I’ve been talking about blogging your music in the past and now I am even more convinced that it is an essential fan interaction method for any artist. I have been thinking many times about the idea of building your official artist website based on blogging software such as Wordpress and I was very positively surprised as I stumbled on a live example of that idea. A finnish band called Jermaine has succesfully utilized the idea of using a blog as an interaction and information tool between the artist and the audience, without compromising over design or functionality.

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I really like how things are turning out now in the music industry. Radiohead has released downloadable version of their newest album In Rainbows without a record label and fans can choose how much they to pay for it, and yes you can even get it for free if you choose so. Inspired by Radiohead’s success many other major level artists such as Jamiroquai, Oasis, Nine Inch Nails and Madonna are now planning to do a similar move and release their next albums direct-to-consumer without record labels’ assistance. I just love to see artists taking care of their own business and that is also the main mission of Wicked Whammy - to help all artists to become truly independent when it comes to the business side of music.

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Using social video websites is a great way to promote your music and uploading music videos to YouTube has become somewhat a standard procedure among indie artists and mainstream artists alike. Some of the video sharing websites also offer an affiliate program for video publishers, which means that you can get a percentage of ad revenues or get paid by the number of video views. I haven’t seen so many indie artists trying to leverage this kind of revenue model yet, so why not give it a try?

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A while back I wrote an article “Will music be like water?“, where I analyzed music futurist Gerd Leonhard’s thoughts and visions about the future of music. That was somewhat an eye-opening experience and I truly recommend checking out his blog and his YouTube video channel, if you are at all interested in the future of music industry. However, there were so many unanswered questions that I decided it was time to talk with Gerd himself. I discussed with him on the phone and I tried my best to find out how the music industry will change and how indie artists can best take advantage of that.

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Rehearsing is essential for every musician and it is something that bands and artists should do at least on a weekly basis, if not on a daily basis. Although the main purpose of rehearsing is improving musical skills, you can still take rehearsals to another level by recording them on video. This is a good way to see how you look from the listeners/viewers perspective and also to keep your fan base more active.

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Those of you, who have been using BitTorrent sites might know that some major media companies have created “fake” torrent files of their own content in order to monitor illegal downloads. According to Digital Music News the infamous BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay “is now pursuing a criminal complaint against several major recording labels and studios” exactly for this kind of behaviour. Some of the mentioned companies were Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and EMI Music and they are accused of infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming.

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about music player widgets and how to best utilize them to promote your music. There are a lot of widgets that allow you to share only songs, but why settle to that when there is so much more you can do with them. Music player widgets are evolving and they can serve many purposes from being an mp3-player to promoting your gigs and playing your music videos - all in one sleek package. I wanted to find a widget that could also help in branding and I intentionally left out music widgets that are meant mainly for selling music. There are better ways to make money with music nowadays than selling it directly. You can read this article for more ideas about that.

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Gerd Leonhard, co-author of The Future of Music book, has been talking a lot about how music will someday be like water, and that the day might be closer than we realize. Basically this means that music consumers will have access to large catalogs of songs with a single periodical fee, just like we pay for accessing tap water in our households. Now, in practice Leonhard is talking about music subscription services, which are already happening on a large scale with Napster and Rhapsody leading the way. However, music subscription services haven’t caught the interest of music consumers as well as expected. iTunes is still the the market leader. According to Leonhard technology is still restricting larger scale adoption of music subscription services, but eventually pay-per-song revenue model will be replaced.

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People don’t want to buy music anymore. Okay, maybe that is a bit of an overstatement, but that is the trend music industry is facing more and more often. There are so many alternative ways for music consumers to listen to music they like that buying records and even paying for downloading isn’t appealing anymore. You can go to pandora.com and last.fm to listen to your favourite bands and discover new music, you can download your favourite music from peer-to-peer and BitTorrent networks illegally, and now you can also go to spiralfrog.com and listen to ad supported music for free legally.

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I write music and record it in my home studio. However, this process takes quite a while usually and I finish only one song at a time. I have realized that making enough songs for an album will take ages, but I still want to get my songs out there. Most obvious option would of course be making an EP of three or two songs, put up a MySpace site and upload the songs there. However, that’s exactly what every other band does already. I have tried really hard to think of another approach and here is something that came into my mind.

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