But Tunited is not just for musicians. Fans of genres from across the musical spectrum can discover new artists and provide feedback and support for each other in an ever competitive music industry. Custom playlists can be made with a huge mix of different artists from the site.

Tunited

And the best thing? All profits made from the songs go directly to the musicians, 100%. No middleman or promotion company to take in any revenue, effectively making the idea of a record company obsolete. And even if you don’t purchase a track, streaming a song can give the artist money also.

Tunited also adds links to music production software such as MU.LAB and Ableton to provide artists with the gear they need to rip tracks and perfect that sweet sound. Since Tunited is still in beta, not everything is up and running, meaning there is no artwork software to download yet. When it becomes available, musicians can create posters, flyers, CD artwork and more to promote their sound.

To add to the promotional opportunities available for musicians, music industry experts are available to provide insight and suggestions on artistic ideas. Such experts include Andrew King, who managed Pink Floyd and Ross Allen, a DJ for Domino, an indie label.

While it looks like another music sharing site on the internet, Tunited offers a greater alternative for up and coming artists looking to get their name out on the web. 100% profit intake and a great community for feedback, adding on top of great features to keep the artist and fans coming back for more, and you have yourself one promising website.

Flattr

Flattr’s system is based on the idea of people tipping content they like (think Twitter, Digg, Facebook Like buttons), but with real money. Everyone who registers a Flattr account sets a a monthly fee, minimum €2, that he or she is willing to contribute for any kind of online content. When users find something they like that has a Flattr button, they can click the button to “reward” the content provider. At the end of the month, the user’s monthly fee is split equally among the holders of the content that they “flattered”.

The start-up was founded by Peter Sunde, co-founder of Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay. The site reportedly generates some revenue, but exact current figures are not known.

“Before Flattr, the only reasonable way to donate has been to use Paypal or other systems to send money to people,” the service’s founder says. “The threshold for this is quite high. People would just ignore sending donations if it wasn’t for a really important cause. Sending just a small sum has always been a pain in the ass. Who would ever even login to a payment system just to donate €0.01?”

You can get a bit more about the service by watching the video below. The new features available after this month’s update include Facebook and Twitter integration – read more in the official blog post.

I see a big future in the micropayment systems, with their popularization bringing advantages to independent bloggers and artists alike. Just give your fans a chance to share some little money with you, don’t question yourself if they want to pay or not.

And when you register on the site, be sure to flattr this or any other Dotted Music post that you like ;)

Visitors to SoundCloud now can uncover popular Creative Commons-licensed tracks via a dedicated homepage and search for free-to-use samples and audio via the advanced search features and tag browsing. Creators who choose to provide their original work with these free licenses now should have new channels to expose their tracks with the freedom they want them to carry for sharing and reuse. In addition, companies and developers building on SoundCloud’s open platform can bring the same search and remix experience to their users with reportedly increased access and filtering behind the scenes over the API.

SoundCloud

Creative Commons is most often associated with photo-sharing sites like Flickr, who host over 140 million CC-licensed images, and more recently with video-hosting platforms such as Vimeo. An increasing number of bigger names in the music world such as Nine Inch Nails, the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Radiohead, and Snoop Dogg have embraced Creative Commons and it continues to thrive among a wider community of musicians and artists.

Alexander Ljung, CEO of SoundCloud said: “Providing the talented and varied userbase we have on SoundCloud with more options to share and create their own original works is core to our mission. Partnering with Creative Commons is great for our users and any audio creators in the CC community as we look to build a huge library of sounds, samples and songs to inspire more new creativity. These new features will facilitate this process and help to consolidate all the disparate sources of CC audio around the web for future creators.”

Find out more at this location.

Have you used the new features yet? Share your SoundCloud username in the comments, and don’t forget that you can send music promos to Dotted Music through our DropBox widget.

Bassist John Illsley was recently interviewed by Ultimate Guitar’s Amy Kelly to talk about the release and not only. While nothing specific on a reunion possibility has been revealed, John shared lots of interesting info on his own career, beauty of the Dire Straits’ music, and the state of the music industry.

Read an excerpt below:

Dire Straits is a band that has been able to go against the grain in terms of the typical radio song format, with many of your songs going well beyond the five-minute mark. Did some of those songs develop during jam sessions?

John Illsley

I guess you could get a sense of what Dire Straits thought about three-minute songs when you hear “Sultans of Swing,” a six-minute song that was our first single! I’ll never forget at one particular point in time the record company said, “I’ve managed to get ‘Telegraph Road’ down to five minutes.” We listened in complete astonishment, but that’s record company policy. You have to respect that, but we never really set out to do three or four-minute songs. One of the most successful songs we had on the British charts over here was “Private Investigations,” which was six minutes long. It was unheard of! You can break the rules.

As far as the songwriting is concerned, Mark would bring ideas to the band. We’d sit down in a small room and hammer out most of it in pieces. Then we hammered that out again. It’s very – I don’t want to use the word “organic” because it’s overused. But we all put our eclectic ideas out. Mark was very responsive to people’s ideas. As long as the song was working, it wouldn’t get thrown out. I think he, at that particular time, was writing some fabulous songs. I mean a song like “Romeo and Juliet,” it’s just an incredible piece of music. It was an absolute pleasure to work with such an extraordinary writer.

As someone who has been a steadily working bassist in the ever-changing music industry over the past few decades, what is your opinion on the current state of the business?

I think you’d be in denial if you didn’t embrace what’s happening. I think technology has created a completely different space, which some people don’t feel comfortable in. I don’t mind it all. The only think I object to is that some people don’t buy the music. They download it and it goes straight on to their iPod. They don’t have any idea of what the album cover looks like. They don’t care who might have produced it. It’s a different world we’re living in. I’m still slightly old fashioned, but I have to embrace what’s going on in the times. You can’t stick your head in the sand and say, “I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do that.” People want to cherry pick their albums. They’ll say, “I like Brothers In Arms, but I don’t want to listen to ‘So Far Away.’” So be it. That’s fine as long as people are listening to the music. The music is the most important thing. How you get it out there is slightly irrelevant, as long as you can get it to where people can hear it.

There’s this court case with Pink Floyd. I don’t think Pink Floyd wanted Dark Side of the Moon broken up into bits and sold as individual tracks. I completely and utterly understand that. I absolutely understand that. The record company is saying, “Well, things are now getting broken up.” I think Pink Floyd actually won the case. I thought, well, in some ways they’re absolutely right. They had basically devised a concept album, and that’s the way they would like it to stay. In another way, the record company was right in saying, “When you made that record, this kind of technology wasn’t available.” It puts you between a rock and hard place. I’m pretty open to that whole thing. I think a lot of good things have happened over the last few years to get music out to people.

Read the full article at Ultimate Guitar.

The Fader app offers exclusive features, fresh editorial content from the magazine, a slideshow of images from each issue, a music player featuring podcasts and exclusive mixes, mobile access to Fader TV, information about Fader events, and so on.

“We are very protective of The Fader brand, and we’re extremely selective about anything we output to our specific and loyal audience of tastemakers,” said Andy Cohn, EVP and Group Publisher of Fader Media. “The Fader’s mobile app is another dynamic platform in which our readers will be able to consume all kinds of the original content we’re known for, including music, video and photography.

The Fader app

“In 2006, we were the first magazine in the world to make full issues available on iTunes as a free PDF,” continued Cohn. “Wherever our readers are, and whatever technologies they’re using, we’re right there with them.”

In early 2010, The Fader released a mobile application through Mobile Roadie for its annual Levi’s Fader Fort festival held in Austin, Texas with up-to-date news on concert schedules, music streaming and official photos.

Another brand who took advantage of Mobile Roadie Pro is Ninja Tune, with an app that features profiles for all 90 of its artists, including photos, a video stream, and the option to buy songs and gig tickets.

As suggested by Sandbox.fm, Mobile Roadie might simply want to offer extra features due to Apple’s unhappiness with the large number of ‘cookie-cutter’ apps appearing on its App Store, using the same platforms and looking the same.

You have to pay more for such additional customization, though.

And thanks to Rockethub’s newly launched community site, that’s about to get a lot easier.

“Musicians should know that crowdfunding regardless of the platform is still work,” cautioned Brian Meece, one of Rockethub’s founders. “It takes a strategy and organized thought to make the campaign come together.”

But formulating that strategy can be daunting, and finding information about what works and what doesn’t is difficult; crowdfunding is a relatively new idea, and aside from the odd user of the crowdfunding hashtag on Twitter, most artists, already unfamiliar with the demands of fund-raising, have few places to turn.

RocketHub

That’s where Rockethub.org comes in. The site was founded, Meece explained, on the idea of “learning [from] and supporting each other.”

To draw users and curious crowdfunders to the site, Meece and his partners wrote something they call The Crowdfunding Manifesto, essentially a road map that anyone can follow, “to galvanize both our community and help the overall ‘Crowdfunding for Creatives’ movement,” Meece explained.

The Manifesto helps artists understand what’s required to successfully fund projects based on their size, the importance of rewards, and what kinds should be offered, and more. Its insights can be applied to any crowdfunding platform, whether it’s Rockethub or a competitor like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo.

That is one of the most important things about Rockethub. “We really consider the other platforms colleagues in this new sector,” Meece stressed. “We share mentions by bloggers, radio shows, news articles etc. – and have a lot to learn from each other. In the end, choice stimulates demand for the overall market – and the pie gets bigger, which is good for all of us.”

Whether that means gaining insights into Kickstarter’s “fund and follow” approach, or chatting with fellow crowdfunders in Rockethub’s forums is up to you. The important thing is that there is now a place for you to do it.

Courtesy of WeAllMakeMusic.com. Reposted with permission.

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

Read few exclusive excerpts from Amy Kelly’s UG interview before it goes live in full next week:

Do you feel any pressure from your label at this point in your career?

The label doesn’t really pressure us per se verbally. With the industry as fickle as it is, you kind of put that pressure on yourself. Executives, bands, and record stores – everybody is dropping like flies. Here today, gone tomorrow. You’ve got to keep being viable and give enough reasons for your record label to keep invested with the band and keep invested in you as well.

In buying the record or buying the single from iTunes and buying concert tickets, that’s keeping your shit going. I used to get really caught up with where we were on Billboard and how many records we had sold and where the single was and how much MTV was playing us. Honestly, I don’t even look at that. I have no idea where the single is. I have no idea how much they are playing our video. As long as I wake up and play a show and people are there and they know the words to the song and they’re having a good time and we get to do this for a living, then I’m happy.

I’m extremely happy that we can do that. Success isn’t the charts anymore. As long as I can keep doing this for a living, I’m extremely happy.

Photo credit: Chad Martel

What would you suggest for the business side? Do you think that touring as much as possible is still a viable approach to marketing?

That may work for some people. I don’t know. I really think that’s a complete waste of time, going to all these cities where people don’t know who you are. You go to a bar and play for 10, 15 people that are there for the drink specials. Maybe if you’re really good, then there will be 30 people. I’ve heard that. It never worked for me! I was always like, “Why did I take off work and spend money to go play at some show.”

I think nowadays it’s completely different. There is so much you can do on your own now. That’s what you have to do now as a band because no label has money to spend on breaking in an artist. The more you can do on your own as far as your MySpace, your Facebook, and your YouTube or your merch, the more you can do on your own and the less of a risk you are to a label, the better chance you have of getting it. The chance of a major label picking you up and wanting to spend a gazillion dollars on you are slim to none. Unfortunately that’s the way it is. Buy a van. If you make enough money, buy a van and the label doesn’t have to worry about it. Anything you can do on your own is going to give you more bargaining power with the label.

I will post the link to a full interview when it’s up, great read.

Designed and built by RUNE Entertainment and GRAND Creative Studios, the website opens with the story of family man and steel factory worker Drake Carter ending his affair with seductive co-worker Thea Landa. This sparks a chain of events that leads to Drake’s murder at the hands of his former lover and secret Villain as she moves to claim his soul.

Hail The Villain website

Freezing time in that savage moment, the website allows you to navigate through the scene to unlock character back-stories, clues, downloads, to participate in the story by becoming “Villain-ized” and to share messages with the band.

According to the press release, the concept for the website grew out of a series of sketches the band had created as a rough draft for a comic book inspired by the sounds of their new album, Population: Declining which will be released via Roadrunner Records on June 8, 2010.

HailTheVillain.com includes a series of illustrated environments to explore, with clues and hints, character bios and Easter eggs hidden here and there. Numbers scrawled in matchbooks unlock audio content when punched into a phone booth, while a map hidden in the glove compartment foreshadows a darker plot twist that will be revealed in one of the upcoming comics.

You are also invited to activate your webcam at the beginning to “uncover various opportunities to upload and modify pictures of yourselves,” (FYS look pretty modest with their simple flash app) record and share videos with the band and other users.

I haven’t had a chance to test the game with a webcam, but the experience was impressing enough even without it – now I just can’t call this game a website anymore. Great job.

Your thoughts?

Let’s take a look at two iPad apps released this week: Korg’s iELECTRIBE and GrooveMaker from IK Multimedia.

iELECTRIBE

Korg‘s popular among electronic musicians hardware Electribe Series is now also available as a dedicated iPad musical instrument app – the Korg iELECTRIBE virtual analog beatbox.

iELECTRIBE

“Korg Electribe products have been popular due in part to their interactive, easy-to-use front panel controls. The iPad’s 9.7″ multi touch display offers an intuitive layout that will be familiar to previous Electribe users. Just as on the original Electribe, users simply choose one of the eight parts (or sounds) and touch the 16-step sequencer to quickly build patterns and grooves.

The iELECTRIBE faithfully recreates the historic Electribe’s entire sound engine – including analog synthesis modeling and PCM synthesis, along with virtual Valve Force tube modeling. The sequencer can record instrument parts as well as advanced Motion Sequencing – the recording of knob movements as part of a pattern.”

The iELECTRIBE is currently available from Apple’s App Store. Regularly priced at US $19.99, a special introductory price of $9.99 is being offered until June 30, 2010.

GrooveMaker for the iPad

The infamous IK Multimedia‘s GrooveMaker series of remixing apps is now released as an iPad version as well.

GrooveMaker for iPad

“Released for the iPhone and iPod touch in August 2009, GrooveMaker has become one of the most popular mobile loop remixing apps. The GrooveMaker Free version has consistently been in the top 100 music apps with over 600,000 downloads, and the entire GrooveMaker family features 11 style-based apps for the most popular genres of music.

GrooveMaker for the new iPad offers the same smart features and streamlined workflow as the iPhone/iPod version for making music with loops, but also takes advantage of the new larger multi-touch surface to provide enhanced operation with an integrated, advanced controller.

Also, GrooveMaker for iPad adds even more control when working with loops, providing a new level of creative flexibility. Users can now switch “snapped” grooves with a single touch, plus control the number of loops that are automatically combined during a random mix. GrooveMaker iPad is the perfect addition to a DJ set, providing unlimited creative flexibility in live remixing and DJ applications.”

There are 4 GrooveMaker packs for the iPad available now: Free (a 120-loop pack with a mix of House and Hip-Hop), House, Hip-Hop, Drum & Bass. GrooveMaker House, Hip-Hop and D’n’B contain over 300 loops each and are $9.99 from the iTunes App Store.

Check out the demo video below:

I’m wondering, will we ever see Ableton Live on a tablet?