When everyone and the neighbour's band is on tour, how do you grab the media's attention to get exposure cos you need to fill in the seats ?

There are so many bands touring now (hey, even Metallica feels obliged to do so as royalties checks aren't what they were no more), one need to be able to uphold the attention and get the customers to buy tickets. And sometimes, your tour just competes with someone else already getting shares off your market: Madonna is currently touring and so does Lady Gaga. How does Madonna diverts the attention to HER tour and dates while Gaga seems to have little problems having The Press publicizes her cancelled gigs in Indonesia (the concert's content has been judged devilish and therefore non grata) ? Well, what about a good combination of neo-nazi controversy and an hefty dosis of untamed sexuality, hmm ?

Madonna's latest album isn't bad, but sales are (relatively) and her tour is experimenting troubles selling seats so there she flashes a video showing a right-wing french politician with a svatiska on her front and in Istambul she performed a song in her bra (nothing unusual) and showed some flesh which drove the audience mad....

If you're an artist, i'm pretty sure your ego must sometimes get boosted up to 11 when seeing how many "Like" your update status has been blessed with this morning. And yes, there's nothing guilty about enjoying it.

But you do know also this doesn't always convert to real factual support or even sales do you ? Here are a few numbers showing one more time how hard it can be for artists and bands to convert the easier thing to do in this world (saying I 'like' to a comment or an update) into what a real fan would do: actually buying a CD or a DVD or going to a gig...

First, dont' be hard on yourself: the competition is harsh and there are millions of bands and artists fighting for recognition and the social medias are filled with new bands everyday. And people don't spend as much as they used to on music, meaning the pie is smaller or the same, but there are more bands wanting to have a share of it: Tunecore says less than 1% of the bands on its platform gets more than 1280$ in sale per month and only a few thousand albums sell more than 10.000 units per year.

Secondly: what doesn't work for you works just about right for huge companies with huge...

By now, if you're an avid reader of this blog, you surely have seen that while we're not dipping too much into politics, we're still a looooong way to be Tea Party material for sure. Politics and music have always been linked, politics in music as well, and so does music in politics...

Barrack Obama, running for a second mandate as Numero Uno in the USA, has made public his Spotify favorite list. Now, that's quite a change from earlier elections where candidates had to look uber serious and only concerned by America. Here, we have a president that sings, smiles, dances, cries...and whether you think his 4 years at the helm were a huge success, a moderate one, a just-about-right or a total disaster, Obama will still come thru as someone who knows when to let go and get to that famous bridge. Amen to that. (see below a few videos of President Obama singing. In tune. Yes.)

So, his Spotify list ? Well, there are some rockin tunes there for sure, and a couple of I-wouldn't-be-caught-alive-singing-that, but overall it's rather ok....This said, when we wanted to hook up to his playlist on Spotify, we had a pop up asking us if we had a Spotify account or not ? Knowing...

Making a video can go multiples ways...but all of them are time-consuming and most of them imply a rather large amount of money that needs to be spend in order to get something of good technical quality. There are enough rather technically unacceptable and very, very low-fi looking videos around and if you want yours to come across the ambiant deafening noise, you need something that will touch your fans, make them fall in love with your song, make them buy the song, or the album it's on, having people talking about your and your music and attracts new fans as well

There's now a new possibility to have great looking videos made by technically savvy image people: outsource them to the biggest movie industry on the world: Bollywood !
Drew Smith, a canadian artist, did just that: he commandeered a Bollywood director to shoot a video on his latest song and the result is of very good quality, whether you like it or not: images and sounds lare top notch, and while the plot is frankly derivative from the idea of the song in the first place, the end result is charming, pleasing to the eye and the mind and..Drew has people talking about him! And frankly i don't see...

There are moments like that, where you get a small but significant "victory": Le Monde, one of France's most read daily newspaper, has a small article on Kollector, and it feels good.

Besides the fact that it makes new users converging to the site and register, it also feels good to see that the article is picking up things that you feel are important in the Kollector project: its transparency and how this could be a game changer tool for the music industry, and not only in the redistribution of radio's royalties.

Kollector does that, and even more:

- Realtime worldwide statistics giving you a precise and accurate view of your radio broadcasts.
- First hand transparent factual data to help you and your publisher to estimate airplay royalties.
- Time saving application optimizing the management of your audio works.
- Data you can share with your partners to overview in realtime and nationally/internationally your promo campaigns .
- Comparative watch to ensure new territories and markets.

Using Kollector to track down your songs on the planet's radio will tell you so much more than just where and when it's has been played: it...