Music Arsenal Blog

Just a quick note that I'll be presenting some of the tools we built Music Arsenal with later this month at the Nebraska ColdFusion User's Group. I've presented here before on the old version of the app, but these are the tools from the all new version. These meetings are always a lot of fun and you learn some great stuff.

It will be primarily focused on the Transfer ORM but I'll also discuss a couple of the other cool things we used as well.

Here's the information:
Tuesday, November 25th at 6pm
Location: CF WebTools at 11204 Davenport, Suite 100, Near I680 & Dodge.

Hope to see you there!

I was talking with some friends recently and we were discussing the tools we use on a daily basis to run our businesses. I heard the standards like the Microsoft Office tools, online banking, Photoshop and more. To give a little back, here is a list of the tools I use every day to make my work at Music Arsenal a little easier.

Eclipse
I use the Eclipse IDE day in/day out for Music Arsenal development. I couldn't imagine a better IDE and I don't know what I did without it! I used to use Homesite for development but with CFEclipse my life is a breeze.

Firefox
C'mon, we're a web company. I use this all the time!

Bloglines
I never could get into Google reader so this is my RSS reader of choice. I try not to spend ALL my time with whats going on in music and the web so I also have a few feeds like The Perry Bible Fellowship and Will Draw Anything to keep me "balanced".

Favorite Feeds: HypeBot, Coolfer, Bruce Warila, ReadWriteWeb, and Vitamin.

iTunes and Sirius Internet Radio
For me its Sirius all morning and iTunes all afternoon. (Evident on my Last.FM feed) I didn't just start Music Arsenal because it was a natural progression but all I want to do is listen to music.

Music Arsenal
Not only do we develop it but we use it all the time too. We drink this special sauce for all of our contact and project management. Events.... not yet, but we have some things cooking.

Firebug for Firefox plugin
Nothing has made my life easier when it comes to web development than Firebug! Making changes on the fly to see the results instantly is a life saver.

This isn't everything I use, but its 85% of the important stuff. So what about you? What are your key tools on a daily basis?

Yesterday I was listening to some songs on our friend Kyle Galanaugh's MySpace page and I came across a neat widget called Pocket Fuzz that Kyle was using to sell his songs as ringtones. Of course there are many companies that help major artists and even groups of small artists sell ringtones, but I had yet to come across a program that put selling ringtones entirely into the hands of the artists.

After some research on the Pocket Fuzz website I found hit works and it's really simple. An artist creates an account on the site, uploads MP3s into the Pocket Fuzz system and then Pocket Fuzz provides them with a piece of code to place on the artist's MySpace page and artist's individual website (hopefully). From this widget, a user can type in their phone number, pick a 30 second clip of one of the artist's songs as their ringtone and pay $1.99 through PayPal. The user receives a text message with a link to their new ringtone file and the transaction is complete.

I asked Kyle what he thought about the service so far and he has a very positive response. "Pocketfuzz is working for me. I have found that some people don't really know what it is when they see it on my site. I believe it is because it is new to most people. However when I post bulletins to "DOWNLOAD MY RINGTONES" people respond well." When asked about the number of ringtones sold Kyle said, "In the past month I have sold just over 50 ringtones. I have just under 1,400 fans on my page so the percentage is pretty good."

The artists receive between .30 and .50 cents based on the rising scale of ringtones sold. This is a great way to make some supplemental income from a revenue stream that until now was difficult for regional and local artists to tap. As soon as integrated credit card payments are built in and artists can select their own 30 second clips (instead of leaving it up to just the user) I'm sure we'll be seeing Pocket Fuzz on websites more often than not.

RSS yields most action: Geffen Records to leverage FeedBurner - Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted an interesting article about Geffen Records beginning to use Feedburner to distribute band/label news. Apparently, based on recent research, readers are more likely to react to a subscribed news feed rather than older, more traditional methods of receiving news. (Subscribed E-Mail newsletters I assume)

BandNews is doing something similar by creating a combined RSS feed of all your favorite bands' news from their repository of band RSS feeds. I'm sure this Geffen development can only help their business by making more feeds available to BandNews users.

If Geffen's response research is correct this may also affect FanMail, a newly launched company that provides e-mail marketing for artists. Although a news item in a subscribed RSS feed may create a stronger response than a subscribed e-mail news item, I still think e-mail newsletters will retain their foothold until there is a much higher RSS adoption rate among common internet users and music fans.