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.

We've been doing a lot of work under the hood in Music Arsenal but we also wanted to let you know about some of the visual and functional updates we've made recently to make MA easier to use. Click on the image to view a bigger version

Tagging is here!

Lots of Music Arsenal users requested we add tagging to our contact system to make searching and navigation easier... so we did just that! On any contact page you can click the 'Add Tags' link to add a tag to a contact right then and there. After you add a tag it is searchable from the 'Tag Search' box located on the left of almost every page of the application.

Paging

We admit, it used to be hard find all of the contacts in our music industry contact directories.... but no more! We've added paging to the contact lists so you can see every contact we have. This will make cruising through the directories faster and easier for everyone.

Navigation

Another update we're very proud of is the retooled site navigation. We've ditched the dropdown menus in favor of a faster tabbed based navigation. The feedback for this feature in particular is resounding as the overall experience with Music Arsenal is much improved.

Redesigned Contact Page

We released a new design for a contact page awhile back and now we're getting around to writing about it. Its MUCH easier to read and find information on a contact page and if a contact has an address a map of that location is also displayed. You can also add notes and communications for a contact without refreshing the page. What a relief!!

We are hard at work making more updates available in the near future and as always we'd love to hear what you think or if you have any ideas. Just e-mail us at info@musicarsenal.com or fill out the suggesting form in the application.