Attention indie  bands and artists, Headliner.fm wants to help you connect with other musicians and ultimately reach new fans and better promote your music. The website is a “promotion exchange” for bands and artists to help build awareness for each other.

Bands who sign-up on Headliner are able to join forces with and promote other bands on each other’s Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace profiles. Members are rewarded a number of “band bucks” (proportionate to how many followers they have on their social media sites) which can be used to buy requests from other bands to give your band promotion on their social media profiles.

Have you heard of Microsoft Tag, yet? It’s an innovative way to give your fans exclusive content and music via mobile devices. You can either dish out print marketing tags or apply the tags to your website for free.

You can create the tag online  and customize it to help brand your project.

Fans can download Tag Reader and scan away to open the URL’s that you have tagged on your product.

You do need a Windows Live account to access MS Tag.

We have covered stories about bands like Third Eye Blind and Counting Crows taking the independent route. These bands could have signed with major labels, but took a new approach to the music industry. OK Go is also making their own path by creating their own label called Paracadute.

OK Go’s move gave a swift kick to the current industry model. Tour dates have been set up which will help bring in funds for the band. Paracadute and OK Go will manage the band’s distribution and promotion.

How much of an impact will a move like this have?

In recent weeks, the web’s latest buzz-monster, Chatroulette, has gone from surreal social experiment to the next great way to promote your band.

For those of you living under a rock, a quick update: Chatroulette is an infuriatingly simple, totally genius, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that web application that allows people to randomly connect with each other via webcam. Built by some 17-year old Russian kid who’s now more successful than you or I will ever be. Go on the Chatroulette website, enable your webcam, and you’re instantly connected with some other webcam-abusing hero. Chat away! Show off your junk! Whatever! And when the fun is over, click ‘next’ to move on to another random cam, and a new adventure.

Launched in November 2009, by the beginning of March, Chatroulette was well on its way to having 2 million users, all, ostensibly, looking simply to make a connection.

Bring On The Indie Musicians!

The phenomenon-within-the-phenomenon of Chatroulette artist promotion officially began with the enigmatic Merton, a hoodied pianist who released a YouTube video of himself improvising odes to the random people he encountered on the CR website.

It didn’t hurt Merton’s bajillion-odd views that he looks and sounds suspiciously like web-savvy pianist Ben Folds. So much so, in fact, that word of Merton’s piano improv video made it back to Folds, who promptly created his own video, entitled Ode to Merton. At a concert in Charlotte, N.C., Ben Folds and his audience serenaded a handful of random rouletters.

James Pew gives us the scoop on Studio 2.0.

At GigHive, we’re always interested in those folks out there who are taking an active roll in building alternatives to the mainstream music industry. In Toronto, James Pew is an musician/technician well worth watching. Over the last decade, Pew has created Euphonic Sound, a vibrant and diverse community of artists who are currently hard at work building models for the future of the music industry. And psst, guess what? It’s totally indie.

Recently, we had the opportunity to speak to Pew about what he does and why he does it. Here’s what he had to say:

GH: Clearly, you’re a busy guy. You run Euphonic Sound Studio in Toronto, you’ve got the Broken Window label, you run the Studio Manifesto blog, you’re involved with Origin Audio Electronics, and you’re a musician. How did this whole indie empire get started?

JP: Roughly ten years ago I researched recording studios in the GTA that I could potentially record some of my music at. At this point I had already been through an audio engineering course at Humber College and had done hundreds of demo recordings on 4 and 8-track – all of which sounded awful, hence the need for a professional studio with qualified engineers. The best price I found for a pro studio was $900 per day back then.

Indie Bands Get a Shot At Becoming Rock Band Famous

The Rock Band Network music store is officially live. Will it be the greatest thing to happen to indie music since iTunes? Let’s have a look.

For all you kids not in the know, the Rock Band Network is the newest incarnation of the Xbox Rock Brand, er Band franchise. Network allows bands to put their songs on Rock Band 2. And not just big name artists. Using development tools provided by Rock Band, all indie bands can now, theoretically, have their songs available for sale, download, and play at the Network music store. Here’s how it works:

The Investment

Over 100 songs have been uploaded by music labels to the Rock Band Network, and unknown indie bands have the opportunity to expose their projects. So far, established bands have taken the spotlight, but this is a great outlet for unsigned bands to gain funding and get more fans.

Rock Band Network has allowed independent and unsigned bands to submit their own songs for users to download since mid-January. The offer is  for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions of the game with the intention of providing the most downloadable tracks to Nintendo’s Wii moving forward.

Indie bands can price their songs between 50 cents and $3, netting 30% of track sales. Users of the game will be able to preview songs before they purchase on the Rock Band Network store.

Wasted Space features an array of indie bands in their show schedule.

Wasted Space is co-owned by Action Sports Super Star Carey Hart, Yankees baseball player Jason Giambi, and the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. Rockers Benji and Joel Madden of Good Charlotte are partners. Hard Rock’s Cory McCormack will act as Managing Partner.

Wasted Space represents the ultimate depiction of the decadent rock n’ roll lifestyle. The first anti-club of its kind, Wasted Space melds the high-end rock n’ roll culture with fashion, art and design creating a one of a kind atmosphere and nightlife experience.

I’ll be the first to admit that New Year’s resolutions are kind of stupid. They usually involve quitting something (smoking, drinking, eating too much) that I end up doing on New Year’s Day because the party’s still on, and after that, I need my favorite vices to recover from the craziness of the holidays, and by the end of the week, I’m wondering why I bothered making a stupid resolution in the first place, and what’s so great about New Year’s, anyway?

But there is a secret to keeping a New Year’s resolution. The secret, friends, is to resolve to do something totally amazing with your new year. Don’t plan to wallow in miserable self-denial. Don’t plan to change who you are. Just plan on being completely awesome.

Doing great things is a particularly excellent plan if you’re someone whose future depends on your ability to succeed with no one cracking the whip behind you. Like, say, for example, if you’re an indie musician. Inertia can be a killer. So what better time to commit to becoming rich and famous than on January 1st?

The independent albums that I chose have shown a new musical direction. The albums contain originality in arragements and sound, helping to redefine the current music landscape. The list includes unsigned and indie band’s albums/EP’s that are signed to labels.

The indie movement and community needs to keep regenerating. The music is out there, but we just need to keep building an indie music community to help expose these artists to the masses.

The list of indie artists’ albums are not in any particular order.

Wasted Space features an array of indie bands in their show schedule.

Wasted Space is co-owned by Action Sports Super Star Carey Hart, Yankees baseball player Jason Giambi, and the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. Rockers Benji and Joel Madden of Good Charlotte are partners. Hard Rock’s Cory McCormack will act as Managing Partner.

Wasted Space represents the ultimate depiction of the decadent rock n’ roll lifestyle. The first anti-club of its kind, Wasted Space melds the high-end rock n’ roll culture with fashion, art and design creating a one of a kind atmosphere and nightlife experience.

Peyote-inspired indie fantasy, or an actual, factual trend?

If you’ve been watching Taylor Swift sweep the music awards circuit this year, you’ve probably also had the depressing thought that yup, country music is back in the mainstream. Does this mean we have to start line dancing again?

But the good news is that the likes of Swift, Keith Urban, and Carrie Underwood are just the surface ripples of a much larger phenomenon that’s taken place mostly in the indie underground over the last decade.
This scene has got a lot of different names, all meaning slightly different things – New Weird America, Death Country, Gothic Americana, Freak Folk/Free Folk, Tex-Mex – but it all boils down to a similar theme.

New Dark Country?

There are a lot of people who would disagree with grouping together these labels. Indie music scene-watchers smirk at the term ‘New Weird America’ to begin with, as a term coined by The Wire’s David Keenan in a moment and relevant only to that moment. Similarly, Gothic Americana and Death Country are genres difficult to separate from indie folk or alt country. But together, these obscure subgenres do create something distinct.

BandCentral.com has created a central hub for you and your band-mates to stay organized. The Web site offers an array of features that would help any band stay connected with themselves and their fans.

I know trying to keep a band focused and informed is a tough task when creating a project. Getting a group of people with other plans, or jobs on their calendar is something most bands break up over.

This site offers many ways to for a band to stay grounded and focus on their goal, which is producing music.

What does Band Central Offer? The answer is simple… Everything.