A personal blog of Andrew Apanov, founder of a digital marketing agency for the music industry Dotted Music.
My first ThingLink interactive image, a feature for PLAYMA's website. Absolutely loving the deep integration with services like Topspin and Soundcloud.
Will see how it's accepted by PLAYMA fans, but so far I see this tool as a perfect replacement of featured images and slideshows on websites' home pages (plus there are way more other ways to use it).
PS: Turns out Posterous doesn't support ThingLink, which is kinda addnoying, so check out the image here.
Another cool little app I discovered and tested this week is called Smore.
Currently in Alpha (yes, not even Beta), the service allows to instantly create simple pages and share them on social networks. This kind of a digital flyer is great for announcing events, and so I tried it out yesterday with a page dedicated to next week's premiere of PLAYMA's new music video for "Cuz We Are PLAYMA."
THE RESULT: Cuz We Are PLAYMA announcement on Smore
THE PROCESS:
Basic statistic are available, showing the admin how many views the page got (without any details at this point). I loved that each page goes with a Facebook comment plugin, which is very appropriate considering the social concept behind the service.
Overall a fun and handy tool, which of course needs to improve to become something that you can use on a regular basis (but it's alpha afer all). The two creators of the service have done a great work so far.
If you want an invite, let me know in the comments or Twitter @matterandrew and I'll try to get you one!
PS: For full disclosure, I am not affiliated with Smore, but do manage PLAYMA. Watch that video on Tuesday, it's awesome!
Here is my little discovery of the week - a website called Twylah. Currently in beta (I guess I was lucky to get an invite very quick), the service allows you to create "custom brand pages for your tweets," which is pretty accurate.
What you get after receiving an invite and signing up with you Twitter account is a dedicated page, in a trendy newspaper-like layout, divided into sections based on the most popular keywords in your tweets. Just look into mine to get a better understanding of what I'm talking about.
Clicking on a tweet opens a preview with suggestions - "Related Tweets" - which is pretty engaging as well.
All in all, so far it looks like a promising and essential tool for any brand or celebrity, active on Twitter.
I didn't ever think that my stream of random tweets could start making sense so quickly.
As commenters pointed out, VibeDeck has a ways to go before it has the same functionality as other music services, but in keeping it simple (and remaining free), it has some great potential. Every day fans and musicians are always looking for services that keep prices low.
And today VibeDeck added another piece of the puzzle by deploying a SoundCloud integration that will allow any SoundClouder to sell tracks directly to fans (or give away music for free in exchange for email data, if they’re cool like that). This new feature also enables fans to buy MP3s (along with metadata and artwork) as SoundCloud “sets” directly from a SoundCloud user’s page. It’s a quick, 3-step purchase process, and payments flow directly into the artist’s PayPal account. And, thankfully, VibeDeck doesn’t take a cut of those sales.
The set-up process produces a free VibeDeck page as a by-product (an example of which you can see here), and pricing is up to the user’s discretion. However, there is an email-for-media option for those musicians that would rather distribute their music for free in exchange for building an email list.
My two favorites among music services have teamed up, awesome!
The opacity feature allows for the background image to ‘shine through’ the other elements of your deck.
Here is an example:
http://www.vibedeck.com/thedominostateAnd looks great on Facebook too:
http://www.facebook.com/thedominostateYou’ll find it in the Colors tab in your VibeDeck menu.
VibeDeck, the intriguing new service allowing musicians to sell music directly to their fans and getting 100% of the profits, just released a nice little update which allows you to control the opacity of the mid-section of your deck. Check out the examples above - small yet useful feature that I'm going to try out myself soon!
If you are not on Music On The Dot newsletter list yet or just missed this, here is a beginner's tutorial on using a popular Twitter tool called TweetDeck. Hope some of you will find it useful. What do you think on the guide's format?
From the press release:
Each member of the band took turns spinning some of their favorite music and chatted with their fans for nearly four hours. For the lucky fans that got into the session, the event was highlighted by the band sharing two unreleased and previously unheard demos that they recently recorded. The band announced the special session on Facebook and Twitter on Tuesday afternoon informing fans they would tweet the DJ room link out at 7:59 PM EST. The room immediately filled upon announcement and quickly became one of the highest trafficked rooms on the site. The band plans to hold additional DJ sessions on TurnTable.FM in the coming months.
Entertaining and timely, though Turntable.fm remains closed only to the US visitors (I must confess that I didn't see it coming using the service just two weeks ago).
The lovely SoundCloud audio platform has announced this week a series of new integrations and features aimed at providing further sharing opportunities for sound creators. From the press release:
"From today, SoundCloud’s more than three million registered users can share their sounds on Foursquare, with the option to ‘shout out’ their recordings when they check-in using the free SoundCloud iPhone or Android app. They will also be able to sign-up or login using Facebook connect on SoundCloud.com.
"For it’s core community of musicians, SoundCloud has also integrated with concert tracking site, Songkick, enabling artists to easily add their upcoming gig dates directly onto their SoundCloud profile and keep all their tracks and tours in one place."
Additional new features include:
- Android. Track commenting and sharing to Twitter and Facebook for Android users, previously only available for the iPhone; as well as two bespoke SoundCloud widgets for the Android homescreen
- iPhone. Followers and followings can now be tracked using the iPhone app
- Mobile Web. For non-smartphone users, the SoundCloud mobile site has now been fully optimized for mobile browsers
- Desktop. Sharing capabilities to social networks are now also available on the Mac desktop app
From next week SoundCloud users will also be able to sign up or login via Facebook on SoundCloud iPhone, Android and Mac desktop apps.
Solid stuff!
Have you heard about fiverr.com? It's an interesting place where you can find people who will do various things for you for $5 (from designing a business card or setting up a website, to becoming your virtual slave). You can offer your $5 services as well - and that's exactly what I've done.
I am promising to give you a complex personal music marketing advice for five bucks.It should be a fun experiment, will see. Interested in trying me out, anyone? ;)
