All About Music
February 26, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Two things to say today about music.
Good News (Hurray!)
- YouBloom : A Social Networking Site for Artists by Artists
Take a look at it and you might say ‘yeah yeah it’s just another MySpace’. But that’s where you’re wrong! It’s not. The main difference between YouBloom and MySpace is that with YouBloom money is involved.
At the moment, with MySpace, someone listens to your music and likes it, then you have to hope that they go off to iTunes to buy it. If that happens, you have to wait months before you find out how many sales you had.
Youbloom allows the artist to sell product (music or merchandise) on the site and you get to see in real-time what’s selling and what’s being listened to. They also share 50% of the advertising revenue with you – some other sites claim to do this, but if you read the terms & conditions, you’ll find it’s a bit fuzzy wuzzy… they’ll only share if the cock crows on the third full moon of a leap year sort of thing.
Other important differences:
- YouBloom – the artist owns the data
- You can import lists and use tools to communicate with your fan base.
- Fans get points for forwarding, rating and commenting on songs and they can redeem these for product
- Artist can sell product – digital or merchanise – and can choose to give it away for free, sell for hard cash, or sell for points.
The site is only out of beta a couple of weeks and already has 500 artists. It’s definitely worth a look. And for the record, I have nothing to do with this site.
Evil Bad News
I’m disgusted with the news that Eircom is being forced by IRMA to block access to music download sites. It’s such a ridiculous pile of legal poo. If it goes through, Ireland will be the first country in the world to block access to these sites. I hate the way the authorities here allow things like this (that they don’t understand, or that don’t affect builders/farmers) to go through with no comment.
It’s not even going to work. People will use proxys to get around it.
But the real point is, it’s not just about blocking access to music, it’s about censoring the internet. The internet should be kept free and semi-state appointed, old men from IRMA should back right off.
There’s a Facebook group called “Let’s Ensure We Have An Uncensored Internet for Ireland” you can join if you want to voice your disgust.
UPDATE 3 March: More signs of deals being unwound… Portishead are looking to fans to come up with their new business strategy.
if you lot have any bright ideas of how we should sell our music in the future lets us know
Here’s a pic lifted off the fabulous Pirate Bay website. If you want to download music for free, check out ThePirateBay.org :
