As album sales are down 50% since 2000, radio is breaking less new music than ever in history. Record companies are signing fewer and fewer new artists and artist development budgets continue to shrink, artists and labels need to all find a new way to get music out there. 

The 2009 New Music Seminar NYC is an action packed day of power players in the “new” music industry presenting ideas on how to keep up with the latest technologies, network with others to build your own music business foundation at “The Schmoozatorium”  and most importantly, how to monetize your relationship with your fans in the digital age.

The seminar will kick off with President of Myspace Music, Courtney Holt as the keynote speaker, as well as industry individuals such as:

• Mathieu Drouin, Equator Music
• Mark Ghuneim, Wiredset
• Bruce Houghton, Skyline Music/Hypebot
• Peter Wells, Tunecore
• Steve Greenberg, S-Curve Records
• Terry McBride, Nettwerk
• Tim Westgren, Pandora
• Emily White, Whitesmith Entertainment
• Nick Catchdubs, Fools’ Gold
• Sam Hollander, Fresh Kills Music
• Mickey Factz, MC
• Saint Louis, GFC New York Brand Strategic Management
• Martin Atkins, Tour: Smart/Invisible Records
• David Cooper, Foxman/Direct to Fan
• Marty Diamond, Paradigm Agency
• Lisa White, 9:30 Club, Washington DCWashington DC)

Tickets are available on the day for $150

http://newmusicseminar.biz

ReverbNation is the music industry’s version of a “Web 2.0 Fairy Godfather”…

If you’re an artist looking to market your music online, but don’t know where to start, ReverbNation is a platform that provides Artists, Labels, Managers and other Industry Professionals with their own set of digital marketing promotional tools.

Now artists have the ability to manage their fan base, create widgets and banners, distribute music on iTunes, create geo-targeted campaigns and send e-newsletters -all from one platform (and did we mention it’s free?)

The most refreshing part about digital distribution on ReverbNation is how they’ve created a business model that puts artists first. For $35.00 per release/per year artists can distribute one song or an album of up to 99 songs – best of all, ReverbNation does not take any percentage of the sales.

ReverbNation offers both a free and premium service. Features include:

• FanReach: fan managements system with customizable and targeted email system

• Widgets & Banners: Music Players, Fan Collectors, Street Team Collectors, Press, Shows, Shows w/ Map, Exclusive Song.  Widgets and Banners are also trackable

• Digital Distribution: distributes music on iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody and emusic

• RPK (Reverb Press Kit): electronic press kit (EPK) that allows the   recipient to access music, videos, bio and photos. Artists also have the ability to geo-target fans and track number of click-thrus

• Fan360: reveals the contact information for emails e.g. name, age, sex, gender, zip code and how many Friends, Fans or Followers on Myspace, Facebook and Twitter

• Street Team Functionality – every artist gets their own Street Team Program to help activate their fans and make every promotion “viral”. These promoters will help artists gain exposure by talking about the artist on blogs, message boards and by posting music, banners, tour dates, etc.  The platform even tracks everything these Street Team members do and creates a Leaderboard that measures impressions, number of plays, clicks and/or conversions

• Facebook and Bebo Applications – the MyBand Application is currently the #1 Artist Application on Facebook.  It puts almost everything from the ReverbNation profile right into the artist’s Facebook Public Profile page.  Artists can also include “Buy links” e.g. music, tickets, merch on their Public Profiles

Currently there are over 400,000 artists using ReverbNation including 50 Cent, Kenny Chesney, Madonna, Pantera, Judas Priest, O.A.R., Natasha Bedingfield, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Sara Bareilles, Lamb of God and Jason Mraz. 

Earlier this week, Blip.fm (a.k.a.“Twitter for music”) launched a YouTube integration feature that allows users to have the option of posting music videos directly onto their Blips.

The Twitter social media paradigm was used as the inspiration for Blip.fm, a platform that’s specifically designed to share rich content media, giving users the ability to make music recommendations (in 150 characters or less), to their network in an easy format, without the use of TinyURLs. With the new YouTube integration, Blip.fm users can now do more than just recommend their favorite songs, but also favorite music videos as well.

“The decision to introduce music videos to Blip.fm is part of our broader strategy to expand our content sources and to introduce all media types to our platform” says Blip.fm Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Jeff Yasuda  “We’re happy with the integration and the feedback from our users has been really positive.”

Artists and labels can take full advantage of Blip.fm’s YouTube integration as part of their grassroots marketing strategy to promote new releases, live performances, or even to become a thought-leader for music recommendations to fans.

“We believe that music discovery is an inherently social process.  In fact, the most compelling recommendations don’t come from an algorithm or a computer… they come from your friends and trusted sources” says Yasuda.

What are your music recommendations? Tell us on http://blip.fm/rockisreligion

Involver is a new application for Facebook that turns your Fan Page from generic to dynamic.

The site touts itself as being ”The first complete marketing suite on Facebook”. There is a premium for the service, but some of the individual applications like the RSS Feed, Photo Gallery, You Tube Channel, Twitter, Poll, Coupon, File Sharing, Slides and PDFs are available for free.

Even though the ability to seamlessly enable a Twitter, RSS, You Tube feed into your Fan Page is nothing new, the ability to brand all your individual Tabs with your own logo on your Facebook Fan Page in a neat and professional looking way is.

The Coupon application is nice if you are a band offering a promotion exclusively on Facebook. You can create e-coupons either exclusively for existing Fans of the page, and/or create a different coupon for new fans (to encourage them to become a Fan of the Page).

However, the product description claims to offer a “set it and forget it” feature, which generally goes against the whole point of “social networking”.

As per the site’s instructions, it’s simple to use and promotes engagement and viral sharing, which enables marketers to take one step closer to being able to find a way to successfully monetize the Facebook platform.

Earlier this month, Facebook began the Beta roll out of a new currency system called Facebook Credits. The feature allows users to purchase credits to reward their friends for posting good status updates at the rate of $1 USD for 100 credits. Currently, the system is in Beta mode, and is only available at select colleges only.

Sounds innocent enough: your friend posts a cool status update - you reward them with credit.

However what this means to brands is, if Facebook Credits take off, brands will soon be able to offer their “influential friends” a reward for mentioning their product to a highly attractive demographic (the fastest growing demographic on Facebook being 35).

For record labels and artists promoting their new release or upcoming tours, a “pay per play” strategy can be applied too -but for a price far lower than a traditional ad-buy.

Even though there are no hard statistics on exactly how much influence a status update has on the consumer buying power, we all know from personal usage, how effective music mentions and recommendations can be when we see our own friends make a mention of a band or song on their own updates

Now all brands need is to find the right friends who would be enough of a Fan to actually do it.

New Facebook brand pages, (now referred to as “Public Profiles”) is the best thing to happen for artist promotion since the introduction of Myspace.

Why? Because you can now totally customize your profile to direct your fans to a landing page of what you’re trying to promote right now! Also with this new version of FB, when brands post news, it will appear directly in your fan’s news feed (seamlessly integrated with their other “real” friend’s news). Oh, and let’s not forget the Status Updates option (i.e. room to insert friendly humor here).

It’s like having your very own “mini website” in the world, wide web of Facebook!

Now that Facebook has relaunched their new Fan Page, it means that artists can now do even more promotion on the platform.

The redesign that occurred last Wednesday (3/11) not only allow artists to create their Fan Pages to resemble Personal Profile Pages, but also the ability to include more info in a user-friendly tabulated format (i.e. one tab for band info, one for Tour dates, one tab for Merch etc) to even a Twitter-like live news-feed so fans can get up-to-date info on all the latest news. 

Facebook urges all brands to change their existing Fan Pages in the next week to give them the opportunity to customize their Fan Pages before it gets automatically changed over to the new redesigned format. But don’t fret if you don’t get a chance to… all your info on your existing Fan Page will not still be available and carry on into the new format. 

Facebook is currently approximately 175 million fans-strong -that’s 75 million more than rival Myspace’s 100 million users.