Music Arsenal Blog

Last week we were treated with the new Weird Al song "You're Pitiful" (A take on James Blunt's you're beautiful) and this week The Digital Music Weblog has written a story detailing why Mr. Yankovic prefers CD Sales to Digital sales of his albums.

Weird Al Yankovic Says Digital Is a Raw Deal For Some Artists - Not only does this quote Weird Al's feelings for digital downloads from an April interview but the article also does a good job of breaking down the distribution of money made off of a digital download. A must read for those looking for more information about digital sales.

We're happy to announce that Music Arsenal's tour management module now integrates with the Eventful and Podbop websites. When entering a tour date into Music Arsenal the data is automatically sent to Eventful which PodBop then accesses and uses on their website.

Eventful is a website which allows users to post about upcoming events they care about and want others to know about. Once concert information is in Eventful, PodBop takes it and posts it in their concert pages. Artists and Labels can also upload photos and edit their bios on the Eventful performer pages.

PodBop, which recently won First Place at Mashup Camp, is a revolutionary concert discovery site that posts upcoming tour dates and music from touring artists. For example, if you search Omaha, NE on the PodBop site, not only do you see upcoming shows but you can also hear songs from those artists. This helps users discover and hear new bands that are coming to their town. You can also sign up for an RSS feed for the city to have tour dates automatically delivered to your RSS reader.

Currently there are over 60 labels using PodBop to promote their concerts. In order for PodBop to display your artists, you simply need to add them to the PodBop database.

We're very excited to have this enhancement available to our users and hope you can take advantage of these two new and growing methods of concert promotion!

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.