And I don’t mean musicians on tour – it’s more about people changing their location, moving between cities and even countries. While it’s generally obvious how to prepare for a long travel if you are a freelance writer or run a small online business (after a brief check I’ve found that there is a myriad of great resources for that, e.g. Location Independent or Free Pursuits), musicians might need access to not so evident things – like a recording studio.

And here I remembered the site that had been pitched to me few months ago, called Open Studio. Sounds like an appropriate deal, so let’s take a look at it.

Connecting Musicians And Rehearsal Spaces

Image credit: aileenrobot on Flickr

Rand Rognlien, Chief Musician’s Advocate at Music Nomad noticed that twenty percent of musicians utilizing the encyclopedic information at his site were looking for studio space. Inquiries were said to be from touring professionals and garage bands alike.

“We have over 250 studios listed on our site.” remarked Rognlien. “And we’ve researched every one to make sure it’s a legitimate business. Many studios are listed on sites like craigslist, but we’re the only site that goes the extra step to insure our musicians are dealing with reputable companies.”

And so he launched Open Studio, “allowing to hourly and monthly rehearsal studios to list their available rooms, and musicians to find available studios in their area using their zip code or city.”

If you’re a space owner, you can set up a profile of your studio and any room you have available. You can set up additional room profiles, and when a room becomes available, visit your profile page, check “Available,” and anyone coming to the site can now see your listing.

Promised to be added soon is a waiting list of musicians in any area that are looking for available monthly rooms.

If you are a musician, just enter your location and sort available studios by distance.

What might be not so attractive for bands and musicians at this point is that the site lacks what it is supposed to have – a large list of available studios (there are 25 listed when this post is being written). It might be due to very recent launch of the start-up (it’s still in the beta mode), so if you own a studio – be sure to add it to the directory.

What Open Studio also needs to become a true creative nomad’s assistant is support of more countries, though I’m not sure if this exists in the founders’ plans.

But if you need a rehearsal space in the US or own one – check out the site and let me know your thoughts.

Do you know any other services created specifically for musicians living a life of a traveler? Any tips? Share them in the comments!

The social buying and selling feature is an addition to TheIndie.biz’s Frindie application launched in April. Frindie is based on the concept that like-minded people (friends) tend to have like-minded tastes in music and is the basis for the social buying and selling feature.

The Indie

“We’re truly happy to be offering this unique opportunity for fans to be able to buy the music their friends are listening to right from their social media profiles,” said Damon Cleveland, TheIndie.biz’s CEO. “There really isn’t anything out in the market like it and we’re excited to be the first to offer this to our fans and member bands. This is what TheIndie.biz is all about, giving independent musicians and bands the avenues to sell their music to new audiences, while offering music lovers a taste of what their friends are listening to so everyone’s music experience is enhanced.”

In addition to allowing music fans to expand their music choices and enjoyment, with the social selling feature bands will be able to reach a growing, fan-driven audience as users listen to and post their favorite songs to their social network feeds right from TheIndie.biz. As people see the music their friends are listening to, they will be able to listen to and buy the songs that they like directly from their friend’s profile.

Independent musicians, labels and bands can post their music for sale and distribution through three primary options. The first package lets bands sell an unlimited number of songs and includes full membership to TheIndie.biz for a flat fee of $149 a year, plus a 15% fee per song sold. The second and third options are $7.95 per song, or $19.95 for three songs, plus a 30% fee per song sold.

The representation of the not too revolutionally new idea is pretty intriguing, in my opinion – give it a look.

Ultimate-Guitar.com, the world’s biggest guitar tablature database and musicians community, has officially announced a joint venture with internationally renowned artist Slash.

Here’s a part from the press release:

Slash

Under the agreement, Ultimate Guitar and Slash will co-develop and co-own digital assets associated with Slash’s online initiatives, including his official website, www.slashonline.com, which launched today. In addition, the Joint Venture will develop and release a variety of Slash-branded mobile applications as well as instructional videos featuring Slash.

“As a musician & fan there’s nothing cooler than to partner with Ultimate Guitar. They’re THE source for gear info, tabs, music & artist news & the list goes on & on. There is no online site that comes close to UG for supplying such comprehensive music information. I’m proud to be onboard,” said Slash.

“Slash is the ultimate guitar god and his brand resonates with the Ultimate Guitar community like no other musician. He is one of my favorite artists and a major inspiration when I started Ultimate Guitar in the first place,” said Ultimate Guitar founder Eugeny Naidenov. “This partnership creates a unique opportunity not only for Ultimate Guitar to leverage the Slash brand but also for our worldwide community of guitar enthusiasts to interact with and get close to a revered artist, and vice versa. For an artist of his stature to tie his brand and web property to an online social community is a forward looking approach that truly breaks the mold.“

Noticed the “Slash-branded mobile applications” part? We are in fact going to release a co-branded iPhone application in a week, you will love it.

Meanwhile, Slash‘s self-titled album is released tomorrow (April 6th), be sure to check it out – dope LP.

Originally, the website was going to be launched on January 10th, but was delayed due to technical issues. The blog, which was launched this month instead, is now up and running and is already loaded with posts on the industry and music in general. What I checked out in the first place, though, was the About and Take the Tour sections.

What the hell is it?

Tunited logo

The platform is aimed at music lovers and musicians alike, at this point being more of interest to independent artists. “It will be a level playing field where artists are not judged on which label they are signed to or even if they are signed to a label at all, but they are judged on the quality of their music and how they engage with their fans,” the description says.

Tunited promises 100% of profits from musicians’ music downloads and maximum transparency. “We’ll let you know the why, where, how and who of everything on our site and give you a context to place it in. For example, we will be showing you where every penny goes of a 79p download.”

The site is based on four cornerstones: Create, Collaborate, Promote and Enjoy. Here’s a description for the Promote section:

Now this is the section to be rinsed for all it’s worth. Tunited has a pool of industry experts, A&Rs and producers poised to give advice and feedback on Tunited’s artist roster and scout the latest talent to sign. Add to that some marketing advice, a facility to produce merch and press up CDs at a low cost as well as a contacts list for industry people and you will be set. Listeners can promote the new music they love too by recommending bands and uploading tracks to playlists and widgets.

Sounds kind of familiar, but still not bad huh?

Asked if Tunited gives any priorities to particular music genres, the service’s Managing Director Matt Stanley told Dotted Music: “Tunited will be multi genre and we will attempt to cover as many genre within the editorial as possible.” He added, however, that Indie, Rock and Dance Music are expected to be three of their biggest categories.

And here is why you may care, if you are an artists yourself: you can become one of the first 100 profile artists featured on the website when it launches. Just submit your details (and upload a demo mp3) at this page. The competition closes at midnight on 31.01.10.

If you are not a musician, this service – self-proclaimed “a music lover’s paradise” – might be your destination as well. Head to the blog for more info.

Conclusion

It’s too early to praise what haven’t been launched in full yet, time will tell. But Dotted Music stays tuned. I might get a bit more of useful comments after meeting the company at MIDEM next week.

PS: I love how Tunited is impregnated by powerful mottos. Remember I mentioned Midge‘s loud statements at the beginning? Check this out:

“With Tunited, we’re not just opening doors for new artists – we’re blowing the doors right off, Italian Job-style!”

A brief tutorial on the site shows that the tool allows bands to automatically plan tours using a tour router (built on Google Maps API). This takes the hassle out of planning and booking, which I believe is true. The product is designed “to assist new artists who lack management experience to help move their careers from the garage to the arena.” You should note, however, that it can only be used for planning gigs across North America.

TourSavant.com logo

One of TourSavant.com‘s pleasant advantages is that it welcomes bands to contact them from the road for assistance with issues they may face. “I learned a lot about what these bands need while keeping the band Cactus’s going on the road for over six months… my passion for new bands led me to think about how to help others,” says music industry veteran Paul Rogers, who formed the site and business in late 2008. With his aid, Cactus’s moved from the garage to an industry showcase at the famous El Mocombo Theatre in six months time.

The site is a membership-based community. Features include GIGTONIGHT, a free service that sends a text message to bands within a four-hour radius of a venue available in the next 24 hours. The basic membership costs $12.50 per month and the PRO Level 24/7 band concierge is an additional $89 per month. Each membership comes with one personalized loadable TourSavant MasterCard, which has discounts at numerous gas stations and hotels (a very smart partnership, in my opinion).

While the concept behind the project and its features sound exciting, I’ve got only one complaint / advise to whoever is responsible for the site itself: get through with your design. Right now, it’s a mess, and such assumption isn’t acceptable nowadays – especially when you are asking for money to become a member of your website. A good example of how a service like this should look like is bandize.com, which seem to include lots of useful organizing and planning tools, but lacks some major TourSavant’s features (I shall test it out in the nearest future though).

Conclusion: once the site gets a serious redesign, I may start recommending this to anyone going to tour in the States.

Ten years after Napster tried to make a deal with the record labels to digitally distribute their content, the record labels have found themselves dragged kicking and screaming into the late 90s, offering exactly the same thing Napster proposed. DRM for music has come and gone, having shown that it created hassles and limitations for paying customers while remaining a triviality for infringers. The recording industry’s cry of “we can’t compete with free” has been proven false, with the iTunes Music Store selling billions of dollars of digital music. These sales all happened while P2P traffic remained significant, thereby discrediting the notion that file sharing and digital music purchases are a zero sum game; that an illegal download is a lost sale. In fact, several studies have shown that heavy P2P users are among the biggest music buyers. Consumers have proven that they pay money when there is a good value for their money, even if they have a free alternative.

Napster logo

In fairness to the record companies, it is true that digital download sales have not replaced lost CD sales. But it is unclear to what extent that this is related to piracy. Consumers, especially young ones, have many more forms of media — games, internet, DVDs — jockeying for their attention than at any time before. Perhaps the era of the long form CD has simply run its course.

Much like a doomsday cult’s members have to figure out what to do when their prophecy fails to come true, we are left to envision the future of the music industry now that the bogeymen of technology have failed to materialize. The recording industry is free to innovate without the fears of the past impeding its imagination and vision. Novel distribution models such as blanket site licenses, new relationships between artists and labels such as three-sixty deals, new forms of product packaging such as the iTunes LP are all indications that the music industry has hope for the future.

What will that future look like? Technology has driven down the cost of recording and producing a professional-quality album or single, making the dream of creating music more accessible than ever before. The internet, with social networking, YouTube, and internet radio make marketing and distributing that music equally accessible to aspiring musicians. Without the need for their recording studios or distribution networks, what is the value proposition of the major labels? How will the labels take advantage of these new tools and incorporate them into their businesses?

By Tony Berman. Originally published on M.E.L.O.N. blog. Reposted with a permission.
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Luthier Society

But first, about the white paper…

Dubbed The Social Media 3.0 and Future of Viral Marketing, this work discusses the changes of social media and key concepts behind cutting edge emerging technologies that are helping to shape the short-term and long-term strategies behind viral marketing.

What’s truly great in my opinion, the material is based on a real company’s successful social media campaigns. Clients of Luthier Society range from Universal Records to Sony. Among the achievements of Royal and his Los Angeles based agency are the pairing of Michael Welch with iNDELIBLE’s creative branding campaign for AcZone, the eTeam aggregation for rock band Pop Evil and the recent participation in a feature film release of FIX, starring Olivia Wilde.

The White Paper on Social Media 3.0 also includes further detail on Luthier Society’s proprietary ROI weighted value metric analysis software, Archimedes 1.0, which is set to launch in 2010.

Check out their cool demonstration video.

And this is what the notation says:

Inspired by the theories of Charles Henry Dow, Archimedes 1.0 uses a proprietary Tracking Technology Metric (TTM) that has effectively created the world’s first online market index for websites. Archimedes 1.0 users will be able to determine the depth of their outreach efforts, saturation rate, geo-spatial location of their audience and value of online positioning, giving the first true, monetized value for Return on Investment in social media marketing.

All in all, I’ll keep an eye on this thing for sure.

I have known Johnny for several years now, and can say that this man is extremely good at what he’s doing.

The White Paper is available at this location.

Obviously, finding a song of a favorite artist is getting easier than ever. Not only you can listen to a tune with one click directly from a search results page, now you don’t even need to type in the name of the song to find it (you can use a line from the lyrics, for example). A post on the official Google blog lists the smart new search capabilities.

Google search results example

The downsides? First of all, due to the licensing issues some of the songs will only include 30-second samples. Secondly, the service will be rolled out only in the US, so far.

There are surprising advantages though, according to the recent TechCrunch report. The blog reveals that Music Onebox will feature exclusive songs from “a number of well known artists.” Over 20 acts are said to be offering tunes that can only be found through Google search, and some of these tracks will be given away for free.

On the business side of things, Google is not working directly with record labels for licensing, but the company says that the labels approve the new feature, according to DMW . “Everybody’s been very supportive. Indeed, our business model is to improve the search experience with the help of streaming partners, which offer interesting business models of their own,” R.J. Pittman, director of product management for Google, told Reuters.

“Google is the most powerful internet partner that these music services could have,” Michael Nash, Warner Music Group’s executive vice president of digital strategy and business development, told Wired.com. “We think that it’s potentially very significant from the standpoint generating revenue and gives a big boost to legitimate digital music services.”

Now, why should bands that are not among those 20 “well known artists” care? Hypebot just reported that indie artists and labels might be able to control and improve the content of their search results with OneBox.

Says Matt Rosoff on CNet’s Digital Noise:

Eventually, artists will be able to use Lala’s platform to ensure that specific content, such as a new song, shows up in the music search results at Google… (they)  will also be able to work with Lala to sell products other than MP3 downloads through Google’s search results. For example, Lala is working on a deal with Rhino Records where users will be able to buy vinyl Joy Division records directly from Lala.

Interesting? Indeed. In any case, if you are an artist, getting your music to Lala and MySpace seems pretty essential.

By the way, the improved search results will link to bands’ websites as well.

Check out the OneBox in action.