THANKS TO ALL THE ARTISTS WHO ENTERED OUR CONTEST – WE WILL NO LONGER BE CONSIDERING CONTEST SUBMISSIONS. BEST OF LUCK TO THE 2 LUCKY MUSICIANS. WE WILL BE POSTING OUR DECISION DECEMBER 1ST!

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Receive 6 months of professional management and promotion to take your career to the next level!
Services and support selected artists will receive include:

• professional phone consultation and education with CEO of Pro Soul Alliance on the artists development *and career
• a professional blog based website they can edit and update, complete with hosting by Rackspace, one of the best in the world, with artistsname.com
• Professional bio and press copy writing, blog development and updating
• Search engine optimization for effective search ranking
• Graphic design, photography and image assistance for promo materials
• Social networking configuration and integration, connecting with fans (ReverbNation, Facebook, MySpace, Blip.fm, Twitter, Youtube, Ourstage etc)
• Offline & online marketing assistance, radio airplay, follow up, and tracking
• Product development, design, CD production and digital distribution through major online retailers worldwide including ringtones and mobile phone
• Licensing and song placement; electronic licensing options online
• Scheduling of show dates for live performances
• Video Production; Youtube promo viral marketing videos

To narrow down the 2 winners, Pro Soul Alliance will be choosing the artist that is the most marketable, and has already shown commitment, and dedication to their career.

Contest ends October 30th. Details, entry information and music submission can be accessed here: http://www.prosoul.com/contest

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NEW YORK, July 1 /PRNewswire/ — Sony Music Entertainment (SME) today announced that it has entered into a global partnership with IODA to create a new leading distribution and services network for independent rights holders. As part of the partnership, Sony Music has made a strategic investment in IODA, a leader in digital distribution, marketing, and technology solutions for the independent music industry. Additional terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In a statement released by Kevin Arnold, Founder and CEO of IODA, “Sony really impressed us with their respect for, and understanding of the needs of the independent community.” He adds, “We remain, as we always have, fully dedicated to helping independent content owners succeed in the digital world. This alliance will greatly enhance IODA’s ability to continue delivering effective solutions for Independents.”

The question arising out of this major merger or “Partnership”, is how will the independent label community react? After all, the I in IODA is supposed to stand for Independent. What we do know is that some indie labels are seen at times to be in distrust of large corporations. We know that IODA gains a strong marketing partner in Sony. Sony operating through its independent distribution subsidiary RED taps into IODA’s digital distribution system worldwide. Released in the Newswire, Sony identifies making a strategic investment in IODA. Sony’s subsidiary, RED will continue to offer digital distribution services and IODA will be an added option for clients who need other services than what RED currently provides, specifically more indie-focused marketing and global distribution services.

In time, the answer will unfold as to how the independent community will react to this meeting of corporate minds. What is clear – did we honestly think – major corporations, responsible to their shareholders, would sit on the sidelines for long – better yet, did they ever sit on the sidelines? Or were they just waiting for the savvy, independents like IODA to work hard, build and develop this growing, transitioning industry, and then come in when the time was ripe and call “Merger” aka “Partnership”.

Corporate strategy and business development in true form. Sony’s way of addressing the changing needs of their market without doing due diligence to innovate and make changes necessary themselves from scratch.

Record Companies have finally agreed to accept a settlement of $7,000 from a suburban family in a law suit that spanned over 4 years. Talk about relief! Four record companies accused Patricia Stantangelo of illegally downloading and distributing copyright music. This mother of five from Wappingers New York, claimed she couldn’t have downloaded all that music from the internet because she had no idea how to download music from the internet! She also refused to settle with the RIAA.

The lawsuit against her was dropped. However, they then turned around and sued two of her kids! Michelle, 20, and Robert, 16, were accused of downloading and distributing more than 1,000 songs. Michelle and Robert denied the allegations. The music industry claims a loss of millions of dollars due to illegal downloading, and the companies claimed that Michelle had admitted to the piracy and Robert had been implicated by a family friend.

Jordan Glass, Ms. Stantangelo’s lawyer, is reported as saying that the music industry had no idea that Ms. Stantangelo would fight back against billions of Corporate dollars.

Some relief can be felt knowing a settlement of $7,000, which can be paid in instalments, was perhaps only a fraction of what the RIAA spent on advancing their claims. Though they wouldn’t reveal their actual costs, it’s pretty clear more than $7,000 was incurred in legal expenses in this case of 4 years!

All to fight something that is inevitable, the freedom of music; music lovers getting what they want, when they want it. It is far less expensive to come up with new ways to monetize music instead of fighting to keep old ones that no longer work.

The RIAA has now announced Jennifer Pariser, former Sony BMG lawyer, as the Senior Vice President of Litigation and legal affairs for the music industry trade group.  Will this solve anything in regards to the RIAA’s stubborn attitude towards music consumption? To be frank, the RIAA and the major record labels are not listening to what music lovers have to say, and they certainly aren’t interested in giving them what they want.

A little while back, recently, we posted a blog entry about the Isle of Man, which is an Island not to far from Ireland. This Island has started to put a tax on the consumers Internet. This tax money is then distributed between record labels accordingly. But of course this is just an experiment, another attempt to avoid giving music lovers music on their terms…

Is it logical for the rest of the world to follow suit? Especially in America, clearly there is something wrong here. The creator of Kazaa was fined 200,000$ for violating the distribution right, and for what, helping people do a better job promoting music than the record labels are?
Not only is suing the distributors costly, but its proven ineffective, this is why DRM has been dropped for the most part on digital music.  Another dangerous individual to the freedom of music is Thomas Perrelli. He single handedly convinced the Copyright Board to help kill web radio by instilling massive fees for broadcast royalties! This has forced web radio companies to beg their listeners for donations just to stay afloat.
Then there is Neil MacBride, VP and Anti Piracy for Business Software Alliance.

It’s almost as if major record labels are begging fans to stop listening, to stop caring. The big record labels are pushing the fans farther and farther away.
The only way they can stop this downward spiral is to simply give in to what’s inevitable, and give customers what they want or risk becoming irrelevant and insignificant.

People are listening to and finding out about music in different ways than they used to and music companies and content creators should understand this and act accordingly.

Jonathan Coulton makes a full time living as a music 2.0 internet musician.

Now that Jonathan Coulton is something of a household name in some segments of the online community, has anyone approached him with a deal with the devil and a pen dripping money? “I’ve had a couple of conversations… I’m not anti-label in concept,” he tells me. “I have people I pay to do things like a label would; I can’t do everything myself. That’s always been what a label is for. That’s still true. It’s just that the deals that have been proposed to me never made a great deal of sense; they always involve giving up a piece of what I already have, as a gamble to increase the fan base even more.”

It makes sense, and even for popular bands the economics of signing with a major label rarely work out. The band 30 Seconds to Mars found this out the hard way. After scoring a couple of catchy and popular radio hits and doing some touring, they found themselves on the wrong side of a lawsuit after their label decided it wanted more music from the group. Singer Jared Leto described the business of going platinum in an open letter to the fans. “If you think the fact that we have sold in excess of 2 million records and have never been paid a penny is pretty unbelievable, well, so do we. And the fact that EMI informed us that not only aren’t they going to pay us AT ALL but that we are still 1.4 million dollars in debt to them is even crazier,” Leto wrote, sounding exasperated. “That the next record we make will be used to pay off that old supposed debt just makes you start wondering what is going on. Shouldn’t a record company be able to turn a profit from selling that many records? Or, at the very least, break even?” He goes on to describe other aspects of the label he found intolerable, including the firing of the people who helped his band, EMI pressuring the band to place ads on its official website, and the fact that they will never own their masters.

Says Jonathan: “There is going to be some company that comes along that’s like a full-service label and has the scalability that a guy like me can do this sort of thing.”

So in Coulton’s world, the label doesn’t come to you and take control of things. Rather, you build your following, and then you hire a company that operates like a label. The most dramatic change in all of this is that the artist is the boss, every step of the way… Very much our philosophy at Pro Soul Alliance!

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/09/jonathan-coulton-interview.ars

There seems to be no end to the resistance major record labels have to the changes in the way people want to listen to and consume music.

Today was a classic example, as Warner music refused to come to an agreement with YouTube in how they should be compensated for the streaming of their videos, pulling all their videos from the service. This is despite Universal Music already earning tens of millions from YouTube.

Do artists signed to Warner know how much money they are losing from being banned from the most popular source for music videos in the world? Do they know MTV doesn’t play music videos much anymore? Probably not, and they have no choice anyway as long as they are under contract with Warner.
Just another example of how traditional music industry doesn’t get the potential of new ways of earning income, and building an audience.

Our attitude is that it’s career suicide to turn down any potential way of earning income in the new music business just because you don’t feel it is enough. Especially if that income is likely to increase in the future, and will help bring in new fans, and encourage fans to promote you, something that is huge on YouTube.

What do you think?