Article Title: Dave Allen Speaks

Excerpt: The Northwest Chapter of the Grammy Organization, NARAS, put on an event in Portland Oregon at the Nemo Design Building, to discuss the benefits of social networking online. Gang of Four's Dave Allen explains his position on how the internet and especially social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more, can help unsigned musicians reach a larger audience.

Excerpt: follow above link to video

Article Title: indiemat.com | Free sites for Indie Musicians

Excerpt: IndieMat is a site to go. There is a demo online. You can play with all the buttons and mess it up all you want.

Article Title: 20 best musical discoveries for 2007

Excerpt: Another year in music. And this one seems to have been quite rich in new talent; the Moose has certainly been bombarded with some cool new music from many different bands. In fact so much has come in that it is has been impossible to cover everyone of the bands that made submissions this year. With that in mind I decided that I would create a new annual list for the blog that lists what I consider to be the 20 best new artists that landed in the Moose inbox this year.

Excerpt: Slaraffenland Polaroids The Saturday Knights 45 Your 33 Black Angels Pyscho On Your Side White Denim Mess Your Hair Up Thunderheist Suenos Dulces Celebration Evergreen Comanechi Death Of You Gentlemen Drivers Glass Candy Life After Sundown Boy Eats Drum Machine 3000 Flares Oh No Heavy Half Cousin The Absentee (Fujiya & Miyagi Remix) Regulate and Fold Looks Like A War New Young Pony Club Hiding On The Staircase Eskimo & Sons Song About God Camille Au Port Black Moth Super Rainbow The Afternoon Turns Pink Food For Animals Swampy (Summerjam) Black Kids Listen To Your Body Tonight Little Hunks Came To Party Fionn Regan The End Of History

Article Title: TuneCore

Excerpt: TuneCore has arrangements with leading digital music retailers that let us place your music in their online stores and subscription services. You get 100% of the money that your music earns

Excerpt: TuneCore charges $0.99 per track, $0.99 per store per album, and $19.98 per album per year storage and maintenance.

Excerpt: "I've been promoting TuneCore to every musician and band I meet, the hardest part of the sell is that people think it's too good to be true, well it's not, it's true and it's good!" Roger O'Donnell, of The Cure

Article Title: TuneCore Stocks Videos in iTunes for a Price

Excerpt: TuneCore, the dirt-cheap digital distribution service that artists and labels can use to sell their music on the iTunes music store and other outlets, announced today that "for the first time, anyone can sell a music video in the iTunes stores" around the world, by paying TuneCore a flat per-video fee.

Excerpt: TuneCore, the digital download agent for musicians, has launched its new music video delivery service in beta form, marking the first time that anyone can sell a music video within the iTunes stores around the world. Grammy Award winner Ziggy Marley became one of the first to use the new system when TuneCore delivered his music video for "Love Is My Religion" to the iTunes stor

Article Title: MySpace to Move Into Ad-Supported Music

Excerpt: NEW YORK MySpace is joining the search for a new business model for the music industry by enlisting the help of advertising.

Excerpt: Next March, fans of punk band Pennywise can go to stores to buy the group's ninth album. Or they can go to the MySpace profile of Textango, a mobile music distributor, and add it as a friend, which will allow them to download the entire album for free.

Excerpt: Textango hopes to use the draw of Pennywise to attract other bands and build awareness of its service among music fans. It is looking to build awareness with bands of its service for selling music that bills a user's cell phone for music downloads rather than requiring a credit card. Consumers text a band's name to Textango, which then returns a code for downloading the music from Textango's Web site. The charges are placed on the user's phone bill.

Article Title: Capitol Records Enlists Radio Web Sites To Promote Trace Adkins Album - 11/19/2007

Excerpt: COUNTRY MUSIC ARTIST TRACE ADKINS will star as a video spokesperson on the Web sites of 25 radio stations as part of Capitol Records' campaign to promote the new album beginning today.

Excerpt: Adkins stars as the video spokesperson on each station's Web site and promotes the radio stations by using the station's call letters, promoting the station contests and events. He offers them a chance to win a trip for two to Paris, France; view his new video; and/or buy his new album by clicking on him. The campaign concludes on Dec. 31.

Article Title: Peter Rojas of RCRD LBL

Excerpt: Because the deals we're doing with artists are so flexible, if we're into a band and no one's ever heard of them, we can just do a quick deal with them, it's not like we have to go through this big layered process of vetting and getting final approval. It's low-risk for everyone involved. It's low-risk for the band, because it's just a few tracks to start off with, and it's low-risk for us, because we're not making a big multi-year commitment, and we don't have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, on marketing the artists. We're not trying to sell anything, we're just trying to put out music that we think is good.

Excerpt: We have lots of different deals, and it really depends on the artist. With some artists we do deeper deals, where we rep them in terms of their publishing and licensing, and we split the revenue for that kind of stuff. Downtown has a great team of seven people that are some of the best publishing and licensing people in the business. Some artists want to take advantage of that, and some artists don't. It varies; it's a spectrum, a continuum – if you want to give us a little bit more, you get a little bit more, and if you don't, that's fine – it works both ways. It's going to evolve over time for sure.

Article Title: Welcome to RCRD LBL | RCRD LBL

Excerpt: we'd like to welcome you to RCRD LBL, a brand new music site where all of the downloads are both free AND legal. In a world where many people get their music for free, we wanted to create a site where bands we loved could put their music out there for free AND get paid for it. RCRD LBL is a new model and an experiment, putting great music out there for free and with absolutely no DRM.

Excerpt: In some ways we're a music blog, written by people who want to bring you cool new music day in, day out. In other ways, we're a record label, championing, signing and partnering with bands we believe in.

Excerpt: All of our downloads are free and legal, but we'd ask that you not rehost the tracks on your site or use them in any way that might be considered commercial.

Article Title: Keith Urban and iLike

Excerpt: iLike, the Web’s leading social music service, and Keith Urban, the GRAMMY® Award winning musician, songwriter and performer, today announced a multi-tiered, multi-month collaborative relationship. Keith Urban, whose Greatest Hits:18 Kids streets on November 20, will make an exclusive series of weekly videos, which will provide unique, behind-the-scenes access to Urban from the road. The videos will be made available to Urban’s more than 300,000 fans on iLike, and syndicated across multiple websites including iLike’s popular application on Facebook® Platform, using iLike’s Universal Artist Dashboard™ and iCast™ multi-media blogging tools. In return, iLike will promote Keith’s tour dates on strategic locations throughout iLike.com and the iLike application on Facebook, as well as featuring Urban in a print advertising campaign.

Excerpt: To celebrate the launch of this on-going initiative, Keith Urban is offering a 30-day trial membership to his online community, Monkeyville, to fans who join Keith’s iLike fanbase before December 16. By clicking “iLike This Artist (Keith Urban),” these new trial members will be given the opportunity to purchase tickets to the “Love, Pain & the whole crazy Carnival Ride Tour” before the general public. Members of Monkeyville also have exclusive access to behind-the-scenes photos, Keith’s personal video blogs, Monkeyville message boards, members-only content, and more.

Excerpt: The leading artists who actively manage their presence on Facebook and beyond via iLike’s Universal Artist Dashboard include hundreds of established, award-winning acts. In fact, every major artist in the world already has an active and highly-trafficked profile within the iLike application on Facebook, complete with songs, concert dates, news and fan communication tools.

Article Title: Music Test: Can a Firm Profit From Free Tunes?

Excerpt: A joint venture of Downtown Records, the independent label behind Gnarls Barkley and others, and Peter Rojas, a journalist and entrepreneur who founded the respected technology blogs Gizmodo and Engadget, Rcrd Lbl is a hybrid record label and blog; its releases are to be posted on the company's Web site for downloading, free and unrestricted by digital-rights management software that limits copying.

Excerpt: The company has signed up three sponsors so far: Richard Branson's Virgin America Inc. airline, Nikon Corp., and PPR SA's Puma AG sneaker unit. The site will also include short articles, social-networking features and Internet radio stations

Excerpt: Album sales have fallen 14% this year compared with last year, a trend that shows no sign of reversing. Given those "sobering" numbers, Mr. Deutsch says, "if you're not trying to monetize the experience of sharing music, you're slowly going out of business."

Excerpt: Nonetheless, high hurdles remain for Rcrd Lbl. It is unclear, for instance, whether music fans will view as credible a blog that exists largely to promote its own commercial products. Messrs. Rojas and Deutsch say they will post music from other labels, too, as long as they can secure the rights and think their readers will be interested.

Excerpt: Another uncertainty: whether up-and-coming bands will be willing to lock up their best songs in a contract that is virtually guaranteed never to generate hit sales.

Article Title: Bob's Big Black Book of PR Links

Excerpt: The two biggest hurdles between you and an effective music PR campaign is knowing: 1) what to do (in other words, what news angle to attack) and 2) who to contact (or where to send your press releases). That's where having a personal database of PR advice sources and connections comes in very handy.

Excerpt: I encourage you to bookmark this page, work your way through these sites, print off the most helpful articles and use them all to put yourself into a music publicity frame of mind.

Article Title: USA Networks & Yahoo Music Join Forces To Promote New Artists | STR8HIPHOP.COM

Excerpt: USA Network and Yahoo! Music have entered into an agreement to discover and promote new music and emerging artists through a non-traditional marketing model. The collaboration, a first for television, will enhance USA Network’s slate of innovative programming and promotional content through breakthrough music.

Excerpt: Yahoo! Music VP Programming and Label Relations Jay Frank added: “As the music industry continues to evolve, the business of breaking artists depends on creative and integrated deals like this one. Yahoo! Music is in a unique position to identify unsigned talent and now has a partner with the reach, content and expertise to help develop the next big recording artist.”

Excerpt: Music industry innovator Proffer of Meteor 17 will oversee the development and promotion of the artists along with USA Network and Yahoo! Music.

Article Title: Is Cyloop Music's New Business Model?

Excerpt: Cyloop.com, headed by Argentine-born Demian Bellumio, began life as ElHood.com, a social network website geared toward Hispanic musicians. The company changed its name to Cyloop in August with goals to expand globally, including English-language offerings. On Monday, Cyloop.com announced it had signed deals with heavyweights like Warner and The Orchard, which distributes the music of about 6,000 independent labels.

Excerpt: Bellumio, a former vice president of corporate finance for Terremark, said he doesn't expect the company to be profitable until next year. The company has so far raised more than $11 million in venture capital financing.

Excerpt: For artists themselves, social networking sites have become critical to promoting themselves, even if they don't make any money.

Article Title: eSession.com Combines Talent & Technology

Excerpt: With eSession, the client simply clicks one button to hire Mastelotto and uploads his or her music files via a drag-and-drop Web page. Then, recording from his own studio, Mastelotto works with the client across the Internet. eSession handles all of his payments and real-time communication between him and the client, saving him days of travel time and alleviating the hassle of shipping and setting up his gear. Needless to say, this saves thousands of dollars while also allowing anyone, amateur or professional, anywhere in the world, to hire his or her musical heroes with one click and a credit card.

Excerpt: Three years in the making and launched this past April, eSession.com is a music recording solutions company, a Web application and a talent-matching service all in one. Users can choose from over 750 "eTalent" members -- accomplished musicians, producers and engineers, each with at least 15 major label credits. Users may also search the site to work with over 3,000 eMembers.

Excerpt: Fant-Saez expects that eSession will grow its fan base quickly because of the way it emphasizes autonomy in an independent music landscape and how it leverages the exploding number of digital recording studios that artists and musicians now have at home. "Anyone could collaborate with anyone else, anywhere, anytime," says Fant-Saez. "Now, that's not just theory anymore -- it's reality."

Article Title: For Radiohead Fans, Does 'Free' 'Download' = 'Freeload'?

Excerpt: During the first 29 days of October, 1.2 million people worldwide visited the "In Rainbows" site, with a significant percentage of visitors ultimately downloading the album. The study showed that 38 percent of global downloaders of the album willingly paid to do so, with the remaining 62 percent choosing to pay nothing.

Excerpt: "I am surprised by the number of freeloaders," said Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures and well-known music aficionado. "The stories to date about the In Rainbows 'pick your price' download offer have been much more optimistic. I paid $5 U.S. and had no reluctance whatsoever to take out my card and pay. It's a fantastic record, the best thing they've done in years. But, this shows pretty conclusively that the majority of music consumers feel that digital recorded music should be free and is not worth paying for. That's a large group that can't be ignored and its time to come up with new business models to serve the freeloader market."

Excerpt: "While the band, its fans and artists alike are celebrating what looks like a success for Radiohead's bold move in releasing their new album using the 'pay what you'd like' model, I think everybody has overlooked one very important aspect of this, and it doesn't bode well for the future of the music industry," says Michael Laskow, CEO of TAXI, the world's leading independent A&R (Artist and Repertoire) company. "Radiohead has been bankrolled by their former label for the last 15 years. They've built a fan base in the millions with their label, and now they're able to cash in on that fan base with none of the income or profit going to the label this time around. That's great for the band and for fans who paid less than they would under the old school model. But at some point in the not too distant future, the music industry will run out of artists who have had major label support in helping them build a huge fan base. The question is: how will new artists be able to use this model in the future if they haven't built a fan base in the millions in the years leading up to the release of their album under the pay what you'd like model?"

Article Title: PRWeb: The Online Visibility Company

Excerpt: All PRWebnews releases deliver online visibility. There are four levels of news releases that contain progressively increasing degrees of distribution, display features, SEO and social media functionality, and reporting capabilities. Please refer to the comparison chart below to find the package that best meets your needs and goals.

Article Title: Internet killed the CD store

Excerpt: Record labels seem powerless to turn around slumping CD sales. They've dropped 20 percent in the first three months of 2007 compared with this time last year. "I would think it's definitely a trend," said Rob Jara, sales and marketing representative for the music distributing company AEC One Stop. "I have a lot of friends at record labels who say the final days are upon us."

Excerpt: “What we are witnessing is not so much the imminent death of CDs, but the death of the old methods of selling CDs,” Gross wrote in an article called “The CD is dead: Long live the CD.” “It’s still possible to make money in the CD business … The incumbents are getting killed, but upstarts are thriving, using different methods.”

Article Title: Musicians back Net neutrality laws

Excerpt: The campaign, called "Rock the Net," is the latest attempt at getting Congress to pass legislation barring network operators like Verizon and AT&T from charging extra fees to shuttle Web content.

Excerpt: A Republican-controlled Congress went on to reject repeatedly a number of Democratic-backed proposals that had the support of Net neutrality advocates, which also include Google, eBay, Amazon.com and a diverse array of advocacy groups.