Links: PRINTABLE VERSION | A2IM Site | Slide Show | Video Help

New York City, February 23, 2010 – The music industry’s leading digital content provider, Loud Feed, is proud to announce the launch of its new social media networking site for the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM). The A2IM branded site allows the trade association to focus specifically on the needs of its community, empowering members to connect, share news and add content within a highly interactive and useable online social network.

A2IM serves the Independent music community as a unified voice representing a broad coalition of music labels, music companies and services. Key aspects of their new social networking site include FaceBook-like features whereby members can view site-wide activities, status updates, and latest news. Members can also join groups, forums and promote events. Each profile allows for custom fields and tags. Distinct tag clouds are viewable for music labels, associate members and news items.

“The new A2IM.org social web site is an enhanced gateway for our membership to better connect with one another and to easily stay updated with what’s happening in our community. Dr. Ron Suarez of Loud Feed engineered an impressive custom solution using standards based Open Source tools that laid the foundation for greater things to come. We are especially pleased that our non-technical staff are able to control our content more easily.” – Jim Mahoney, Vice-President, A2IM Read the rest of this entry »

Open Source, Press Release | No Comments »

Download this free plugin and try it out with a free Loud Feed account to promote your music. Loud Feed has created “Music Label WP” as a Wordpress plugin that takes content managed in Loud Feed and automatically populates your Wordpress site. Whether you’re an established Music Label or starting your own Label, this plugin leverages Wordpress for the ease of creating and skinning your own site possible with content that Loud Feed stores using Amazon Web Services for storage and bandwidth. Loud Feed offers a publishing workflow for all you music content (albums, artists, songs, shows, promotions, widgets and related metadata).

See examples of artist and album pages displayed on a Wordpress site using “Music Label WP” site that uses content from the GoinNative Label, whose custom site we developed in Ruby on Rails. Wordpress with the new Music Label WP plugin will now offer a less expensive solution for labels and make it easier for the label and their staff to control the front end, while leveraging to powerful Loud Feed Music Content Management System integrated with Amazon Web Services for unlimited scalability.

The plugin is being licensed as GPL Open Source and the Loud Feed platform itself is in the process of becoming licensed as GPL Open Source (as soon as our lawyer is done).

LF-Tools, Open Source | 3 Comments »

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to sit next to Fred Wilson and hear his ideas about making a difference. Before the talk started I got to chat with him about my thoughts to take Loud Feed Open Source and he offered some very encouraging advice. It is great for me to be able to leverage being back in NYC, my home town. The Music Industry has a lot to learn from the game changing technologies that companies like Boxee funded by Fred Wilson are creating.

Investment, Open Source, Video | No Comments »

I just spent the previous two days at the Open Video Conference, which took place at NYU. This was an historic moment. From artists to programmers, a wealth of information was presented and discussed that is just the beginning for this group of people who came here from across the planet and will continue to interact through the Open Video Alliance. The alliance is putting together the principles of an open video ecosystem that will form a technical roadmap for a more interoperable and decentralized online video environment. Over and over, I kept hearing sentences, where I would think about simply changing the word “video” to “music.” Read the rest of this entry »

Conferences, News, Video | No Comments »

Want a catchy way to get people to play your music and share it with all their friends around the world at the click of a button?

Ape Radio is a custom skin for a music feed from the Loud Feed back end that also powers content feeds into the label’s Apehouse digital music store. The User Experience is like streaming, but it is actually using MP3 files. The Apehouse Label is run by Andy Partridge who readers may remember from XTC.

Think about it, if you are lets say Josh Wink, and you want to promote your new album called “When a Banana was just a Banana,” why not create a banana shaped widget that is sure to get more plays and be shared amongst friends that will have a viral effect and take on a life of its own.

Have an idea for a crazy widget of your own? Try us.

News | No Comments »

(special thanks for the picture, you can buy the tshirt here)

First off, maybe the image is strong, because Myspace has truly helped many artists and labels, so it is sad to see them not continue in that direction.

Myspace is still the largest and dominant social network, yet it mistreats artists and labels, big and small. The site is under increasing pressure: Facebook is catching up at a rapid pace and should surpass Myspace as the world’s largest social network, but also Myspace Music which was supposed to help labels monetize their content, is failing. The major labels are not happy (as usual, except for EMI), but now there are more and more growing complaints, especially from the independent labels and also all the widget makers, digital stores and many others hoping to help artists monetize their content on their myspace pages.

Until recently, artists could copy paste Beatport, Loud Feed or any other widgets on their myspace page and thus sell their music, since Myspace does not offer the ability to sell music unless you are with the majors (with few exceptions). However, now you can still paste these widgets on your page, but unfortunately they are ineffective since Myspace is now blocking the outgoing links from within the players.

This is a dishonest and anti competitive move on the behemoth’s part. Their inability to come up with the necessary developments to help artists should not push them to preventing others from helping artists. Besides, have any artists seen a cut of their advertising revenues?

Something needs to be done and if Myspace does not change their attitudes and show some gratitude towards its artists and labels, then the exodus to a better and more profitable place will occur. Artists and labels no longer rely on the site to succeed. To remain relevant it will have to offer more solutions to artists and labels and in particular the ability to sell content. Regardless, if Myspace does not undergo strategic changes, I am willing to bet that Last.fm or others could rapidly surpass them as the premier music social network.

Would it not be much nicer for artists to have a customizable webpage where you can have all the widgets you want to sell, license and promote your music. Shouldn’t your fans be able to buy your music from you? Well you can now do that by getting started here. Check out what AIRDROP has done with its Loud Feed page. And the truth is we are not the only ones, but we are doing our best to add features and tune them as closely as possible to the true needs of artists and labels.

News | No Comments »

Ever hear about an unconference? Much in the spirit of everything we do at Loud Feed, we are producing a music industry event in Detroit May 21st and 22nd that will focus on helping emerging artists and labels make the most of the digital age. MusicBIzCamp: The Music Unconference, Detroit09 will be different form all other music education seminars and events, as it will have the by us for us feeling. Want to learn how to create your own Wordpress site? Start a netlabel? Get a distribution deal? You tell us what you want to learn and we will work together to put together panels based on your needs.

We have an experienced team of music industry professionals: from artists, label owners to social media experts and music supervisors all to give you tips on how to succeed. Come check out the panels we have already set up and get an idea for the schedule. Time is ticking so get involved now and attend for free by volunteering!

In case you wanted to get a preview of the venue, check this out!

Venue for MusicBizCamp Unconference Detroit 09: May 21 – 22 from Ron Suarez on Vimeo.

Events, News | 1 Comment »

(thanks beatportal for image)

Richie Hawtin will not be playing this year’s Detroit Electronic Music Festival, but the twitter app he unveiled in partnership with Traktor leaves room for a lot of opportunity at DEMF 2009 for other DJs using Traktor. Beatport and Traktor have previously partnered for Beatport Sync and it seems like the companies are a great match, so no reason they should not be working together now.

So why don’t they put something together for DEMF? Having the Twitter feed shown behind the DJ may be a bit too much, especially considering that DJ’s like to be able preserve a certain mystique on what they play and not have the track instantly appear 30 seconds after playing. There is also the risk that it just confuses people. Matching the track’s information text with the track being mixed may not be 100% error free. Integrating Beatport sales into the feed could also represent an ethical dilemma for artists: what do you play when everything is a buy link? should artists get kickbacks? On the other hand what about giving discounts for buying from the playlists or for instant purchases?

Nonetheless, how cool would it be when hearing that track that will get you humming for the next 24 hours, you can check twitter and find out what it was. The more technologically advanced you are the easier it will be too, so if you have an iphone with a nice twitter app, you can discretely monitor what the DJ is playing. Not only that, but you can now support the artists you love by buying their music or just by being there and listening, since ultimately the app serves as an amazing start to performance tracking, so that the underground artists can get paid royalties as well.

There is a significant educational element to it, which will undoubtedly improve people’s musical knowledge and strengthen artist followings.

One thing is for sure artists and labels in electronic music can thank Richie for making the leap. You can read more about some of the pros and cons given by Beatportal and more on the techier side of the news at CDM.

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Franco Cinelli & Funzion (aka Alejandro Mosso) have created 2 dance music hits for the AIRDROP imprint. First released on vinyl in a limited edition of 500 copies with art by Cocobula. It will be hitting digital a few weeks later and will be available through the AIRDROP widget store.

The strategy of releasing vinyl before digital has now become standard amongst the top indie electronic music labels, rewarding the “vinyl tribe” for its fidelity to a legacy that technology risks destroying. At Loud Feed we hope that the vinyl tradition will continue and that we can help it continue to exist, possibly using our tools to build sales and bundle digital and vinyl into a single product. Even the most die hard turntablelists have ipods…

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If you have not realized that search engine ranking makes a big difference then maybe we should send you to Music Biz Camp. When googling “AIRDROP Records”, the top 5 results are going to have significantly more exposure than any of the others.

Social media like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and Loud Feed have certain advantages when it comes to search, one of them being that they are overarching-umbrella brands under which others can regroup. So the fact that Myspace has over 1 million bands, gives some extra clout to each and all of them when using search, inevitably helping myspace place closer to the top as well.

Maybe Loud Feed has not beaten myspace yet, but the fact that we are already ahead of Twitter and Facebook must stand for something, and if not at the very least, a bit of pride. Especially, considering we also know that AIRDROP was on Twitter and Facebook before joining Loud Feed.

You can get your band or label on Loud Feed to see if it improves your presence in top search results. At least Loud Feed can get you integrated with google analytics to analize the geography of the traffic coming to your page, making it much easier to justify tours in Eastern Europe, Japan or elsewhere, because you will know where to find your fans.

News | No Comments »