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.

Every Indie music artist should think about starting a blog.

First though, a little rant. I’m always shocked by the amount of crudeness people will allow on their MySpace pages. It’s not always their own content either. In fact, usually it’s the comments other people leave on their page.

If people start dropping comments on your page like, “Yo man, ur shits smashin, check out my dope new tracks !!”, not only should you not check out their dope new tracks, but disable comments on your page altogether because your page is becoming a spam farm. If your page is attracting these types of numnuts, pretty soon you’ll be inundated with more garbage than a Mumbai slum.

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 travel a lot to speak at music conferences and I see this all of the time: Musicians squirming in their seats as I present ideas on how to improve their marketing. The idea of having to do one more thing is just unbearable to them, and they literally begin to melt down in front of me.

One of my best friends is an artist – a dancer – and she literally takes to bed after she has to write a press release; it literally makes her sick.

You will NEVER achieve the success you want it if you try to do it all alone and take on things that stop you dead in your tracks!

I can not stress this enough: You MUST learn to delegate, and get the stuff that makes you completely stressed out off of your plate.

Teen sensation rockers Disco Curtis’ debut video for “Ashley” is currently premiering on MySpace.com right now here. In just 8 hours the band has almost 5,000 plays!

I read an article on Billboard.com [awhile] ago which said that Coldplay is going to give away their live CD “leftrightleftrightleft” to all fans attending its Viva La Vida summer tour. Brilliant!

“Playing live is what we love,” says Coldplay. Exactly! It should be. Surely, a day doesn’t go by where you don’t hear about how you should be giving away free music, right? You should be. As I’ve mentioned before, music as a product doesn’t have much value anymore because it’s too common. It’s basic supply and demand.

Ok, so now, instead of hoping in earnest that somebody buys your tracks, you should be hoping that as many of them as possible download them for free. But does that mean you’ll make a penny off of your free downloads down the road? Well, it depends. Coldplay does. And they’re making lots of it. So why can’t you?

In continuing with my exploration into the broad question of how the Internet has changed the playing field for musicians, I turned to my old friend Howie Kleinberg Senior VP of ElectricArtists.

Although ElectricArtists started out exclusively as a music marketing firm, their deep knowledge of the culture of the Internet allowed them to handle all types of campaigns, from films and TV to books, DVDs and magazines. Their main specialty is building communities on the Internet.

Q: How has the Internet shifted the playing field for musicians?

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.

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.

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.