Inside the Circle is an online destination for news, information and conversation about Zune, Music and Community. The site began in July of 2008 as a place for readers to engage in open, thought-provoking and stimulating discussion. Inside the Circle is also proud to help give voice and exposure to musical acts of different genres and styles — both from the indie and mainstream areas. This is done through: interviews, reviews and free music downloads (both embedded from the blog and links to locations of free music).

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Straight out of Canada, George Reefah is making his mark in the hip-hop music world and broadening his reach to include the dance/remix pop realm. The indie artist’s newest single “Rollin” was just released digitally in May 2010, and reached #5 on the Masterbeat charts for two weeks.

Having been apart of the hip-hop community in Toronto since early 2003, Reefah has established himself as an entrepreneur and marketer in the hip-hop industry and serves as President and Co-Founder of Freshilystic Records. Reefah considers himself a wordsmith and was influenced by groups such as Wu-Tang Clan early on.

Reefah has worked with Major Music Productions, a large Canadian production house, and has 2 mixtapes, 3 full length LP’s, 1 EP, and 4 singles under his belt. In the spirit of staying truly indie, this artist is not looking to sign a traditional label deal.

Funny story. Remember waaaaaay back in 2001 when downloading music was still kind of new and weird, and it took hours to download one song from Napster or LimeWire?

Back then, Kazaa was another notable peer-to-peer music sharing network, kings of the dial-up connection, they were. That is, until they and all the other disruptive technology people got the pants sued off them by the music industry – a.k.a. Sony, EMI, UMG, and Warner.

Kazaa’s founders, Janus Friis, and Niklas Zennstrom, settled the case for $100 million just as they sold their next startup – Skype – for $3 billion. Kind of makes the music industry people and their settlement seems kind of puny, doesn’t it?

The Next Big Thing?

Fast-forward to today, and we find Friis and Zennstrom behind Rdio, a new music service that let’s you pay a monthly membership to stream like on Spotify, download like on iTunes, and share playlists, like Last.fm. Friis and Zennstrom are banking on the calculation that people are just about ready to start paying monthly subscriptions for online media, and that the memberships will start to roll in. Of course, up to this point, a similar approach has not worked for Rhapsody.

One of the biggest weapons in the Rdio arsenal is a complete set of deals with Friis and Zennstrom’s old friends, the music industry. All four major labels have struck deals with the new company for access to their entire music catalogs.

Indie-pop songstress Kina Grannis is thrilled to announce a Spring headlining tour of the US.

The incredibly talented 24-year-old from Mission Viejo, California of Japanese, English, Irish, French, Dutch, Welsh and Scottish descent is heading out in support of her debut full-length album Stairwells.

Self-released in February, the album debuted on the Billboard 200, #5 on the Billboard Top Internet Albums chart and #2 on Billboard’s Heatseekers Chart.

The release was accompanied by an official music video for the first single “Valentine” – which has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times on YouTube!

How to find jobs, collaborators, and co-conspirators.

To begin, a shameless bit of self-promotion: If you’ve been hanging around GigHive for a while, then you know we’re all about creating connections throughout the indie music community. Instead of spending valuable time trying to get the attention of a struggling major label, why not get onboard with us, and connect with producers, songwriters, designers – whatever you need to take your career to the next level – through our artist’s directory.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to earn cold, hard cash, somewhere in the area of right now, check out these resources dedicated to helping musicians and artists sell their talented butts to the highest bidder.

CreativeAllies

Brought to you by the band marketing wiz kids over at MusicAllies, CreativeAllies is a place where musicians can go to look for art, and where artists can go to get paid for creating album covers, logos, apparel designs, and concert posters for bands, musicians, music festivals, and rock n’ roll brands of all types.

The new website features a fairly competitive scene. Musicians post jobs at a fixed price (usually between $200 and $500) and then artists can submit their work to be judged. So it’s pretty much an art contest website – winner gets paid, and gets their art published.

CreativeAllies is also open to writing jobs, web design, photography – pretty much any type of collateral a band might need – although at this point, most categories are empty.

Mixcloud.com launched their new “Category” pages, which feature some of the finest stations, shows and DJs (Cloudcasters) on Mixcloud across 10 music and 6 talk Categories. The new update also includes an interesting integration with Twitter and Facebook.

The Category pages are a selection of editorial picks, designed to help listeners browse through the wealth of content on Mixcloud and discover high quality shows more easily. The Categories range from indie to house to comedy. In addition to the editorial picks, the Category pages include a section for “community picks”, empowering the community on Mixcloud to choose the Cloudcasters they would like featured – an interesting model for crowdsourced editorial. New user picks will be revealed every week on Mixcloud Monday!

Third Eye Blind had their time in the mainstream spotlight, but wanted to continue to make music. Embracing all the internet, music industry and technological resources that have been able to brand their name once again.

What do you do when you feel like your business has lost its identity?

Members of the band “Third Eye Blind” know that situation all too well. After years in the mainstream, they took back control of their brand by going independent.

Check out the video feature on MSNBC here.

Or could something even more sinister be going on…

Imeem users got an unpleasant surprise last week when they clicked on their favorite music site and found themselves redirected to MySpace. Seemingly overnight, the imeem API had been completely absorbed into MySpace Music. The social networking dinosaur bought the once-promising imeem platform for less than $1 million.

The Breaks

The first disappointment comes when you realize that MySpace has not transferred your imeem playlists over to their site. The redirect page contains a vague promise that they are “working to migrate your imeem playlist to MySpace Music. We’ll email you about that once we have more details.” Yeah. You do that, MySpace. You email me.

Everyone is tired of that same old phrase “you only get one chance to make a first impression”. It is repeated ad nauseum from business schools to beauty pageants and everywhere in between. As much as I would rather say to throw away the stuffy old phrases, parables and sayings, this is one that seems to grow more and more true every day. Especially in the music industry.

Of course it is important to make that strong initial impression, that is first and foremost. Second, having all the music, assisting materials, image, business elements and the presentation of these pieces in place is paramount and required. Third is knowing how to individually and specifically present to the person, company, or agency, and doing it the right way.

This last paragraph represents the gold standard that has been a requirement of the industry for years. The musicians that move forward are those that have all the elements in place. If they don’t, they might want to hold up on their forward motion and get those elements in order.

So why is it more important now?

Today marks the digital release of Rapture Ready I Gazed At The Body, the debut short-player from Brooklyn’s Midnight Masses. Released in partnership between Collect Records and Team Love, the EP features an assembly of tawny indie-soul and woozy, 60s-inspired pop music.

The witchy concoction has been said to resemble everything from Spiritualized to a version of The Doors fronted by Billie Holiday. No matter the disparate reference points, all music is sung and delivered by songwriter Autry Fulbright and his expansive troupe of collaborators. Bolstered by the ever-tasteful drumming of Miyuki Furtado, and the complimentary guitar dramatics of Eric Rogers and Destiny Montague, Masses has received an impressive list of praise in the months leading up to Rapture Ready’s release.

In a recent interview with The Guardian, major label lovechild Beyoncé Knowles expressed an interest in taking a different direction on her next album by “going indie,” despite the fact that – let’s face it – Beyoncé wouldn’t know what it’s like to be a struggling independent artist if she won an Oscar for playing the role in a hit movie. Which she didn’t. In Dreamgirls, she still played the star, and Jennifer Hudson played the underdog.

Of course, Beyoncé wasn’t suggesting the possibility of actually becoming an indie artist, she was just talking about working with indie artists like Of Montreal, who she heard about from her sister Solange, you know, the Knowles sister with the ‘underground sound.’

However, despite the brutal abuse inflicted on the word ‘indie’ by the very suggestion that Beyoncé could somehow “do” it, there is a slowly snowballing trend amongst major label artists to reject the bright lights and big payoffs in favor of producing their own music.

Irony 101: Record companies elbow out the vinyl LP in order to maximize profits through the sale of cheap-to-manufacture CDs, which ends up paving the way for a digital music revolution that, in effect, obliterates the music industry’s consumer stranglehold. And the icing on the cake? The resulting destabilization creates the perfect environment for the rebirth of the vinyl record, which in turn empowers the independent artist.

How Did All This Happen?

In 1988, after surviving the reel-to-reel, the 8-track, and cassette tape, the vinyl record was finally toppled and all but eradicated by the CD. Although there was no shortage of enthusiasm for the easy-to-play compact disc, the disappearance of vinyl was largely orchestrated by major label distributors, who stopped allowing retailers to return and swap unsold records (a practice common in everything from magazine and book to music and movie sales).

Left with little choice in the matter, retailers began to stock CDs, and labels stopped offering most titles on vinyl. It was a good move for corporate shareholders, as CDs were a fraction of the cost to manufacture, while still justifying the higher price tag of a new techy product.

Tired of getting all your music recs from the barely-indie but passionately hipper-than-thou Pitchfork? Check out the Buzz list of great indie music blogs. Each one is guaranteed to make you feel even more out-of-the-loop than ever, but they make up for it by introducing new music you’ve actually never heard of.

3hive – Collecting all the free mp3s out there into one place.

A Post Punk Tumblr – Oi! You! Get your punk history fix here.

Amber Waves of Twang – Fresh roots, alt-country, bluegrass, and other sounds that were indie before there was indie.

Apes for Indie – The rare and elusive indie country music blog.

Aquarium Drunkard – Does every Wilco song have a blog named after it? AD covers indie music in grand L.A. famous style.