Oh, untold hoards of loving readers, I guess this is sort of like goodbye. After five years of life in the sticky, smoky trenches of music journalism, I’m hanging up my hat and paddling my canoe in the direction of uncharted waters. Enough banal metaphor usage for you? Ya, for me, too.

I know that I don’t have to worry about you once I’m gone, loving readers. The webosphere is so full of smart, eloquent folks writing about music that I know you won’t suffer from any shortage of information or half-baked ranting. I am, on the other hand, a bit concerned about what’s going to happen to the music industry once my back is turned.

State of the Tune-ion

Things are looking a bit shaky these days. While I’ve enjoyed guiding you through the collapse of the major label-dominated music industry, the glittering digital phoenix that has risen from its ashes isn’t exactly everything it’s promised to be.

While professional-grade recording equipment has become accessible to all, it’s also created a production scene ripe for manipulation by middlemen who promise much to aspiring artists, but deliver little.

While the Internet offers unprecedented levels of access to promotional tools and global fan bases, it also creates a fertile breeding ground for mediocrity, and for a new kind of anonymity, bred not by obscurity, but by dearth of access.

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Beehivecandy
http://www.beehivecandy.com/

Beehive Candy is a blog and writes about all different genres. It includes new music, live concerts, rarities, and memories.

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Weekly Leader Podcast
http://weeklyleader.net/

The host of The Weekly Leader Podcast is a maritime and leadership blogger and podcaster as well as principal of a small social media consulting firm that works with maritime organizations, nonprofits and small businesses.

I went to an interesting show last night. It involved five bands, all in the process of recording their first album at the same studio. The owner of the studio, who is, I guess you could say, “co-producing” the album along with the artists, suggested that they put on the showcase in order to do some live sound and video recording. If they were able to create some successful media, it could be incorporated into their album and/or EPK in various ways.

While the producer suggested a venue, along with video and sound people for the project, it was the bands’ job to book the venue, promote the show, sell the tickets, and pay the tech people. If they managed to record quality sound and video, the producer would then know just what to do with it.

The night was a big success, but of course the bands didn’t actually make any money. After the venue, technicians, and set players for solo artists were paid off, the only reward was some hopefully usable recordings. The bands had been walked through part of the process of production, however, and they were all delighted at having participated in such a professional event.

Indie Limbo

This is a trend that we’re seeing a lot of these days, isn’t it? Bands and musicians hovering in a kind of indeterminate state between being DIY and having the support of a label or producer.

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M is for Music
http://www.misformusic.com/

M is for Music is an all-purpose music website. Consider them the anti-Pitchfork as they don’t want to be a select little club in our own little bubble,. This site is all inclusive and wants you to be part of it. If you like an album, then review it. If they like your review then they use it. You teach them new things, they teach you new things, that’s how we roll. They’ll bring interviews, new band representation, blasts from the past, the latest reviews and release dates plus all the latest gossip from the music world. This isn’t an in-crowd, this is THE crowd.

Ariel Hyatt founded Ariel Publicity & Cyber PR and her firm has worked with over 1,000 musicians and bands of all genres. Her company is now 100% digital and helps artists increase their online exposure. Sign Up here:http://www.arielpublicity.com. Follow Hyatt on Twitter @cyberpr.

It happened a few weeks ago in Australia.  I was standing at the opening cocktail reception for APRA’s Song Summit Music Conference overlooking Darling Harbor in Sydney, and I was chatting with a perfect stranger (who it turns out is a very famous Australian musician with quite a few top 10 hits in Oz).  Noting my foreign accent he asks “What brings you here?” “I teach artists about online marketing and social media.”  I answer sheepishly, because this news is not always met with elated enthusiasm.

Because you can’t have music without bureaucracy!

The dramatic shifts that have taken place in the music industry over the last decade have shaken up and set to crumbling some of the old institutions that built and shaped music as we know it. The big labels are going down. The big records stores are all but gone. Healthier, happier, and more numerous than ever before, on the other hand, are the music industry organizations, particularly those catering to the independent artists labels.

Organizations like the RIAA and the NMPA are nothing new. They’ve been protecting the rights of – well, not artists, per se – but certainly music publishers and distributors in the U.S. for the better part of a century. And in countries with smaller music industries, like Canada and Australia, national organizations have long worked to promote and protect artists on the world stage.

Of course, if you’re a musician from one of the less chart-topping countries, you know just how useful these organizations are.

The Indie Org

Over the course of the last ten five years, we’ve seen the rise of a new type of organization – the independent musicians’ organization – various groups dedicated to protecting the rights of independent artists from the evil strangleholds of corporations, and defending music from the greedy clutches of digital technology users.

A couple of examples of these new organizations include the Merlin Network and The American Association of Independent Music.

Shane Blay is a guitarist/vocalist for the indie band, Oh, Sleeper. The Texas based group has been compared to Slipknot and Underoath. You can learn more about the band here. Follow the band on Twitter @weareohsleeper.

For the past five years my brothers in Oh, Sleeper and myself have sacrificed our lives, our time, relationships, birthdays, holidays, health (haha) to travel around and play shows for our fans. Not to say that isn’t been a fun ride!

I would just like to bring a few things to our fans attention.

I would like to show you guys an average day in finances for a “mid-level” band like us. I’m going to breakdown the average monetary ins and outs of a day on tour.

On tour, bands have two ways to make money – guarantees and merchandise.

I’ve been hitting a lot of folk music festivals this summer, most of which involve a weekend of shows and usually camping near the festival grounds. But, of course, a great outdoor festival is more than that. It’s sunburnt faces and children dancing in fairy costumes, muddy feet and intimate workshops with artists, pine needle naps and mosquitoes, BBQ and cold beer and bonfire smoke, live music until one or three in the morning, and then back to the campground to jam until dawn.

For musicians, these late-night, boozy jams can be all-important. Because more than during stage performances, more than in backstage kitchen tents, this is where mettle is tested and relationships are forged. For a young artist trying to break into a local (or even national) music scene, jamming is a chance to show her quality, and get to know some of the musicians and producers and general folks-about-town that she needs to know to advance her career. Impress, make friends, and she’ll find herself becoming a part of the music scene.

If she knows her jam etiquette, that is.

Jamming etiquette is a complex thing, particularly when you’re in a relaxed environment, and not an organized Sunday afternoon blues jam at the local pub. At organized jams, there’s usually a house band, and obvious rules that you can play along to, but at a freestyle party jam, etiquette becomes a bit more complex. Ironically, the very free and open nature of the event – with its myriad possibilities for intense emotional experience – make it all the trickier to navigate gracefully.

A few weeks ago, Prince made headlines by claiming that,

“The internet is completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else.”

Not surprisingly, the famously eccentric / multi-platinum songwriter got pretty seriously mocked for his statement, particularly for going on to compare the internet to MTV as something that was once hip but is now outdated.

And it’s easy to laugh these comments off as the petulant wailing of an industry dinosaur, but what if we worked from the assumption that Prince is not a nut, and took a closer look at what he’s actually saying.

Is The Internet Over For Musicians?

Prince made these comments in relation to the release of his new album, 20Ten, which is not being released digitally. In fact, the only way the album is available is through the purchase of various European newspapers, which come with a copy of the CD (included in the price of the paper).

This strategy begs the question: is Prince doing this purely to spite the internet, or is he doing it because experience has taught him that he will gain greater attention, distribution – and potentially, profits – via these newspaper deals than he would online?

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The Music Critic
http://www.themusiccritic.co.uk/

At The Music Critic, they are passionate about music. They review all types of music whether a new release or a re-issue and give it a honest, unbiased and independent review. As such, you may or may not agree with the review. If you have an opinion on a review, then leave a comment.

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Oliver Di Place
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Oliver di Place is a music MP3 blog based out of New Jersey that reviews many styles of music. Darius posts MP3s with his CD and music reviews if he is granted permission to do so. Darius also writes for Star Maker Machine Blog at http://sixsongs.blogspot.com/

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After more than ten years in business, GarageBand is shutting down. No, not the Mac software. The music website! Geez, don’t you remember GarageBand?

GarageBand.com was part of the first wave of indie music communities. It was one of the first places where bands could go to post mp3s, and have them submitted to a peer review process. And it was one of the first places where listeners could go to browse through a large collection of unsigned bands. The deal, for artists, was that to post one mp3, you had to review thirty songs by other bands. Way back in 1999 when the website launched, this forced march community participation thing was pretty fresh.

But that was then, and this is now, and there are other options available to indie aritsts (ahem, GigHive, ahem). GarageBand lost a lot of traffic over the last few years because it stopped evolving.  First, the makers of GB created iLike, and then iLike became part of MySpace, and somewhere in there, everybody just moved on.

Former GarageBand users are encouraged to link their profiles to iLike, and to start a MySpace profile (like you don’t have one already). But what are some other options available to musicians who want to get their songs on communities and start receiving feedback? How far has the industry come, really? Let’s check it out!

The first time I heard Katy Perry’s summer hit, “California Girls,” I could only think one thing: a blind baboon on a Blackberry could write a better song than this.

So do it!

If there’s ever a time for a wannabe band to break out, it’s at the beginning of summer, with a fantastic summer song. And sure, it’s a bit of a gimmick, but of all the gimmicky song types, it’s the least incriminating.

The other great thing about summer songs? They’re incredibly easy to write! Music critic Peter Robinson hit the nail on the head when he said that musical tastes relax over the summer. “People stop trying to cover up the fact that they like simple pop music,” he explains. “Pretending you don’t like music with a very catchy tune is tiring, so people take the summer off.”

In fact, there’s a pretty simple recipe for cooking up a summer hit. If you’ve already figured out how to write a song, here’s all you need to do:

Use Your Words

It’s not a must for summer songwriting, but it sure helps to talk about summer-y themes, and use summer-y words in your song. For example, try writing about:

• Summer, summertime, summer girls…
• Sunshine, sunny days, here comes the sun…
• Heat, hot, hot heat…
• The beach, sand, the proverbial boardwalk and its nether regions…
• Cruising, getting around, rollin’ with the top down…