5thBeatle.net

Bray

I was treated to a video premiere and awesome super-tight performance by Bray and his band at the Red Devil Lounge in San Francisco last night. Nothing like a user-endorsement!

We are LIVE! BillOrtiz.com on FourFour.com CMS

Bill had lots of content so FourFour.com was the right choice. He will be Blogging and Video Blogging from the road with Santana, so again this self publishing platform was perfect choice for Bill to be able to keep his fans up to date with ease. Check it out at www.billortiz.com . 5thbeatle.net can work with a range of budgets to help your band achieve such Web presence.

Soundcloud.com embeddable widgets; so SOCIAL !

While working on Santana’s Trumpeter, Bill Ortiz’s upcoming Website using the www.fourfour.com Band Website CMS I had to create a few pages to showcase his music. Featuring his latest release was easy to-do by using the built-in “Store” and music player widget in the CMS. But then I had to create two pages to feature “Live with Santana” and another entitled “As a Guest Artist” and upload a number of one-minutes samples of music he has played on including Toni Toni Toni, Luce, Rebeca Mauleon, and Joyce Cooling just to name a few. After considering a custom hack of the Yahoo Media Player, and a couple others, I landed on Soundcloud.com .

The new feature to reach out to your Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail contacts is pretty nifty to get the word out that you are on Soundcloud. Also the Social functionality is tops, you simply click anywhere on the time-line of the sound file and you can leave a comment, after logging in at Soundcloud of course. The widgets are up-to-date looking in presentation and easy to use. For free accounts, if I have this correct, you have a limit of minutes of audio ( 120mins ) you can upload, but there are no limits on outbound streaming. The site has other “fee based” options to be able to share audio with others. Check it out here.

This is some serious cool-factor. Below is the “standard” Soundcloud widget I made for my band. I would show you Bill’s widget but you will have to wait until we launch his new site. The Premium widgets look great and come with their Premium services. BTW, you can upload multiple songs into one widget. You can also embed these nifty widgets on Facebook via the Soundcloud Player Facebook App.

Delightful by lifelovemisery

Premium Widget example:

Crowdsource to get things done for $0 and engage fans

I am feeling so industrious today. HA. Ok so it’s a lazy day and I’m on Twitter and I see Island Records, home of many of your and mine favorite recording artist over the years…and behold look what I see:

We are looking for a new twitter background & u can design it! http://www.islanddefjam.com/artist/news_single.aspx?nid=5922&artistID=7386

Pretty cool idea to get fans engaged and also get something done! So say if your in a band, and you have little time and/or inclination to get into making your Twitter background look professional… Get your fans to do it!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year! Wanted to take the the time to thank all those who where a big support in 2009! Looking forward to 2010 with all of you!

Brian and Shoshana Zisk – SF Music Tech Summit
Christopher Buttner – PRThatRocks
Steffen Franz and everyone at IDC!
Mario Previti & Terry Morton Renegade Studios
Kenny Stavropolous – Bay Street Studios
My team and ( hopefuls ) at Super Secret Underpants, LLC – Curtis, Jaemin and everyone at Ropers, Majeski, Bentley, and Kohn, Buzzmakers, Inc., @toxic, Secret Weapon Dude, Brenda Walker / Rebel Content, Kara Murphy, Shannon Clark, Design About Town, & Secret Mobile Guy.
David/David and Ashli at Musica Tecnomica. The best and longest running *monthly* Music Technology Mixer right here in SF!

My 5thbeatle clients! That you for making the music you do and letting me help you with your Web and Social Media Presence for Music Marketing and Fan Engagement. I provide the platform; you provide the inspiration for fandom.

Alright let’s make some music and get it out there with the technology.

Best to everyone in this new year of 2010.

All the best!

Todd

Google, Myspace, and Collecta; 2010 the year real-time search takes off

A new exciting year is upon us! Many are still absorbing the news of Imeem going down, and the few possibly..or real reasons why. For those of us in the know, it is surprising to hear what really brought Imeem down, then again maybe not too surprising. Anyways…

Onto bigger news that improves things for musicians and fans a like is the Google and Myspace deals going down lately.

Status Updates

Google works Myspace status updates into their real-time search capabilities. Oh this is so “last month” as far as news, but a really big deal for the landscape of 2010. I’m gathering the deal is you can get real time results of *status updates* from Myspace, Twitter, and soon Facebook Fan Pages, via Google.

To check this out in action, simply:

1) Go to Google
2) Below the search box click on ” + Show Options ”
3) On left hand navigation go down and click “Latest”
4) Bingo you will see real-time data start to scroll down the page
5) This is the future!

What does this mean to you the musician or band that wants to have presence on the Web?
Update your status’s! ; no matter the consensus on how “cool” Myspace is. You must still have some sort of presence there and update it, maybe even daily!

Or if you want a more thorough and even easier way to view what is going on in the Myspace-sphere right now you have to check out Collecta’s real-time Myspace search interface.

Instead of *just* status updates. This arrangement drafted by Myspace and Collecta enables users to search for sentiment / key words in Blogs, Comments *and* status updates!

Myspace is wheeling and dealin’, so be sure to include it your daily routine of Web and Social Media Presence for Music Marketing and Fan Engagement. Tell your fans about Real-time search at Collecta and Google. When people ask you where your from, say ” I’m from allova’ ”

Europe or BUST: Spotify opens indie floodgates

I’ve done a couple outreach campaigns with my band to European countries on a network-to-remain-nameless and I must admit, they like my music more that America does. So far at least. Last.fm is cool , but Spotify of course is all the new rage. So maybe 4 weeks ago I went through Cdbaby Digital and asked to just be put into Spotify as I have already put my music into stores via Tunecore. I am imagining I should be up and available very soon. CDbaby was keeping this somewhat low key I noticed, but the cat is outta the bag now, and you have other options too.

Just got this e-mail from Spotify:

Dear Artists,

First of all; we are really glad to hear that you are interested in getting your music onto Spotify.

We appreciate your patience since you signed up to the Spotify Artist and Label list. Since we last communicated to you we have created some pretty cool things. For instance, it’s now possible to listen to your favorite music (and hopefully soon your music) using Spotify on your mobile phone. Also, our time and energy has gone into uploading thousands of tracks every day from the 80 thousand labels we currently have agreements with. However, getting more independent artists’ music onto Spotify is important to us, so we’re working on various solutions to assist you.

The current solution we offer indie artists is to make your deliveries through Record Union, Zimbalam, CDBaby or Ditto Music. They are artist-aggregators, whom we work closely with; and through them you can create a standard agreement and upload your music onto Spotify as well as deliver your music to other great digital services such as 7digital, iTunes, Amazon etc.

So if you want to join Spotify we strongly recommend you to go one of the following sites:

http://cdbaby.com/
http://www.recordunion.com/
http://www.dittomusic.com/
http://www.zimbalam.com/

We’re really looking forward to having your music on Spotify soon!

Regards,

The music team at Spotify

Nice note eh? Now go get your music everywhere! Europe or BUST!

SF Music Tech Summit #5

I saw the panel schedule last night for this upcoming Monday 12/7 SF Music Tech Summit, Brian Zisk is yet again pulling off another fantastic event full of great panel discussions. You will simply be torn as to which panel to go to as you have 3 to choose from any any time for most of the day…and a great keynote is in store! Well that’s all I can really say right now.

Got your ticket yet?

TheSixtyOne

You know about thesixtyone yet? You should post your music up there yep. It’s all “all indie +” feast of new music. Bands post and people listen or band’s post music and also start a listener account to “be social” …or try to game the system somewhat. Some smart programming to discourage gaming and enable some real listening is in effect. The system gives you “Quests” to tackle and rewards “credibility” points and also gives you “levels” to un-lock; very video game system like. Cool stuff.

You can buy music also ; a cool mantra they tote is:

“A song means a lot; when a song is bought”

I like that one!

Now go and join and listen to my new ballad I just posted and other great bands:

Todd Rundgren West Coast AWATS Tour

HOT NEWS – Thanks to PRThatRocks I got a short gig helping out with the Social Media campaign for the upcoming Todd Rundgren West Coast AWATS Tour. Check it out; he will be performing the entire classic album “A Wizard A Star” live with Jesse Gress, Kasim Sulton, Prairie Prince, Greg Hawkes, Ralph Schuckett, and Bobby Strickland!!

PRThatRocks, with some consulting from yours truly will be executing a Social Media campaign around, Facebook, Myspace/iLike, and Twitter to help spread the word about these highly anticipated performances.

One main job was to author and Official Fan Page for Facebook and help migrate some fans from his personal profile over to the new page, that is sure to increase in fans numbers very quickly. Also to consult/assist the management in grabbing the vanity url. Be sure to join it at Facebook!

Stay tuned, just getting started.