Music Arsenal Blog

Here at Music Arsenal HQ in sunny Omaha, NE we've been hard at work on an all new version of RockDex. We began RockDex simply as a cool site to track your online buzz but the response has been so overwhelming we decided to take it a step further. We heard your requests and have developed deeper tracking, better results, detailed data and more. We call it RockDex Pro!

So what does this mean for you? You'll be able to better understand where and who your fans are and what they're saying about you. Maybe that deep cut on your new album is the most buzzed about track and you should consider giving it a little more attention. Plan your next tour around hot cities and interact with your fans buzzing about your the most. Find and cultivate that tribe and 1000 true fans.

We plan on releasing this into the wild soon and if you signup for early warning we'll let you know before anyone else and give you first chance to use RockDex Pro. We promise no long waits. (We'll also start deep tracking for any artist that signs up)

We'll also be giving one on one phone demos several times a week so if you're interested, indicate in the form. If you don't want a demo and just want to say whats up we want to hear from you.

Now for the goods! Feast your eyes on the first shots of RockDex Pro! Make sure to click the images for full size.

We have several artists and companies using this pro version now and have had great feedback! Needless to say we're very very VERY excited for this! Remember to signup for early notice, keep an eye here and follow us on twitter for updates!

Twitter has undoubtedly become what many are calling the next big thing in music promotion. There have been several success stories and on the same hand some have been disappointed by the results. If you look beyond individual case studies its interesting to see how artists and fans are using twitter to expose music and what methods are most popular.

RockDex has been tracking millions of Twitter posts as part of our upcoming RockDex Pro edition and garnered some pretty interesting data. We've poured over your tweets and categorized the biggest sources of twitter music discussion and discovery.

First off, a breakdown of all tweet sources. These are tweets containing an artist's name. If the tweet states something along the lines of, "I love Rocket From The Crypt" it is categorized as a general tweet. If the tweet content is "Rocket From The Crypt - Born in '69 http://blip.fm/~8p7l4" it is categorized as a blip.fm tweet and so on. Artists like Cursive, The Streets and Rush were excluded from this study for being overly used in non-music contexts. Click on a chart for a larger view.

You can see that the vast majority of these tweets are general posts about an artist. However 3.6% of all music tweets come from blip.fm and another 5% were from radio stations tweeting what they're playing right now.

If we break this down further we can see what percentage of specialized tweets come from individual sources excluding general tweets. These are tweets posted from social music sites such as blip.fm, The Hype Machine and radio based sites Yes.com and RadioTAGr.com.

Finally here is a chart of specialized tweet sources without radio station tweets. I've excluded radio from this chart because radio tweets don't require any human interaction (both yes.com and RadioTagr.com are generally automated) as tweets from these social music sites do. 

You can see currently Blip.fm is leading the pack far and wide. Although twt.fm is only holding 6.01% of the market share right now, keep in mind they only launched five months ago and are a site to keep your eye on.

We'll update these charts as we collect more data and new social music sites are created. If you'd like more information or want to check out a demo of RockDex Pro e-mail me at jimmy@musicarsenal.com.

Well, not entirely.... but we have just released an open source Cold Fusion integration with Eventful and the EVDB API we created here at Music Arsenal. We used this on the previous version of Music Arsenal to add tour dates automatically to Eventful and plan on integrating this with the new version soon.

You can check it out at http://eventfulcfc.riaforge.com. Hope you can get some use out of this!

Also on the code front you can check out my talk at the Nebraska ColdFusion User Group Meeting about the Transfer ORM on the Tech Omaha site.

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?