Music industry – Gabriel Catalano®

Showcase: Amazing Music Websites

Rock, opera, hip hop, electro, country or swing – if you make good music, you need a good website where people can hear it. A great music website offers visitors a multi-sensual experience and appeals to both ears and eyes. The trick is to design a website that will highlight your music, not compete with it or overshadow it. Wix offers musicians a variety of beautiful music templates that were designed especially for that purpose. With these gorgeous designs, user-friendly layouts, advanced SEO settings and great add-ons, musicians who use Wix to create a music website end up with awesome results. Want to see? Check these out:

Create your own beautiful HTML5 website today! >>

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Setting Goals to Succeed: Lessons from a Freelance Classical Musician

Marion Harrington | Getting Started | http://freelanceswitch.com/

I never cease to be amazed by the number of players I meet who still believe in playing the classical music equivalent of corporate cubicle nation – clinging onto the notion that an orchestral job is fundamental to reputation and survival.

Those of us who have already escaped from the traditional straitjacket can assure you that life is infinitely more pleasurable and less stressful when you’re fully in control of your own destiny.

For classical music jobs, successful freelance musicians center their work around the concept of a “portfolio” career. In order to survive and thrive with such a lifestyle, just like learning to play an instrument, it is essential that you start with the basics in order to build solid foundations.

Following the method outlined below, I re-launched my classical music career after two decades out of the industry and have never looked back. It works! Continuar leyendo «Setting Goals to Succeed: Lessons from a Freelance Classical Musician»

Why Apple’s Ping Stumble May Help Google Music

The labels, it could be argued, have a reason to hesitate. Apple controls more than 80% of all digital music sales (thanks largely to labels’ inability to innovate), and labels would likely be reluctant to hand over any more leverage in the form of marketing via Ping. If Ping becomes even a fifth of Facebook’s size–and with 160 million users registered on iTunes, it very well could–no label could contain it.

Which leads us to Google. There have been bubblings of a possible iTunes rival from Mountain View (the ballyhooed «Google Music») for some time, but according to several sources, Google’s music service may be available by Christmas–and record labels couldn’t have it soon enough.

BY Austin Carr

Click around for early opinions of Ping, Apple‘s new social network for music, and you’ll start seeing the same complaints: It’s like a crowded room with the lights out; it’s impossible to find your friends, especially without Facebook or Gmail integration; the artist community is non-existent, except for a few Apple partners promoting the service. (Why else would Ping «recommend» we all follow Lady Gaga, Yo-Yo Ma, and Rick Rubin?) Boil it all down, and the early consensus is that the oft-flawless company, with Ping, has stumbled to serve consumers, distanced itself from record labels, and even aided Google. Continuar leyendo «Why Apple’s Ping Stumble May Help Google Music»

Free = Worthless: Information Can’t Be Free

by ian

Oh, the humanity. I owe Chris Anderson an apology for this one. After rereading it this morning, I was horrified. Did I really write this? Don’t get me wrong: I do NOT think ‘free’ is a good idea. Nor do I think ‘information wants to be free’ will win out over ‘information wants to be expensive’. But I singled out Chris’ book because I happened to listen to it. What I write below makes a lot more sense as a general argument against ‘free’ as a business model. However, I’ll leave this up, so you can all enjoy my embarrassment. Now I’m going to head off to chew on my foot a little longer.

In ‘Free: The Future of a Radical Price’, Chris Anderson says ‘information wants to be free’ and goes on a utopian tirade about how wonderful things will happen as free information hits critical mass.

by ian

Oh, the humanity. I owe Chris Anderson an apology for this one. After rereading it this morning, I was horrified. Did I really write this? Don’t get me wrong: I do NOT think ‘free’ is a good idea. Nor do I think ‘information wants to be free’ will win out over ‘information wants to be expensive’. But I singled out Chris’ book because I happened to listen to it. What I write below makes a lot more sense as a general argument against ‘free’ as a business model. However, I’ll leave this up, so you can all enjoy my embarrassment. Now I’m going to head off to chew on my foot a little longer.

In ‘Free: The Future of a Radical Price‘, Chris Anderson says ‘information wants to be free’ and goes on a utopian tirade about how wonderful things will happen as free information hits critical mass. Continuar leyendo «Free = Worthless: Information Can’t Be Free»

Five new business ideas for musicians and their fans

Tolstoy said «music is the shorthand of emotion» and, as marketing gurus insist, people buy emotionally. With an audience that extends to just about everyone, the music business can be a great source for new business ideas.

Anthony Volodkin: Why Steep Learning Curves Are Worth It

by Sarah Rapp

In 2005, back when music blogs were still a relatively new phenomenon, Hype Machine creator Anthony Volodkin imagined a website that would aggregate those diverse critical voices to answer an age-old question: “What should I listen to?” A 19-year-old college student with an IT side job, Volodkin had little time, little money, and little experience working on the web. But rather than getting discouraged by an incredibly steep learning curve, he took it as a sign that he was onto something.Today, Hype Machine pulls content from over 1,000 music blogs to paint a «trend map» of what songs people are talking about, and allows users to stream all of them. In essence, it takes the musical chatter from across the web and distills it into one clarion voice that tells you what’s hot right now. Continuar leyendo

Are Brands and Agencies The New A&Rs?

Author Richie Cruz March

Much has been written about the music industry’s historic decline over the greater part of the last decade.

As the primary distribution mechanism has shifted from discs to digital, consumers’ discovery process has followed suit, evolving from the “new release” rack of their local record store to the link collection at their favorite music blog.

What many accounts of the struggling music industry fail to mention, however, is that the music industry’s ultra-fragmented, content-overloaded state has created an opportunity for brands to become involved as never before. The record label’s and record store’s historical position as middlemen between consumers and content is dwindling, leaving a vacuum that is rapidly being filled by blogs, publications and the savviest of brands.

Demand is at an all-time high, but the “means to consumption” have changed, says Roger Faxon, head of EMI Publishing, in his recent interview with The Economist. There are new free-and-subscription-based streaming services setting up shop every day, sustained and fueled by the rabid demands of consumers for more and better content. The result has been the disintermediation of content – consumers no longer care where good content comes from, as long as it’s both convenient and good.