film is written and directed by Floria Sigismondi, and Apparition will release it on March 19, 2010.

“The two teenage valley girls with punk in their blood, meet and become the heart and soul of the seminal all girl band, The Runaways. Floria Sigismondi brings The Runaways to the big screen in this story of a group of extraordinary young women as they rise from rebellious Southern California kids to rock stars of the now legendary band that paved the way for future generations of girl musicians. Under the Svengali-like influence of rock impresario Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), the group evolves into an outrageous success and a family of misfits. With its tough-chick image and raw talent, the band quickly earns a name for itself — and so do its two leads: Joan is the band’s pure rock’ n’ roll heart, while Cherie, with her Bowie-Bardot looks, is the sex kitten.”

The Runaways is produced by John Linson, Art Linson and Bill Pohlad. Joan Jett, Kenny Laguna and Brian Young serve as executive producers.

Have you had a chance to watch any of the movies? (Or have you decided that you should go to The Runaways premiere?) Share your thoughts in the comments!

First off is the official formation of a business. Fortunately my location allows single proprietorships without any paperwork, so I don’t have to fill out any forms to operate a business.

Next up comes the more music-specific business items. I’ve got at least one act who is interested in recording and releasing music on my label, so I’ve got to figure out what I have to do legally to protect mine and their rights. We want to make sure that any music we make is going to be protected from would-be intellect thieves, so we’ve got to register with a provider who is going to issue and protect copyrights. Copyright registration can be done electronically (copyright.gov) for $35, a fee covering all of your works (as the songwriter — form PA). If you’re the publisher you also need to fill out another form, form SR. This doesn’t need to be dealt with until you’ve produced original lyrics, but you can’t forget this step. After a copyright is issued, the next step is to register yourself with BMI, SESAC, or ASCAP. They’ll do the dirty work protecting your copyright, but again you’re going to need to pay both a songwriter fee and a publishing fee to get protected for five years.

Photo credit: El Mariachi 94 on Flickr

Now, you should be protected by copyright! What needs to be figured out next is how to record the album, physically manufacture it, and how to distribute it. Here things have become much more streamlined in the past few years. It’s quite easy to find bulk suppliers of blank CDs, cases and CD labels. For a thousand dollars you should be able to set up a mini-manufacturing facility, ready to press professional-looking copies.

Staring you in the face is the prospect of distribution. Physical distribution companies are no longer nationally-independent — all nation-wide distribution companies are owned by their respective record labels. That’s one reason the music business is so domineering and top-heavy, because distribution channels are mostly clogged up.

The good news is that online distribution is a much simpler affair. There any aspiring artist can have an album distributed for anything from $45/year to a 9% royalty. After much research, I decided to use Tunecore to put up music available for download online. Other options are Songcast and CDBaby. Tunecore also provides a free UPC generator, something we’re going to need if we sell CDs in stores.

So what’s left is the task of promoting and distributing the CDs we make. This is going to require a lot of footwork on my part, but this shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve got to work at securing gigs and talking to individual store managers to get my physical product in. This is where I’m at right now — I know what needs to be done, but I’m a long ways from engaging in the entire process yet. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I’ll keep you updated — I foresee a company web site in the future — but until next time, stay classy.

Ben Histand is a fourth-year Business student with an interest in finding out how pop culture works, and has spent entirely too much time finding out how Marvin Gaye is the same as Led Zeppelin, and why Led Zeppelin sold a whole lot more albums.

Read more: Starting A Record Label. Part 2: Who We Are

You’ve heard it right, Arcade Rocker is a music/rhythm game in the spirit of Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Jam Legend, and even Tap Tap Revenge. How are we (disclosure: Ultimate Guitar USA, LLC) going to revolutionize the music gaming industry with such a banal idea, you ask? Well, I told you only the very basics of the concept.

Arcade Rocker

Arcade Rocker is a game that lets you rock out with any (ok, not literally any) song in your personal music collection. Let an excerpt from our press release bluntly speak for me:

No longer are you limited to only playing the tiny selection of recordings that other music/rhythm game companies choose for you. Arcade Rocker puts you in charge of what recordings you jam with; directly on your PC or Mac you can choose and play music from your personal collection using the free Arcade Rocker Player.

This means that you are not offered to stream, download or upload anything (like in other games in this genre). The website already has game play data (note charts) for other 14,000 popular songs (with more being added each month), and all you have to do is to pick your favorite music, find the desired songs on the Arcade Rocker website, and play them in the built-in player/game. As you can see, the potential is huge.

The charts have been generated automatically, so some of them are not synched up with music the way we would like them too, and we know about this. The generation algorithms are being improved, and what is even cooler – soon we’ll announce the Arcade Rocker Editor, built to provide an easy way to customize the existing game play files and create your own (from any recording).

The website is free, and don’t require you to have a game console (you play with a keyboard).

Arcade Rocker iPhone

This is the spiciest part… Simultaneously with the web version, we have released Arcade Rocker for iPhone / iPod Touch, available as a free application (iTunes link), with Play Packs required in order to play any songs, and a $4.99 version (iTunes link) without any limitations.

Here are few screenshots to spice up your interest (more Arcade Rocker related reports coming soon):

Have you tried either web or iPhone version? Let me know your thoughts, any feedback is appreciated.

Using the stock exchange as a basis for my business model, I’ve constructed a theoretical approach to help support up-and-coming bands, starting from when they’re still at their earliest stages of their artistic and commercial development. Thus, individuals could invest in bands that they think have potential, and when (or if) the band gains popularity and starts gaining profits from CD and ticket sales, the initial investors get a financial return from the band.

Image credit: Gripweed on Pixdaus

Because buying a “share” or “stock” of a band sounds too possessive (these are still human beings after all), we’ll use the term “bond”. A bond in the finance world is a debt security, as in, an individual buys a debt from a company so that at a future date, once the company becomes more profitable, the investor is repaid the amount of the bond by the company along with interest. In the case of investing in bands, the debt would be repaid if the band eventually sells a profitable amount of music, and instead of interest, the band would also pay back a percentage of their revenue.

One way that this whole process can be facilitated is if we can invest in specific bands through their record labels rather than investing in the record label as a whole, or giving money directly to the band. Although this would technically eliminate all bands that are unsigned, it could conversely create an opportunity for them to get signed: they amass a certain amount of money from investors (which would mostly come from family and friends), and offer it to the label in exchange of getting signed, which consequently reduces the risk for the label of signing a new band since they won’t require as large a sum of funds from their own treasury. This greatly supports the industry on many levels: first, the band because they are now signed with a record label and have a sum of money that will go to their commercial needs. Second, it supports the record label by allowing them to sign more bands at a lower risk. Finally, the mechanism also provides a way for people that love music and that are looking for investment opportunities to invest in an area that they know and enjoy versus the complexities of stock markets. Because of a possible financial return, it is more appealing than simply supporting a band by buying their music.

Although this business model is certainly flawed and doesn’t consider potential problems such as band breakups, it is mainly to serve as a theoretical basis to thinking outside of the box in regards to supporting young and talented bands that are swallowed by the leviathan that is the music industry scene. There will practically never be a sudden dramatic plunge in illegal music downloads, and even if there are several other ways of supporting a band, there are still countless obstacles musicians have to face before being able to make sustainable careers out of their art. It is up to us, their avid listeners, to provide the beginnings of a reform that can allow musicians to attain their appropriate level of recognition by being judged solely on their devotion and talent.

Palais des Festivals

This year’s event saw a decline in the number of attendees (13% less compared to 2009), even despite the fact that MidemNet was free. Many blame the economic climate, which is pretty fair. It’s notable, as the event was all about the money (music monetization, to be specific).

I spent the first day of MidemNet at panels. Basically, this was the only day I spent at MIDEM 2010 panels…

Amanda Palmer and The Young Punx’ Hal Ritson started up the conference program with a bang. Amanda sang few verses from Radiohead’s “Creep” with her ukulele, and I had a chance to film the full version of the cover performed in the Palasis’ hall in the evening of the same day, but let’s get back to it later.

Amanda told a story of building a strong relationship with her fans throughout the years, and Hal revealed the three principles that he thinks you have to do to success in music today (paraphrased):

1. Make people hear your music.
2. Establish an emotional contact with your listeners.
3. Find revenue streams.

Rock Band: The Beatles booth

Amanda Palmer found out that it’s much more effective to put all her efforts into many projects, instead of just one (e.g. sitting in the studio for a year and then touring for two years ain’t too good). That’s not all though. “Everyone knows tools like Facebook and Twitter, but the trick is to use them with passion,” she said.

The same day I attended panels with Pharrell Williams and Pete Wentz (unfortunately both were pretty boring), MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, Kodak’s Jeffrey Hayzlett (surprisingly, he sounded more interesting than most representatives of the actual music business at the conference), and many other industry experts.

I seriously recommend you checking out this survey conducted by The Music Matters and Synovate and presented at MIDEM by Jasper Donat. Interesting facts.

Probably everyone’s main buzz word of this MIDEM was MusicDNA, the technology aimed to replace MP3s. It’s been developed by Dagfinn Bach, who worked on the world’s first MP3 player in 1993, and has the backing of Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Germany. He’s been credited as the inventor of the MP3 itself.

MusicDNA is billed as an “enhanced, unified media format” that enables music to be tagged with lots of metadata. Attributes such as tempo, instrumentation, mood and ‘colour’ can be added, which has consequences for the way people search for music, create playlists and discover similar material. Find more at a Billboard report.

MidemNet Lab

Not having invites to NRJ Awards, held on the Saturday evening, we also stupidly missed a fabulous Jay Z party at Baoli (oh Cannes..)

Sunday was literally full of meetings, and ended with a MOG party at Morrison’s. As I said, I missed all the panels on Monday and Tuesday, aside from several MidemNet Lab showcases. They were held in Palais’ Hall 01, and I found the place sort of confusing (it was small and everyone had to stand or sit on the floor). I will cover some of the start-ups from MidemNet Lab in separate posts.

The exhibition areas seemed pretty calm this year, we could find a free table anywhere most of the time (this was only my second MIDEM, but veterans told me it used to be much, much more crowded).

Rock Band had two booths with the latest editions of the game, and overall there were quite a few interesting companies presenting their services / products. I loved a demonstration of Vinylrecorder T-560. Would be HAPPY to be able to burn vinyls at home this way:

That’s it for the promised brief roundup, but that’s not all for this year’s MIDEM. The event was rich on news and events, and I will keep providing you with the best of info brought from there.

PS: As promised, here’s a video of Amanda Palmer performing Radiohead’s classic “Creep” with her ukulele in front of Palais des Festivals’ Auditorium Debussy for MIDEM 2010 attendees. Filmed this on January 23rd, leaving the last panel of that date. The quality is crap, but hope you’ll still feel the vibe: