Name: RootMusic

Quick Pitch: RootMusic is all about making musicians’ professional lives better, be it through building software or building community.

Genius Idea: RootMusic’s debut product is called BandPage, and it makes MySpace-like band page features possible inside a Facebook fan page.

At present, Facebook fan pages are laid out in such a way that you can’t share your music with your fans while letting them continue to browse for information. You can deploy a music player tab, but as soon as your fans click on the Photos tab to see pictures of your band, the music stops.

Myspace continues to streamline their Web site to try and keep up with features on other social networks. The latest update is the “Share” function that now allows you to apply a link and video to your status updates.

Instead of having to choose a “Mood” to update your status, Myspace has updated their design to match the rest of the profile’s home page; while adding the options to apply a photo, link, video and mood to your status.

This is just the latest in updates and moves by Myspace to stay afloat in social media. The site recently updated the “Stream” of your status posts and bulletins in an attempt to organize their many features.

This sweepstakes is your chance to be a part of something very exciting and rewarding. Since January 25th, Sara has been giving out one prize a day to one lucky winner.

Here’s how you enter:

1. You need to join her Facebook page (http://bit.ly/bCwOvB) to be qualified for the prizes!

2. Fill out the entry form.

3. If you recruit two friends, they will also be included in the contest!

It’s that simple!

Check out her website to get all the contest details and prize info: http://sarahaze.com/30days

Never believe in overnight successes. They’re like the tooth fairy. They’re make-believe. How many times have you heard about the struggling actress who moves to Hollywood and bumps into the guy at the coffee shop who happens to know a producer at Miramax? Then bam! The next week, she’s on the set of the next Quentin Tarantino flick.

Or how about the starry-eyed rapper who’s desperate to be the next MTV sensation? So he starts free-styling on the street one day at just the moment that the head A&R rep at Jive happens to be walking by. Next thing, he’s working on his own major label album.

You’ve probably noticed already that in the real world, things don’t usually happen that way. The overnight success is and always will be a myth. The big reason is that there’s too many layers of complexity between an idea and a real world end result.

You might have gotten a passing grade for producing a good single, but how do you grade in your digital music promotions?

It’s no longer the wave of the music industry- it’s practically the only way to succeed in today’s music industry. Yes, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and etc is all the rave, and you need to join the bandwagon or not even bother at all, but it’s far more than having a social profile. Digital music promotions is all about SEO (search engine optimization) and cross promoting across various online outlets. It’s about blogging and being blogged about. It’s about P2P networks and online music stores. There’s so much to digital promotions, and if you think it’s one-dimensional and all about Myspace & Facebook, then you’re in for a rude awakening.

Here’s a few factors to grade your digital music promotions strategy:

I wrote a piece a while back about 4 emerging trends in the music industry that will affect every music artist from here on out. In this piece, I want to focus instead on some more general trends in the way we do business and interact in society today that will affect every music artist enormously. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing Christian Rock or hip hop or whatever. Everybody will be equally affected.

Massive paradigm shifts like the one we’re going through right now unleash tremendous disruptive forces. Industries fall on them. But new industries also rise on them. What we’re seeing now with the thickening web of cyberconnectivity is a tremendous paradigm shift every bit as important as that ushered in by the printing press or the Industrial Revolution. It’s here to stay.

Overwhelmed with maintaining your MySpace page, blog, podcast, e-mail, website, tour updates and everything else online to promote yourself?

Twitter is an ingenious solution that will give your fans more of you and it takes less than 3 minutes a day to stay on top of everything without your computer!

I’m just back from summer vacation where I spent a relaxing 11 days in the gorgeous Pacific Northwest right after having attended Gnomedex07. At Gnomedex, I learned A LOT about Web 2.0, social networking and blogging and my next several editions of Sound Advice will focus on things I learned.

Koolhaus Games Inc. is pleased to announce the release of the latest updated version of iMP: Surf the Music, a new music game created specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

New features include:

* Two new levels for a total of ten fun packed playable levels

* New exciting gameplay features

* Hot new music tracks

ReverbNation has created an application to showcase your music on Facebook to your fans. It is an easy app to download and utilize. The application can be applied to your personal and music pages. Obviously, you need to have a Facebook profile, and having a ReverbNation profile also helps to download the app faster.

The app displays like a profile that shows your music, fans and tour dates to name a few features.

This app really enhances the artist’s experience who want to add Facebook as a legit marketing resource to their band’s portfolio.

At one point, artists really needed to rely on getting a recording contract or having a top management firm such as Violator Management to work their contacts and make a deal happen for the artist. This is a first hand account of how to build your own career in order to get a deal offered to you similar to Drake’s $2.5 Million deal from Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Records.

If you do NOT have a home studio to produce and at least reference tracks, I would start by doing this first. This will stop you from being at the mercy of any producers when you want to jump in a studio because you are creative. Creativity can hit at any moment to an artist. To be dependent upon a producer to get into their studio will hinder you and stop the creativity because you can’t just jump in and create music at will.

Internet music marketing will become a lot easier for you within the next 5 to 10 minutes. Many people who attempt to market their music through the Internet never get anywhere because of simple strategies they leave out. I’m going to help you identify and use these strategies to your advantage, so you’ll need a pen.

Getting Fans to Promote for You!

If you’ve ever received a fan message from anyone on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, or a similar page and didn’t respond, you’re losing out big time. If someone takes the time out to send you a message explaining how much they enjoy your music, they will more than likely do your Internet music marketing for you if you offer them a percentage of sales they bring you. You can ask them to add your music to their page, videos, banners, and anything else you can think of. This will get you maximum exposure in the fastest time because you’re not doing all the work yourself and you’re using your fans as affiliates to make more money for both of you.

There are many ways to use the internet for music marketing and the promotion of your music. Today I want to go over a couple of ways other then MySpace and Facebook to do this. The very first thing I would like to talk about is “keywords”.

These are words that people type into search engines. The reason a lot of internet marketing fails is because people do not know how to select keywords that will align buyers with a product. Keywords such as your group name itself can be one of the many phrases you will use in order for people to find you and your music to no you exist.

You have to look for certain terms such as “Hiphop Music In Houston”, this is what they call a long tail keyword, its very specific to what is being searched for and around that term is how people will find you. Now of course this is just an example of how this is done. You will have to do your own research in order to find what applies to you.

Putting a Web site together is a difficult task at hand, so relying on a service seems like the way to go. There are a few aspects that need to be covered when constructing a music site, because you want to make sure you get the right bang for your band’s buck.

Many Web site services willing to create your Web site, but your band needs to  know what type of deal it is signing.

The more money that your band invests into a Web site, the more control your band should have about the content that is applied to the site.

Of course, you want to be able to have total control of your Web site’s layout. Make sure that your band is able to be portrayed to fans how your band envisions the project. That means having 100% control of your domain.