Musicadium Blog

I thought I’d introduce myself a little bit more and also explain what I do as a promoter at my local music venue in Birmingham. I’ve been working for a club, Un-Plug, for a good while now, regularly putting on popular upcoming and well known deejays from across the country. The club is situated 2 minutes from the heart of Birmingham city centre in Digbeth, an area thriving in music, arts and culture. You can read more about this here.

After joining the team at Musicadium, I immediately began thinking of ways in which I could incorporate Musicadium’s services with Un-Plug. Having just launched a new event dedicated to unsigned bands called Un-Plug Live, I then set about mapping out ideas which would benefit both the venue and Musicadium.

My Idea

I then devised a ticketing system in which bands whom play at Un-Plug, are posted a bundle of tickets in advance of their show. The policy goes like this. All tickets for Un-Plug Live will be split up, with a certain amount sold at advance, and a certain amount on the door. For every ticket sold in advance, bands will retain a set share of this. For every 15 tickets sold, bands automatically gain a distribution deal with Musicadium, funded by the team at Un-Plug. This idea offers bands opportunites to earn money through ticket sales they make, an experience of promotion and also the chance of gaining a worldwide distribution deal with Musicadium. Definitely a big look!

What’s next?

I have a massive list of bookings I’ll be making over the next few weeks specifically for Un-Plug Live. I’ll be designing fresh flyers/posters with all the info regarding the Un-Plug Live/Musicadium partnership, necessary in dishing out to everyone and everywhere possible. As soon as these are done I’ll get digital copies online in my next post to show you guys. I’ll be launching Un-Plug Live at the end of October, having mid-week gigs running fortnightly.

What follows?

The Musicadium podcast, featuring UK artists whom have registered and signed a distribution deal. I don’t wish to give too much away on this idea, so hold tight for my next post.

Nice one!

James

jamesb@musicadium.com

Artist Liaison and UK Correspondent

Musicadium

If you have never heard of South by Southwest - (WikiPedia)

SXSW is one of the largest music festivals in the United States, with more than 1,400 performers playing dozens of venues around Austin over four days, in March. Though it is an industry-based event, SXSW Music links locally with events such as the annual Austin Music Awards show. SXSW is the highest revenue-producing special event for the Austin economy, with an estimated economic impact of at least $110 million in 2008.

The music event has grown from 700 registrants in 1987 to nearly 12,000 registrants. SXSW Film and SXSW Interactive events attract approximately 11,000 registrants to Austin every March.

SXSW has inspired similar festivals elsewhere, including North by Northeast (NXNE) in Toronto and West by Southwest (WXSW) in Tucson, AZ.

SXSW also offers a free musical samples of featured artists at each festival. The number of songs has grown from 775 MP3 tracks in 2005 to 1267 in 2009.

To get your submission in for consideration for a slot at South By SouthWest - go to the SxsW page at http://www.sxsw.com/music/shows/apply which explains the Sonicbids process.  Application fees are US$30 for early submissions, rising to US$40 September 26.

Musicadium has always been a leader in the Australian market for digital distribution of independent music to the world’s leading digital outlets, but from this week, Musicadium is raising the stakes and providing a range of new services, with more to come in the following months.

As early as tomorrow and throughout the coming week, Musicadium will release updates to the current website and to the album-adding process.

This very exciting development has been the product of a number of months’ work for the Musicadium team - the announcement of which has us all celebrating!

The purpose of this is:

1) To streamline the process to get music to us and straight through to the online outlets by adding an upload step in the album process (files are to be submitted in WAV files - stereo, 16bit, 44.1khZ).  This feature will be made available from Friday 26th September, 9AM EST.  This will aid the album adding process for overseas artists and reduce the postage costs for Australian artists to distribute their music digitally!

2) To add an extra outlet - Nokia Music (which also gets your music into the Nokia Comes with Music subscription service for mobiles).  This feature will be made available from Thursday 17th September, 9AM EST.

3) To add the ability to distribute video to iTunes (this feature will be available from Monday 21 September, 9AM EST and details on the requirements for distribution will be made available then).  Musicadium will be the only Australian-based aggregator to be supplying music video content to iTunes, to distribute globally!

These features will be available and accessible from the members area on the Musicadium website.

If you have any questions regarding these developments, please e-mail info@musicadium.com or call (07) 3252 9962.

Deadline Approaching Soon: October 7, 2009

The 2009 International Songwriting Competition (ISC) is well underway, with 55 celebrity and industry professional judges, 21 categories to enter your songs into, and over $150,000 in cash and prizes including a Grand Prize of $25,000 cash and $20,000 in musical equipment and services! This is the largest cash Grand Prize of any major songwriting competition in the world.

Easiest of all, if you have a MySpace page with your songs on it - simply email a link to your songs (along with the entry form info at http://www.songwritingcompetition.com), and they will be listened to on your MySpace page! It’s very easy and is the most cost effective way to enter - no songs to upload online, no post office to deal with, no postage fees!

ISC accepts original songs from musicians, artists, groups, and songwriters at every level from amateur to professional. Click here to go to the entry form on the ISC MySpace page - http://www.myspace.com/isc or simply go to the ISC website at http://www.songwritingcompetition.com for more information about entering through the mail or online.

Each year ISC is privileged to assemble an outstanding judging panel, and the 2009 competition is no exception. ISC’S panel of judges consists of highly respected recording artists and some of the most influential executives in the music industry including Presidents of record labels such as Epic, Universal Republic, Sire, and Nettwerk Music Group!
Please go to www.songwritingcompetition.com for an entry form or more details.

The annual Big Sound music conference, to be held September 9-11 in Brisbane’s live music and entertainment precinct will see the unveiling of new research conducted by Griffith University lecturer Dr. David Carter, in collaboration with Digital Music Aggregator Musicadium, relating to the sales and marketing of recorded music online.

In a marketplace where digital sales are on the increase and physical CD sales are decreasing, the purpose of the research was to examine the relationship between the use of online promotional tools available to artists and revenues generated through online sales.

Australia’s premier digital distributor/aggregator, Musicadium, have been at the forefront of Digital Innovation since their inception in 2007 and are currently expanding their operations to include promotion and industry connection services to artists.

Now working with over 1000 artists and distributing their music to online outlets such as iTunes, eMusic and AmazonMP3, Musicadium was perfectly positioned to partner with Dr. Carter on this exciting research.

Musicadium hopes that the research provides artists and industry a better understanding of how to use the online space most effectively to promote and profit from their work.

The findings of the report will be revealed in a panel discussion on Thursday the 10th of September at 10:30 in Brisbane’s Judith Wright Centre to the sold out, 300-strong audience of delegates and the full report made available to delegates on the day via Musicadium’s website.

Download your copy of the report here

For the sixth year in a row, the mighty Pyramid Rock Festival returns to bring in the New Year on Phillip Island from Tuesday 29th December 2009 until Friday 1st January 2010.

If you are an artist wishing to make a submission to play at Pyramid Rock Festival 2009 email bands@thepyramidrockfestival.com or send demos/press kits to:

Pyramid Rock Festival
PO Box 256
Inverloch, Victoria, Australia
3996

HYPEBOT - MySpace buys iLike

HYPEBOT - MySpace disables Auto-Play (Thank God!)

TORRENTFREAK - Radiohead Leak their new track as a Torrent to MiniNova

THE GUARDIAN - Why the big 4 labels love Spotify

NEWS.COM.AU - Legal Digital Downloads to eclipse CD sales by the end of 2010

The big buzz around the Twitter, Blog and digital music news sites today was about Apple’s new service, code-named “Cocktail”, due to be dropped sometime in September (a fairly ambitious finish line, methinks).

From HypeBot, Apple Cocktail is “an interactive album bundle that would add additional content like liner notes, lyrics, videos and more to every album download.”

Further comments state that Cocktail’s purpose is “…all about recreating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork while you listened to the music,” one executive familiar with the initiative told the Financial Times. “It’s not just a bunch of PDFs. There’s real engagement with the ancillary stuff.”  This suggests that it won’t be a half-measure and that iTunes are, at face-value at least, dedicated to not just putting some PDF files (already available for a lot of releases, though definitely not all) in, bundled with the audio files and branding it a new product.

The comments on the Hypebot article (the small sample that has been posted today) seem to be geared very negatively towards it, saying that the rich content that Apple is promising is already available online and generally free, i.e. High-Quality Youtube content, Hi-Res Album Covers etc, albeit not in all cases.

It is also being reported that the “Big 4″ major labels had previously pitched a similar idea to iTunes, who rejected it at the time, but is now packaging the idea as theirs.  Another criticism it seems to be attracting is that it will be delivered in yet another proprietary format, almost a self-contained application to be run on the computer that plays all the content.

In terms of trying to drive album sales rather than piecemeal sales of low-profit-margin singles this isn’t a bad idea, but not as a proprietary format.  Time and time again, we have seen that open-ness and offering various forms of consumption for playback is the key for gaining new customers - it seems that consumers don’t want to be constricted by the way that they stock their portable players.  The ability to break the package down to tracks and videos for adding (whether as a whole album or singular tracks) to portable MP3 players/iPods and new phones could very well be the success of this product.

Obviously, this product is coming, so it remains to be seen how it will be finally delivered.

The Musicadium team would like to congratulate our wonderful artists who have been nominated in the 2009 QMusic/Courier Mail QSong Awards.

We would like to congratulate (as well as all the other fantastic nominees, but these guys especially!!):

Timothy Carroll (Folk Ballad/Alternative/People’s Choice Award)

Max Judo (Indigenous)

James Grehan (Blues and Roots/Rock)

The View from Madeleine’s Couch (World Music)

Ange Takats (Encouragement Award)

Amy Cushway (Encouragement Award)

Last year, Musicadium sponsored the New Music/Experimental Award - this year, we are sponsoring both the New Music and Experimental award AND the Pop Award! We are proud to be associated with the premier Song Awards in Queensland.

FROM QMUSIC’S FORTNIGHTLY MAILOUT: Queensland’s annual search for the state’s finest songwriters closed last Friday with a record number of entries. More than 2140 songs from across Queensland have been entered this year in 14 categories.

Q Music Executive Officer Denise Foley said “This is by far the most outstanding response we have ever had from Q Song. It’s truly a year to celebrate Queensland creativity with the number of exceptional songwriters we have in our state.”

Entries are currently being featured on www.qsong.com.au and each week 612 ABC Brisbane features Q Song artists on Thursdays at 1.30pm with Richard Fidler. Listeners can tune into local radio Queensland to hear outstanding entries.

Entrants in Q Song 09 will have the opportunity to not just showcase their songs, but also to share in $25,000 worth of cash and prizes aimed at building their careers.

Past Q Song winners include Kate Miller-Heidke, The Boatpeople, The Grates, The John Steel Singers, Robert Foster, Kev Carmody, Bernard Fanning, Ben Salter (The Gin Club), Kate Bradley, Jackie Marshall, Tim Steward, James Grehan, 8 Ball Aitken, Emma- louise, Shari Williams and many more.

While Q Song principally targets emerging and unpublished songwriters, those with established songwriting careers will also be eligible for the Published Song of the Year Award.

Finalists will be announced on June 29, 2009 with the Q Song Awards event to be staged at Fortitude Valley venue, The Tivoli on August 11.

Also announced on the night will be the Grant McLennan Lifetime Achievement Award, and The Courier-Mail Peoples Choice Award.

For more information about Q Song 2009 visit: www.qsong.com.au