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

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.

It’s no secret that it’s a tough market for the Auto industry now, and for the auto makers who are holding up, they are aware of how important it is to stand out in this competitive environment.

At last week’s New York Auto Show, Land Rover unveiled their new vehicle, as well as a promotional campaign that incited a lot of talks around the water cooler at ad agencies everywhere.

Using the same concept as a media buy, Land Rover paid 4500 Tweeters to post and comment about “Land Rover” and include a “#LRNY” tag at the end of their posts to optimize their name search. Even though many other car companies like Ford and Honda have a successful presence on Twitter, according to Brand Republic, Land Rover are the first to openly brand themselves on Twitter.

Land Rover have essentially created a new way to sponsor Tweets -but is it in “good taste”? So far no other brands has been reported to follow in Land Rover’s Twitter sponsoring concept yet.

However, suffice to say, if a brand with a loyal following uses the same strategy e.g. an Artist to promote their upcoming tour, it could be an effective alternative to a media spend in addition to a traditional ad-buy to get their message across.