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

The A2IM site has been engineered exclusively by Loud Feed, a company which is fast becoming the ultimate service provider for self-branded social media networking sites in the music industry. The company offers social media networking audits of your current web/ mobile presence and strategy, and engineers solutions that solve real business problems. In addition, Loud Feed offers “Tools for Independence”, a digital asset content management system specialized for music labels.

Dr. Ron Suarez, CEO, Loud Feed says: “Now any community can have it’s own branded social media networking site. The ability to control your own channel and content lets you focus on the needs of your community without having to follow somebody else’s rules. With new social tools for WordPress, communities that are focused on domain specific knowledge, such as the independent music industry, are able to work more efficiently and enable much more lateral communication among their membership.”

Loud Feed offers affordable, user maintainable solutions by utilizing the standards based Open Source platform of WordPress along with BuddyPress to build its customized web sites and social networking sites.

Ron Suarez says: “Many of the problems we’ve seen in the music industry among the major labels stem from top down hierarchical decision making structures and their inability to adapt to a changing landscape. Thus, I am really looking forward to the new possibilities for sharing ideas about steps to build a new and improved approach to the music industry. By empowering more voices to participate, we’ll have better solutions.”

http://a2im.org/

http://loudfeed.tv/blog

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For further information please contact:
Jem Bahaijoub, imaginePR ,Tel + 202 713 0735, jem@imaginepr.net

My first day at MidemNet I got to speak with Gerd Leonhard, author of the now classic The Future of Music.Gerd’s newest book is The End of Control,

the tough issue of control emerges, again and again, as the key contention point within TV companies, publishers, record labels, and broadcasters: How can a commercial venture that is based on so-called “intellectual property” thrive and prosper in an environment that seems to continuously and progressively remove control from the creators/owners/providers of content, and hands it over to the people formerly known as consumers (aka the users), effectively making them more powerful every single day? 

When I spoke with Gerd, I mentioned that while I purchased the “Future of Music” book, I had actually first listened to the free podcast of the book instead of reading it. I’m so busy these days, I listened to chapter after chapter while doing other things like laundry, cooking, walking and even waiting a couple of hours for President Bill Clinton to speak at the University of Michigan commencement ceremonies last year. I was able to take notes while listening. I then went back and used the physical book as a way to more easily get exact quotes for my staff and details for my Loud Feed business plan. So, physical artifacts like books, can still be useful in the “digital future” which has already begun for so many of us, but still needs to be understood better by those who seek to figure out business models that work.Included in The End of Control web site is an interesting glossary of terms including:

Usator: a favorite Gerd mashup of user and creator, i.e., a person who may consume more or less passively (if there is any such thing anymore) but also “creates” content by engaging in activities such as blogging or guest-commenting, adding some original content to a webpage, publishing a photo, changing the look and feel of a profile page, or adding a widget. In general, this is a catch-all term that reflects how hard it has become to define what makes someone a “creator” versus a plain user who also happens to contribute. 

With respect to the effect of social networking on the future of music Gerd has this to say:

Social networks are becoming the new radio and stand to have more influence over music trends (and commerce) than MTV ever had; (digital) radio is fast turning into a music retailer and distributor; and smart, software-based taste-making agents are set to become a standard in digital music.