Sometimes, death suits an artist well...Many people in ze show-biz knew about Michael Jackson being in deep physical/psychological/drug troubles and many didn't think he could pull up the gigantic dates he had booked for his return.

All sad that his death is, it's been three years now, there's no hiding his departure opens up alleyways of megagigahyper deals to the two astute managers who control his artistic present and future. For instance, John Branca and John McClain just signed a deal with Pepsi (yes, them, again) so the soda company could exploit the image of Jackson on a billion of cans with the slogan "Live For Now". I know, i find the motto rather disturbing myself...

Furthermore, Sony has signed in 2010 the biggest deal ever as they paid 250 million dollars for retaining the rights on MJ records until 2017 and have the OK for exploiting (i think the term is right) 7 posthume albums.

Wait, the one-arm bandit thing doesn't stop here: le Cirque du Soleil has a Immortal Tour in rehearsals (tickets from 60 $ to 190$), Ubisoft has a videogame in the making, and there shall be an interactive museum in Vegas where the willing consumer will be able to...

Ok, ok, we've been here many times, but this letter from The Trichordist (Artists For An Ethical Internet) shines an interesting light on the ethical (?) behavior behind the ways of millions of people who access music without paying for it.

We don't want to go on again about how downloading music without paying for it is stealing from the artist as many excuses are then brought up like:

1/ If I like the album, I then buy it
That doesn't show in stats, people. Maybe you wanted to hear what's the album like and then thought about buying it but numbers show it's NOT the case.Or maybe you forgot to buy the album finally ?

2/ I don't pay the artist cos the label is screwing them anyway.
Well, if the artist has a bad deal with the label, that's up to him to re-evaluate the situation and probably not up to you.

3/ we're in a new millenia: copyright is wrong and artists should all share their work.
And ride an Unicorn, sure. If you go to a restaurant, you're paying the cook and the waiter for a service, you don't run away once you've eaten.

4/ Iphones and computers are essential, music isn't.
So, why do you have so much music...

In a market which is schrinking everyday, one needs to find new ways to get exposure and revenues and we've been long advocate of bands trying to break thru with the licencing of tneir songs for commercials, videogames and movies.

Of course, it's easy to say but harder to do but this should be on the to-do list of every band who wants to make a revenue these days: send your works to supervisors who deal with commercials, movies and videogames.

An example ? The sweet-sounding Jezabels: without a label but their own, this aussie band has succeed in opening many doors thru intensive touring to build up an audience and airplays on a specifically indie-oriented state-funded Triple J radio. That landed them support which eventaully climaxed with a few pretigious australian awards.

But what was really the push to more exposure, and paving the road to international tours and festival bookings was the inclusion of one of their song as the soundtrack for the Red Bull backed BMX rider Danny MacAskill video: it started at 20.000 views the first day and topping more than 20 millions in 18 months...

So, bands and artists: when you have new material ready and if...

More than ever, people are now discovering new bands thru advertisements: 69% of the Y generation finds new music thru adverts and 68% of them thinks it's ok to have bands linked with brands (GMR study which we hoover above here: http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/music-more-important). Licensing music has become an important mean of getting your music to be known, specially in an age where CD sales suck and only works as appetizer for touring and the merch you sold at the gig only pays for petrol...

So, your job as a musician is to find where to licence your great tracks and you, or someone around you, should start pitching it to music supervisors in movies and in adverts. Ryan Fitch is Music Supervisor at Saatchi And Saatchi, a huge multinational advertisement company (with a strong interest in art actually). There's an interesting interview of him in Sonic Scoop which is filled with insights on how, what and by which means to pitch your work.

There are now quite a few online places selling music ready-to-be-licensed and Ryan talks about "Jingle Punks" and "Pump", good companies indeed to which...

Very interesting article by Mark Mulligan in "The Music Industry Blog" about the amount of tracks available digitally (16 millions tracks on offer seem to be rather average) and what forms this impressive number.

One would believe that original tracks and cover versions would cohabit in relative same numbers, or with a slight dip for covers but the situation is all different: the digital music services are filled up with cover versions, often really bad and unimaginative ones, and karaoke redditions of hits. Let's take Lady Gaga: only 6% of the Gaga songs being offered to you are from the actual lady we all love and cherish ! 94% are covers or karaoke tracks !

This doesn't pan out nicely for the offer actually as it seems obvious most of the offer is poor material...Aside the huge digital music services, what the industry, and the people, might need is quality above quantity: a real recommandation/discovery service that's as good as what you now sadly departed record shop would offer, not a giant mall with nothing but sub-level music...

Read the original post on...

Are we not having a "Twelve Monkeys" moment ? That excellent Terry Gilliam movie was showing how Bruce Willis is being send back to different moments in time to search for the single moment or event that had change the curse of the planet.

Well, in 2011/2012 we have been witnessing a few events that may well show the beginning of something new too: people visibly want free data and content from the internet and they are very unhappy about having their use of the internet being controlled...

Some has to do with the desire of the people to have things available to them for free or at the lowest price possible but also as fast as possible: information is instant and global, and so distribution must be too...But there's also greed and companies running into spaces where money can be made out of loopholes in laws: we had the FBI organizing a gigantic coup on Kim Dotcom's MegaUpload multinational operations (which seems to fold down completely such are the procedural irregularities staining the case).

Politically, things have moved too: you have the Pirate Party in Germany who has claimed no less than 9 % of votes in Berlin (that's 15 seats!) , you have...

There's little doubt the emotionnal highlight of Coachella 2012 has been Snoop Dogg dicing microphones with Tupac, resuscitated as an hologram.

While the technology itself is 'only' a luxurious version of pepper's ghost, a make-believe trick used since 1860 and seen more often entertainment parks, it has been used in pop concerts since 2006 where Gorillaz appeared at the MTV awards as they supposely are: cartoon characters. It has also been used since then by Mariah Carey or the Black Eyed Peas but never did it reach the emotionnal climax of seeing a rapper dead for 16 years jumping and moving so vividly years after his departure from Stage One. Oh, and while I write this, Tupac The Hologram's Twitter account has more than 23.000 followers....

What is sure is that they are now talks of taking the hologram on Tour with Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg and there's no doubt some people are busy making crazy plans to bring back to life stars of yesterdays that could easily fill up concert halls. This said, Elvis has been playing live concerts for years with his moving image above his musicians so there's nothing really new about mixing up archives and live gigs, but here the...

Separating music from alcohol and drugs consumption would be like deliberately remove x and y from maths or salt from french fries (belgian fries as it turns out but that's beside our point from today) and we surely don't want to do that today and are even going to concentrate on beer and rock music.

A london-based company, Signature Brew, is very cleverly asking rock bands to be part of the brewing process of a beer that would therefore be totally personal to them and to their fans. So far, two Signature Brew have been issued and sold really well as one of them, The General beer, title of a Rifles song (one of the bands having design a beer), has already seen 6000 bottles sold ! There are a few more bands lining up for that great idea and this connection between beer and rock must for sure resonates well for rock bands and fans alike.

Signature Brew goes quite deeply in the entanglement of the band and the beer's taste as it's asked to the band to actually design the beer: they need to go and taste some and refine it with the help of a microbrewer in the UK. One of the beer is crisp and rather fizzy while the other one is more like mexican beers. Of course, the...

While the music industry is looking for better days and the live market is saturated (some huge festivals are even forced to call it a day), there's a brand new sector which is booming above all expectations: cruise ships linked to music !

In recent years, promoters have merge together vacations and music in a newest form: embark on a cruise, the Carribeans is a must, and see your favorite band, surrounded by roughly 30 other bands sometimes, during 3 or 4 days of musical nirvana. It's all there: the music, the drinks, the food, the fun...just add some sun, a very specific festival site (the sea, with the stage often build over the swimming pool on deck A), the feeling of being a respected customer (bar people are here 100 times more pleasant than your usual festival beer tent attendee and they are never miles away), the specificity of the location, the let-go attitude one gets into...

And it's a definitive success as points it out a good article in The New York Times. Reasons of the success ? They are several but somehow the link between enjoying a holiday while seeing bands you love is a golden one: everyone feels it is a special place and bands love it as...

Bram Stoker, the man who wrote Dracula, was a clever and educated man (he graduated with honors in...mathematics) and the contract he dealt with the publishers of what was originally called "The Un-Dead" and later became Dracula when first published in 1897 was a tough one for the publishers and got Bram a very good royalties deal.

At the times, authors would received about 10 to 15 cents top from the sales of a book, while dear ol' Bram got 20% (altho he wouldn't get anything from the 1000 books sold). We all know what happen after that: Dracula became a hit (and Bram lost the rights on his book for the USA, the reasons for that are still unknown...)

This is the perfect moment to once again state that artists shouldn't sign anything just because a label manager in a record company, or a manager, or a publisher, or a record producer, tell them they are the best thing since sliced bread. If your work excites someone enough to the point of handling you a contract, chances are your work could excite some other people as well and you'll have the choice to sign up something better by making them altering the contract the way you want them.

Of course, we're a...

The illustrious Temptations and its 13 plaintive lawyers are sueing Universal Music Group for allegedly having being cheated out of revenues coming from digital downloads, and we're not talking small dimes here as this lawsuit, if lost by UMG, could mean millions of dollars having to be paid to artists such as Nirvana, Eric Clapton, Kiss, The Police, The Who, etc...

What's the grunge ? The use of the words "licences" and "sales". See, in a 1993 Universal contract, it says UMG would pay The Temptations around 16 % percent of revenues coming from "sales" when they would pay 50 percent from "licences" revenues. And UMG seems to consider that digital downloads and ringtones are sales, and not licences. We're talking a big, large, very large amount of money: UMG would have to pay The Temptations about 3 times more what they've been paying them so far, and we're talking more or less about 17 years of digital sales, aren't we ?

So, in what is going to be a trial to remember, we'll see lawyers from both sides arguing that digital sales are or are not licenced products. And no doubt The Temptations' lawyers will call Steve Jobs' ghost at the hearing as he wrote a...

Spotify's success seems unstoppable, despite many labels (especially indies) removing their artists from the swedish streaming service as they pay-out per stream is extremely low.

Yesterday was a historic day as the US data from diverses streaming companies like Spotify, Rhapsody and Slacker have been added up to the Billboard Hot 100 charts, the US singles popularity chart (which is based on radio play and sales while it's solely based on sales in the UK). This move illustrates very well the change of balance we're witnessing these last two years between digital download sales (no one hardly buys CD singles no more) and streamings. To give a number, Nielsen data shows that 494.000.000 songs were streamed last week while only 27.100.000 singles were legally obtained. All those numbers may look good to the users, yes they love Spotify and streaming and why shouldn't they as the offers are very interesting, but the thing is: this is killing the smaller labels.

Do the maths: Itunes will pay the labels 0,40 Euro per download while Spotify will only retribute 0,002 Euros. If we take that with the numbers of singles sold last week in the as a simple calcalation...

That title from The Music Void is so good, we had to let it spread here too :)

In a very interesting, but sad, article, The Music Void describes and accounts the enormous amount of monet Whitney owed Sony and how little her estate, and her daughter specially, will get from all this. It IS terrible.

This happens so often. Artists are so excited at the idea of signing a deal that they don't read the small letters, or they don't deal with a contract accordingly: this should be done with no affect or feelings. It's a business move in a business laced with feelings and emotions.

Yes, it's cool to be signed by a label but don't forget you're the one bringing the music, they are the ones bringing the know-how, the network, the manpower, the means and the angles to make your work come out as well as possible and have it promoted the way it deserves and gain results. You NEED to look at that contract like a deadly serious thing and kinda forget all the nice things the label owner told you over dinner. Of course, you need to "feel" the label, you need to be able to relax there and sense if they can take you and your band to wherever you want to go: you must TRUST...

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...

In a rare but not unseen move, Motorhead is asking its fans to NOT buy the Motorhead latest box set that just came out and which is priced at, yes, 600 bucks and in which the english band had no saying whatsoever.

This new box contains 15 cds and lots of added freebies like posters, etc... but no new songs or unheard material which, of course, pisses Lemmy Kilmister (who in a previous life was part of Hawnkwind): "Unfortunately greed once again rears its yapping head. I would advise against it even for the most rabid completists!".

Like many, many bands, Motorhead has to fight against bad contracts and rip-off deals they made when starting and with labels being sold and resold over the years, it happens often that tapes and ownerships get into greedy hands that don't care much and who don't even have a contact with the band. This seems to be the case: the band wasn't even involved in the set and even tho they will get publishing money, they won't get royalties on a collector item that's going to deprive their fans from some money they could spend on a set that Motorhead itself is putting on the market...

When the debate about copyright is going public...

Thanx to Guillaume Deziel (https://www.facebook.com/guillaume.deziel) manager from the Quebec band Mister Valaire, I have been happily exposed to a very entertaining and informative movie called "RIP: A Remix Manifesto".

Starting with a very simple demonstration and exemple of a musical mash-up, the excellent documentary from Brett Gaylor takes us down the dark alleyways of copyrights, or how it started back in 1710 (actually, on the very same day of my birthday - lol - ) with a 14 years long period during which a work from a printer was protected against other people reproducing it...And now it has escalade in something that clearly needs to be refined and adapted to the times because technology has more than ever its saying here. And we have moved from a civilisation of passive people to one of zillions of possible collaborators: very economical, if not open sources, tools are there for everyone to pick up and mash things up to create the culture of tomorrow's world which, for the first time ever, starts today...

This documentary begins with some Fight Club like laws:

1/ Cultures always build on the...

In an understandably positive but interesting blog entry, Bandcamp establish how, from sources of Google searches, people have finally end up on Bandcamp and bought music they were initially looking to acquire illegally. All this cos they found themselves on a cool looking website page, set up by the band they wanted music from and said-music was available at a very decent price, and even sometimes a price them, the fans, could decide...

So, from rather cold and blunt searches with phrases like “lelia broussard torrent”, “murder by death, skeletons in the closet, mediafire" and even “maimouna youssef the blooming hulkshare”, the fans were directed from torrents and affiliiated grey sources to Bandcamp where they can nicely sit down, listen to the tracks, not having to care for virus or governamental spys, and calmly take the decision to open up their purse and buy the music. Cos Bandcamp offers a real alternative to grey markets: the music is there, you can experiment it and enjoy it, and the share going back to the band is big as up to 85% goes back to the artist ! The band has a transparent page that goes by bandname.bandcamp.com: easy as pie !

So, bands...

We had a little column on monday about the musical intermezzo from the 2012 Superbowl and how empty, hollow and ego-histerical were the performances of the two entertainement divas on that stage. There are ways to make yourself heard in 2012, but maybe there are more important things to do than just piling up another million dollar in a secret bank account in Caymans Islands, no ?

Artists, musicians in particular, have always been at the forefront of mass movements and (r)evolutions. One cannot deny the latest crisis on the planet, with the 2008 demise of some US banks being the iceberg tip of a worldwide financial domino catastrophy, has taken its toll on all aspects of the economy, and the music industry really didn't need that. But there you go: one can pretend all is well and parade like nothing happens and some others, like Tom Yorke from Radiohead, can go out and use their fame and public side to emphasis on issues that are socially and humanly important.

In an interesting interview in superb internet mag Dazed, Robert Del Naja (of Massive Attack fame) explains how the attitude to revolts and mass manifestations have changed recently, especially in the...

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's no doubt we need music as much as we need artists that are above us mere mortals. When confronted to the boys next door's band or to the Pop Idol of last year, we can only gasp and ponder what it is all about...People can dance to a great tune on saturday night, but ultimately what they want is gaze the entire week on a great looking picture of a REAL artist, someone who has things to say and say them loud, someone that will frankly makes us travel much further than the cash-out page on Amazon or Itunes: artists that makes us dream, us humans, that we're better than what we really are.

Undoubtedly, Lana Del Rey has been the mystery artist of 2011. Everyone has heralded her as the Indie Comet of the year, that she made it on nothing but a great song and an eerie video. That she didn't need a major to succeed or agents with zillions of network to make it. We're all so wrong. To make it clear: no, she didn't make it overnight, no, she isn't an indie dazzling phenomena coming from nowhere, and no she isn't even indie. So what ? She is a hard working artist who slowly but surely made it cos she successfully added up all the right ingredients (whether you like her...

Ok, enough with the rumour saying Megaupload was in fact really shut down cos it was about to unleash MegaMusic and hurt really badly the music industry and Itunes in the process (something we talked about on Dec 20th http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/megaupload-music)...What's next ? The Illuminati have hidden a nasty secret worm in every Mission Impossible movie illegally downloaded ? When whispering Megaupload in reverse 3 times, there's an image of a luxurious Mercedes SUV appearing in your coffee mug ? Enough nonsense !

We think it's a good time to look at some points that can be made out of the very internet intense two weeks that just happened

x The Feds didn't take any gloves when doing this international mission: they wanted MU out, they got MU out. It's scary, cos such power could be used in other circumstances. We can see more and more countries and states, not all rogues or tyrannies, pulling the plug off internet when interior troubles appear, or when they want to shut down informations sources. We should think about it: who owns Internet ? Isn't there a real urgency in making it...

So, you're online, gently browsing thru the Disney Store, looking for a gift you need to buy to your sister-in-law's children and gee isn't it hard to choose between all these pink tshirts and princesses outfits. Well, there are a few branded tshirts with The NightMare Before Christmas and that's a success among many, many Disneypark fans but that was as far as it went for Disney in terms of brutal originality... Until now as Disney has just released a Tshirt direclty inspired from Joy Division's iconic sleeve "Unknown Pleasures".

Most of the alternative music websites are going awol about it and while i'm sure Disney's lawyers have prepared themselves to return Joy Division's lawyers phonecalls any moment now, one can wonder about the rather distateful feel behind it. It is one thing to name a gloomy rock band after what if historically a group of enslaved jewish women forced to have sex with german offciers in the concentration camps, it is a totally different matter to use that specific cover design to make a commercial tshirt one hope to sell a lot to keep the investors happy and see many young, and less young, visitors of the Disney Parks gently stroll around in...

If, just like us, you have one eye on your music and one eye on the net, you cannot ignore that, today, Wikipedia is shutting down its english speaking site for 24 hours as a protest towards two US laws that will seek chambers approvals in the US in the forthcoming weeks.

SOPA, and soon PIPA, are not just attempts to block content to be exchanged between internet users, using well known websites. While attacking a vicious problem (illegal downloads) that needs to be tackled down of course, it just cowardly opens its nets large enough to have any kind of content to get tagged as illegal.

The point that Wikipedia tries to make is obvious: there you have an encyclopedia (with its good and bad sides) developped by millions of users and which could be closed down if SOPA or PIPA are adopted by US congress and US senate under the sole argument that these laws are "censorship-on-the-button": Wikipedia (but also other sites like Boing Boing and, if pushed to the limit, a research you would do on Google...) has in its pages uncleared material being pinpointed or linked to, or phrases from writers being quoted from books they published, or small samples of music shown...

2011 sales figures in the UK clearly show pop music (as in "popular music", heard a lot on the biggest radio stations and seen on TV, often used in adverts, etc...) has largely outsold rock sales in albums or singles this year. This is a first since 2003.

What's happening ? Do the masses turn their back on Evil Rock N'Roll ? Or are the radios more concerned with Political Correctness ? Or does the X factor, The Voice, Pop Idol, etc...finally succeeding in making most people believing what matters is the enveloppe, not what's in it ? I can recognize a good song when I hear one, but when you're made to believe TV show after TV show that an artist can be created in a matter or weeks and what is important is how well she/he sings an old classic, things can go wrong down the line...

Despite releases by rock heavy sellers like Coldplay or Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, Pop Music is occupying 18 spots on the 2011Top 20 album sales, evidently pushed by albums from Adele, Lady Gaga or Rihanna...

UK Top 20 Albums Of 2011
01 21 - ADELE 3,772,000
02 CHRISTMAS - MICHAEL BUBLE 1,292,000
03 DOO-WOPS & HOOLIGANS - BRUNO MARS 1,214,420
04...

Kollector can indeed help you.
Here are some of the articles we published this year that were about Kollector and how it can bring indispensable informations to everyone in the music industry.

Le Monde talks about Kollector http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/le-monde-talks
Some numbers about Freddie http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/kollector-loves-freddie
Finnish Heavy Metal Band goes global http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/today-finland
Abba in the Kollector system http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/dancing-queen
Kollector in South America http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/kollector-diego
How Kollector works http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/see-how-kollector-works
Virginie Berger on Kollector...

2011 saw some important moves in the music industry, if only because EMI called it a day and got eaten up or Spotify opened his gates in the USA....Here are some of the articles on the music industry one could read on the Kollector Blog this year...

More and more time is needed to connect and digital platforms are here to help: http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/digital-platforms
One of the most visited website on the planet about to unleash music site: http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/megaupload-music
is Warner Music Group soon going to take a dive ? http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/majors-only-2
Some numbers on how Spotify cannibalizes CD sales http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/spotify-cannibalizes
And more numbers on Spotify: http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/spotify-whats-it-artist
Streaming hurts small...

First a few words about Myspace relaunching its operation today : "Get over it, Justin. People will never go back to Myspace and revamping it will not make people come back. Remember when Myspace was the totally new rad place to be in and all the bands on the planet had a page there ? Well, it's gone. For ever. Dating back an old flame? Naaaah. It's sooooo 2005 all over again"
Justin ? Justin ? He hang up on me !!!

Now, let's quit 2005 and fly to december 2011.

Funny how solutions appear here and there the second after a problem is being identified!
Two seconds later, some clever guys put together a cool idea.
And on the third second, they have secured a first round with a Venture Capital firm and get a zillion dollars to see them thru the years and put a deposit on a Tesla sportcar :)

Well, 2012 will be the year of the Digital Platforms for bands. You know, they are the digital equivalent of a manager: it's a mix of all the tools a band, an artist need today.
For example, it puts together all access to social networking once you upload a video, it's dispatched to al the virtual-places-to-be, you put concert dates, merch stall and...

There was a time where it seemed having a song being played on radios and a video on A rotation at MTV was all you needed to have a hit or a song that was doing well...

Now, things have changed, the pie that's the music market has to be shared with other ways of entertainment: videogames and smartphones have eaten up the largest part of it. So, bands have to find new ways to attract fans, and make them superfans: those are the ones who don't just click on "Like" on Facebook but actually love the band enough to buy the records and, maybe, the merchandising.

Manchester Orchestra, a band from Altanta, has come up with a neat idea to put the fans in the middle of the game: they want them to sing the chorus on their song "Virgin". They built an entire website around this project (http://www.webuiltthishouse.com), allowing you to sing the song, record it (there is even a clik at the start of the song, with the lyrics and all) and send it automatically to Soundcloud where an avatar is being created for you. Later on, after one month, Manchester Orchestra takes all the voices (excluding mine cos I sing like a crow on Prozac...

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...

Virginie Berger, a french journalist, blogger, manager and new media specialist, has quite a few valuable things to say as her knowledge of the new tools for the Music Industry is proven.
Her blog, now at http://virginieberger.com/, often sees interesting articles on how to act and move in this new Digital Age where choices (and wrong ways) are numerous.

Midem is just relesing a short presentation she did on the available circuits and tools needed these days. She explains well the 2011 landscape available to the music community to promote, expand and sell.
With an important question: while Myspace is evidently out of fashion and abandoned by most, why is it still quite relevant ? The answer is...well read it on http://blog.midem.com/2011/12/virginie-berger-digital-music-new-tools-fo...

Pop Music is a strange phenomenom: it tries to encapsulate in a few minutes all the dreams, hopes, fears of the Young, mash it up with the mood of the era and its instruments and there you have it: 3'30" anthem of pure unadulterated fun the older generations can't get. Hopefully.

K-Pop is just that and more: they learned all the lessons of boys (bands) meet girls (bands) , they mashed up manga culture and Fast&Furious with glimpses heard on Rihanna's records, mix that with a bit of Lady Gaga's attitude, add some spice (sexual tension and innocence intertwined) and there you go: it's like the East has understand all the rules of pop music and decided to make it its own. Japan Pop was eaten up in a decade and gigantic shows are already spreading across the West and the odd K-pop song makes the charts here and there, thousand of miles away from Seoul, where it was created...The music can be syrup at times or annoying Crazy Frog sounding, it mixes dance, electropop, hip hop, rock and R&B and swipes the East, not unlike what happened in Europe with rock music since the 90's..

While we can dismiss it as being just an industrial product, the same can be said...

Music is most of the times about making us experiment feelings thru melodic/rythmic patterns that are organized and structured by the artists known as musicians. And while some of it is very organized (most of the hits on the charts are pushing buttons according to known structures and chords chains, they don't want to upset you in any ways and give you a song you're sure you're heard before), some of it isn't and risks are boldly taken by the artists.

It's not a secret the artists keener to take the risks are on companies liking taking risks. And while there are only a few major left now, their rooster mostly are proven bands and solo artists they know the crowds will love. So, in a cosmic move that's rather funny, it's great to see that the fastest selling artist of the last 6 years is Adele, an english singer signed on XL recordings, an english indie label home to bands like The Prodigy, Radiohead, White Stripes, etc...yes, charts acts but with more than a hint for originality and musical adventures. And we love it.

Adele's 21 album has been 21 weeks at the top of the US Charts, a performance unseen for the last 11 years (2011) ! Columbia, its distributor in...

In an era where music sales are fragile and not even labels can predict what will stick on the ceiling when they release a "record", bands have to look out for means of making a normal retribution to their work.

Gorrilaz, the brain child of Damon Albarn from UK pop band Blur, has a great defined line since day one, and hiding behind a cartoonesque band was just a great, great idea that has prooved to be artistically AND musically a well deserved success. Singles like Clint Eastwood or Feel Good, Inc and Style are gem pop songs while definitively timeless and creative. On the look side, well, here's at last a band that never ages: the band members are all cartoon and as so they are pliable and willing...

In their last move, and just in time for the release of their Greatest Hits, Gorillaz and Converse have ink a deal so that there will be some 60$ shoes with distinctive Gorillaz look and colors. The incredible thing is while this contract would have send any X generation fan crazy about his favorite band making it with the Devil Corporate, this just feels normal and, dare I say the word, even COOL.

The band's website is definitively worth the visit, hey...

We had a blog entry the other day about how the Y Generation sees very little evil at all into corporates funding artists. And maybe this is one of the ways Music can expand and grow: commercial companies seeing the benefits of being a sponsor. Just like in the Renaissance where artists were being able to survive and do their work thanx to rich benefactors...

In this case, Rolex his a sponsor for the Arts since 2002. More than 170 artists from different fildls (dance, film, literature, music, theatre and visual arts) have been assembled into doing a one year project between a mentor and his protege. People like Youssu N'Dour, Martin Scorcese or Peter Sellars have teamed up with youngs gifted artists and have interact with them for a period of at least 6 weeks, assembling new pieces or just communicating together...A bit like If Yoda a swiss watch was wearing to Jedi Padawan lessons to give :)

Brian Eno (universally known as a musical genius since Roxy Music to his work with U2 and others) has mentor Australian born artist Ben Frost (a post rock musician now living in Iceland) and together they made music, talked philosophy and arts....Here is a very interesting 5...

For a label, there's nothing easier to deal with than a dead rockstar. Executives don't have to mingle with the often tormented or, at best, needy artist, they immediately speak with the grieving widow or the artist's estate, all too ready to accept what the living lost wouldn't never have. And frankly, besides the fact that the artist for some reason never shows up at interviews, it's rather easy: all ils being marketed inhouse and very little can go wrong...This is why you see odd compilations, badly mixed rough demos, b-sides from old albums that never made it come out around Christmas, surely the best time to fee the fans' endless desire for more tracks from the departed Star. And we can understand the fascination for an artist, especially a young one and aren't there plenty around ? The Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, the Buckley's, the list goes on and on...

So, here comes the new Amy Winehouse: a truly great voice in a unique, strong-minded individual unfortunately out of control. Her 'new' album will hit the stores early december and no doubt will she share the charts with artists who just wish they had a tenth of the talent she had.

Kollector has been...

In a bold move, ST Holdings, a UK company distributing more than 200 labels, has decide to take away all its music from Spotify, arguing that streamed music is cannibalizing sales.

It isn't the first time an indie label, or an indie distributor, declares Spotify is detrimental to music sales (and even Coldplay says so as they decide to not let portals stream their latest album) but this time a NPD Group study comes up with a survey clearly showing that streaming services eats up music sales as the legal streaming music users are less likely to buy music now that they have access to all the music they want for less that 10 € a month...

Spotify replied by saying they are offering a solution that works against piracy but this is clearly missing the point: streamers have to come up with a reasonable income for creators and labels, not only for huge acts or majors who are counting on massive numbers to hide for low retribution.
An example: 5.000 Spotify streams will get you about 10 € (5.000 x 0,002 € a stream) when 5.000 track downloads at iTunes generates 4.950 €...
See what we mean ?

...

In a recent survey done by GMR, a few minor mindblowing ideas have been shattered. Seems like the Y generation (people born between 1980>1999) is shuffling the cards very differentely that others before them.

First: 68% of them don't mind too much the connection between music and brands. That's a radical departure from the X generation (people born 1960>1980) who dispised as much as they could the interactions between their favorite bands and commercial companies.
Secondly: 75% of the people would rather have no sex than having no music ! This data is brutally different when asked women (92% of women needs music more than sex while only 55% of men can do without sex. Hardly surprising :)
Thirdly: 48% of people think the internet is a better place to find music than asking their friends. Ouch, that hurts.
Four and last point: commercials is the right place to break a band as 69% of the people have been introduced to new music by commercials...This and movies: lots of work can be achieved thru placements.

This pictures a rather strange image of the youngsters, no ?

Very interesting article in "The Music Void" about the then-newly appointed Sony CEO Andy Lack who was under a charm attack from Steve Jobs trying to get the big guys at the top of the Majors into the Itunes frenzy.

Being the man he was, it wasn't too hard for Stve Jobs to seduce Doug Morris (Universal) and Warner (Roger Ames) as they seemingly didn't see all Steve wasn't in it for the Love of Music but for selling tons of Ipods and Apple computers and devices and that the real target was to sell Apple hardware, not music.

Andy Lack saw the tactic behing Turtleneck Man and wanted a percentage on all Ipod sales...That move alone, if followed up by Morris and Ames, would have changed the situation the music industry is in these days: the labels (and therefore, hopefully, the musicians) would earn on the sales of the machinery their music is played on. Sounds logical, no ? Well, it wasn't at the time and if Universal and Warner would have join cause with Sony, Apple wouldn't be today The Mother Of All Major Labels by now and the music industry would benefit from the digital revolution and not be a victim like it is now.

Today, Andy Lack is head of new media...

These days, we hear more and more about crowd-funding for music related "products": records (but also movies) are being made possible by the injection of funds from the public, charmed and interested in a specific project.
The idea of crowd-funding isn't new but it attracks more and more people and groups who relay on this social based dynamic to get running on a documentary, an album, an art project.

Vinylmania is one of these great project: an italian vinyl lover wants to make a 75 minutes documentary about how he got entangled in music and he visits 11 different cities in the world, meets many different people, all as bitten as him by the love of music and it's paramount object: the vinyl. His film embodies so well the love for music and its physical presence, something we're losing when buying an mp3: lines of codes lost among other lines of codes can't compete with a 30cm Long Playing with a cover, an artwork sometimes as important as its musical half.

see here for more infos about Paolo Campana and his documentary project: http://www....

Ok, ok, we went thru this a few times, but Rolling Stone comes down with some pretty good analysis of what is made off the sale of 5 different medias:

1/ Streamers services (as Spotify and Mog)
2/ Itunes
3/Youtube & Vevo
4/Internet Radios (as Pandora)
5/ CD (remember that small silverish plastic circle ? that's a CD, as in cee-dee)

Basically, CD were bringing home far more money for the labels and the artists (about 10 Euros for the label and +/- 3 Euros for artist + songwriter) , but the new Music Economics dictate differently now:
- streamers will pay roughly 0,002 Euros a stream to artists (labels does the same)
- Itunes takes its 30% share and gives the label 40 Euro Cents while the artist and the songwriter shares 21 Euro Cents
- Youtube pays 0,70 Euro Cents per 1000 viewings to the label who shares with the artist according to the contract (usually round 15% of gross sales)
- Internet radios are paying such a small amount of Euro Cents that i don't dare writing it down. Ok, it's 0,0007 Euro Cents a stream.

Now, we can all gather round and make a group hug and cry at how the music industry went down...

In these hard times for the music industry, one may wonder why there's not more boldness and audace as, after all, the greater the risk the bigger the reward can be...But no, what we see is less risks and more marketing plots.
Like this one: take a legendary band who had its moments way back in the old millenia, stir the medias, pump up how great they were, how successfull they have been and plan a few, a very few, dates. BINGO !

The Stone Roses, a proverbial UK band, has just done that. And the funny part is that they were already a nostalgia band with their sixties sound and the full Summer Of Love surrounding their works. Oh, they weren't bad, it's just that one may be surprised that their reunion gets to highs never seen before: tickets prices are rocketing and the band will make something like 19 millions $ for just three shows. More that they ever made, back when they were in their prime. Yes, nostalgia does sell more than new tunes !

http://www.spinner.com/2011/10/21/stone-roses-reunion-tickets-going-for-...

Many people were laughing out loud when Google threw in an hefty sum of money to buy Youtube a few years ago but I reckon we may see the end of that smile as we do think this is going to be major.

In a few weeks, Youtube partners will be able to sell merchandising (in a word: anything related to your band or your label or music related business) on Youtube and this option opens up for indie labels or artists as well as Amazon and alike. Now, studies have shown that 3 billions (and we mean BILLIONS) videos are watched everyday on Youtube and 127 millions viewers are passing thru the site daily. That's a LOT of consumers waiting for nothing but a simple button allowing to buy the song they just watched, a concert ticket, or a tshirt, or a DVD or a cap or any other goodies the sellers can throw at them...

Just to give an idea, people watching videos on Facebook are only about a third of that...Can't wait for Google + to integrate the Youtube merch shops directly and see Youtube becoming a major sources for revenues...It's been a long time for Youtube to come up with a business model other than simple ads, but now the time has come...

the news by Youtube...

We spoke about it a few months ago: the guys in the english group Queen have a slight problem with their singer being temporarely unavailable due to death (what a bad excuse...) and Brian May just had an epiphany: what about having Lady Gaga replacing good old Freddie ? She's about as flamboyant as he was, got a sacré cool wardrobe and could fit in like a glove.

Gee, i'm glad it's friday :)

our article about Queen looking for clones http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/queen-wants-live-forever
the original article http://www.avclub.com/articles/brian-may-would-like-lady-gaga-to-be-the-...

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KOLLECTOR: track your songs on radios in real time. worldwide.
register for the free beta version on www.kollector.com/en...

These geeky and cool people at Visual.ly have come up with a nice graphic display of the music sales tendencies since 1973 and it does look both thrilling and desesperate at the same time :)
An interesting data is the price of music and how it came down since the LP: while a minute of music did cost you 0,55$ in 1977, now it only cost you 0,26 $ thru Itunes and we're not even counting how much it costs you if you're a Spotify user: at 10$ a monthly subscription, lets just say we need to get into microdollars...

At least, with this poster-like graphic the decline looks good, it's the big picture that hurts...

This said, we can still be positive: people still love music and musicians still love doing music. We just need to rebuild a platform where everyone is contented....

http://visual.ly/evolution-music-impact-digital-music-industry

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KOLLECTOR: track your songs on radios in real time. worldwide.
register for the free beta...

They had it coming: it seems that Facebook has finally reached a plateau where customers start to feel annoyed and angry enough, or just bored of the novelty, to start leaving the site. Oh, this isn't a scoop: Facebook's growth has been slowing down these last months, hardly a number to keep Mark Zuckerberg awake at night, but curious people should begin to wonder why, even when taking on account certain markets start to saturate. And the battle for World Domination between Google and Facebook has started, with Facebook on a hurry to outrun Google + on the more geeky aspects and that may well signify the end of Facebook....

Another new element comes into play and added up to the recent updates on Facebook one can feel a certain number of Facebook trendsetters and users aren't ready to take it all: the launch of the Spotify/Facebook app was so badly handled that a certain amout of users have decided to leave Spotify and Facebook. And it's more than just these two companies being under the radar for intruding too much into their users' life: Pandora is being taking to court for privacy issues. It seems like the ALL IS GO approach of the social networking is finally facing...

We've talked about it a few times: Spotify and other means of legit digital streams are ok but the payroll isn't. Far, far from that. Many musicians consider the 0,002 € a stream an insult, and we need to understand their point of view... Globalization is good, long tail, blah blah but serves only those with a certain amount of followers: it doesn't add to your visibilty as such. Spotify and other streamers have an interesting angle, sure,but they shouldn't squeeze the money factor just because they can and it does well for their business model!
By doing so, they are making musicians (and small labels) miserable and, despite the colorful image of the artist living in an attic and delivering his best work while being hungry, artists need to feel good to create, or at least to feel in a kinda confort zone. You can't concentrate when the bills are piling up! Cos streamers might sound good to the end-consumers but to bands it often cannibalize CD sales. Spotify and all the other legal streaming services needs to come out the bush with a real plan to help the Music Industry, not to just fly in and rampage thru what's left of it...

Cameron Mizell, NYC musician, has an...

It had to happen. This world's new obsession of the month is Facebook going all musical with the help of a specially designed Spotify application. Does it work ? It does. Is it swell and all groovy ? It's not.

Digital Music News has tested the beta and oh boy, it has some inbuilt problems, not only in the way it works, but in the way it's been thought off. It will be asking the consumer to go thru walls of requests, endless ads, login interfaces, etc...Ok, it's only a Beta, but do we really need that ? Do we really need the world of the internet being split between 3 megacorporates that have decide they will share Music and sell it to us the way THEY want it: Itunes, Facebook and Spotify ?
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/092311fbspotify#eC65NaKY5maIfk3W...

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KOLLECTOR: track your songs on radios in real time. worldwide.
register for the free beta version on www.kollector.com/en...

Very interesting article by Bob Stanley (part of the legendary and groovy Saint Etienne band) about the EC extension of copyrights laws from 50 to 70 years. While it does sound good for artists and labels indeed, it also extends the ownership of the masters to whom has now the right to use them and that comes with unexpected results. At the end of the day, it really is important to know how to use this extention of copyright so all can benefit from it.

It could mean that some companies not eager to invest money in forgotten artists will be able to keep their hands on the masters while it would have been possible for these artists to re-release themselves, or reshop for a new label, their own tracks: it's not sure all the labels will jump on this copyright occasion and rework their back catalogue for the pure sake of Art.

It also means that many small labels used to dig up reliques and treasures from the vaults of public domain works will no longer been able to do so.
What matters more: having a record out with a song of yours and eventually being called up and play live gigs, generating some radio money, or just NOT having your work out there?

We...

Abbey Road, the famous London studio who has been home to The Beatles, Radiohead, Oasis and that NY lady who wears meat dresses on stage, offers new online services to all: you can now have them mix your songs or master your album for rather reasonable prices !

You can upload your songs audiotrack per audiotrack, no fx, no timing issues to be revolved and no midi channels, and world famous engineers will use their, experience and the outboard at Abbey Road's studios to give that extra ooomph your own recording may need. Price go from £550 for 1 to 24 multi-tracks and £750 for 25 to 48 tracks extravaganza. You can also have Abbey Road to do the mastering (£90 per track and as low as £250 for an album)

This is an interesting development: an amazing studio offering highly skilled and experienced engineers (altho don't expect Georges Martin - unfortunately he's totally deaf now - to turn up) and great outboard equipment a musician on its own can't afford. Prices are reasonable for the kind of quality one might expect and you can even credit Abbey Road on your cover !

http://www.abbeyroadonlinemixing....

We have it (relatively) cool here in Europe. Being a musician is hard, allright, success doesn't come easy and sometimes it doesn't come at all. But still we thrive and keep going, composing and playing and imaginating new ideas for songs and structures. We are in love with the actual making of the music: building something from thin air till it actually has a life in its own, a little world with its own images and feelings. We also love playing music, whether it's with a modular synth or an oboe, and we love listening and seeing people performing music. Still, life isn't easy for most musicians....

But it can be REALLY hard and you're looking at piling up tough times if you're a musician in most parts of Africa. Jobs are few and far between, you need to care about you and your family, you often need to take odd jobs in order to survive and on top of that you want time to play music...This is what the musicians from the "Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste" are doing: altho they are considered as middle class in Congo, they still fight hard times to even get to rehearsals, sometimes they build their own instruments and most of them are self-taught musicians. All of them...

Some of you may know that a band's rider is a document given to concert promoters and stating what the band wants/needs to have as for sounds and lights, stage set up and all.
An important part of the rider is about food and backtage accomodation, towels and drinks, everything that can make the band confortable while waiting to perform in the club/venue/arena/festival/etc...

Seems like the Foo Fighters have come up with the best rider, ever. It actually reads like a cartoon, and maybe it's for the best :)

http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/music/foo-fighters-go-colouring

The Dave Grohl band may have beaten Iggy Pop who's rider is, well, we don't exactly know how to categorize it, it's weird and funny at the same time, very rock n' roll, man, and definitively a great read :)
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/lust-laughs

Inthe video, a great reaction from Dave Grohl about a "fan" looking for troubles at a Foo Fighter show...

Let's stay in the movie industry for a while as there are interesting parallels that can be build between movies and musics. And what happened to music since 1999 (the ever going down spiral of sales) has started to hit the movie industry as well. And if you think it cost a label (and the band, and the publishers, managers, producers, etc...) a lot when a 50.000 € album is being pirated, leaked, stolen, shared, etc...(use the word you want, result is the same: people buy now less music than ever), wait till this happens to a 500.000 € movie (and that's a cheap C serie movie): ROI is dead...We're now entering an era where budgets have to be cut by double digits numbers and the only ones to come out alive will be the one dealing cleverly and accordingly with the situation...

So, it's interesting to see how the new situation inspires people to do MORE with LESS. Take this clever little movie ( by Dan Trachtenberg) based around Portal, that amazing videogame (and the amazing brilliant song on Portal 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ljFaKRTrI). It immediately has an mood, a feel, a look, a sound, a plot that starts...

Time : 07 September at 9am till 09 September at 4pm
Location: Popkomm Media_Gate Gate A1-05, Airport Tempelhof, Berlin
Platz der Luftbrücke
Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany

Kollector is presenting its airplay tracking application on Popkomm and we are looking forward to many interesting contacts.
If you also going to be in Berlin for Popkomm, let's meet up: you can find us at the Media_Gate on Gate A1-05 (yes, it's a former airport ;).

Popkomm is the internationally established meeting place of the music and entertainment industry and will take place from September 7th to 9th on the former main airport Berlin Tempelhof. More information on http://www.popkomm.com/

Kollector is present in the "Popkomm Media_Gate" which is a new innovative event format where representatives of forward-looking digital music services will meet.

Popkomm is embedded in Berlin Music Week which ends with Berlin Festival on the following weekend. http://www.berlinfestival.de/line-up-2011/

Really amazing story from Paul Mawhinney, the man who owns the biggest record colllection in the world (and it's up for sale for a mere 3 million bucks) about his passion for some quite unknown artist from England who couldn't get a hit in the USA, was dropped from Mercury and about to be kicked by RCA too... when Paul came in and convinced an A&R guy from his hometown to press 700 copies of a 4 years old single for FM radios...It worked !

Music. If you believe you've got it, NEVER GIVE UP!

(more vital informations on this extraordinary song: http://www.flixya.com/blog/2224520/David-Bowie-A-History-of-Space-Oddity)

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KOLLECTOR: track your songs on radios in real time. worldwide.
register for the free beta version on www.kollector.com/en
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Just to tackle on from the hilarious but oh-so-true Henry Rollins rant on sell-out (?) songs being placed as soundtracks for adverts (http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/i-want-sell-out-now) , we have this as a counter example...Here are songs that forever and ever will be stained with the adverts using them as aural beds...This said, it's hilarious to notice The Rolling Stones "Start Me Up was used for Windows 95 or that a Violent Femmes song was used for a junkfood commercial when in fact its bass player is profoundly vegetarian :)

http://flavorwire.com/203000/10-songs-that-have-been-ruined-forever-by-a...

It seems increasingly difficult to be able to decipher thru the various options available to music fans in terms of services...While Spotify is under renewed attacks on how little the payback is for artists (0,001 € a stream, camarades...), Apple exonerates for ever pirates by asking them 25 US $ to convert years of hacked music into legit stuff, Google Music doesn't pick up any speed at all...Why ? Cos it seems the amount of money they are ready to give out to labels (and that will be distributed to artists) is seen as far too low by major labels...

In the following article, they have calculated that the 100 millions check Google was ready to give to major labels is what Google earns in...72 hours. (via adverts, Google's revenues jackpot formulae).
Come on guys, get real! We have seen how years of piracy, labels greed, MTV-as-purveyor-of-music-when-you-want-where-you-want and new ways of spending cash (phones, videogames,...) have left the music industry dry. There are now more bands than ever, more music out to buy but less money to share. Why do megacompanies seem to do anything in their power so the money the artists, the creators, will get is minimal ?

Interesting article in AV Club about the songs that are huge hits today and maybe future classics that could still be known and sung for years and decades to come. A song that, just like Yesterday by The Beatles, changes a band into a Pop Icon, a legend...So, which one of recents songs will be like Yesterday, but in 2031 ?

http://www.avclub.com/articles/what-is-the-yesterday-of-today,60168/

We at Kollector can verify the tendancies a song has to stay around and still being played years later, when the hype is gone, when the video has enjoyed zillions of viewings on Youtube and when it's already been covered by many bands. And we can safely say that, looking at the Kollector numbers, on a global scale, "Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes is more than a candidate: it's a winner.

We all know this is a challenging time for selling music, but the Music Industry seems to have hit an all-time low here as they are starting to sell Monopoly games based aroundhuge rock bands.
For instance, the Metallica Monopoly game is on sale, and you can now safely buy your hotels in Beverly Hills and put houses in Malibu with your Lars avatar and laugh all the way to the bank while Kirk spends some thinking time in jail...

Oh, by the way, they do this Monopoly limited edition with other icons like Elvis, The Stones, Kiss and AC/DC...
What will the future hold for us ? A Coldplay water filter system and the unique Beyoncé shopping mall caddy ?

LAST MINUTE: I just found out KIss has an amazing line of KISS (tm)tombs and urns...http://tinyurl.com/3qk3eqh

Let's try to not be patronizing, but some artists do concentrate a lot on the music, which is totally fine of course, but step 2 (making it known) is often forgotten or, at best, badly handled.
Jess Boyer, from Blog Zimbaland, has been putting down some interesting notes about it.

Basically, these 10 points are:

Not providing basic information: your mum knows you and loves you dearly, but you need to think larger and tell the world who you are and how great your music is.
Not creating connections: whether we like it or not, being on the grid is necessary to make your music known and appreciated.
Not writing about yourselves: come on, now you can let your ego run free :)
Not replying quickly: you still need the time to think about what to answer but, please, do reply.
Not having a consistent online persona: don't scare away your public !
Being scared of other bands: on the contrary, a comparative watch can make you learn you a lot.
Not linking: interaction is vital.
Not tracking social media success: it all adds up. you need to know where it's happening for you.
Not capturing fans data: in this age of one-to-one...

We all know the music industry and its actors (artists, labels, publishers, promoters, composers, performers, producers) need to take a fresh look at what the situation is, and come up with real solutions or the drought of revenues due to the descent of sales will continue and jeopardize the future of music as an industry. Cos it's not all down to pyracy, cos it's not all down to the incredible amount of releases, cos it's not all down to the rise of new ways of spending one's money (videogames, mobile phones, computers,...), cos it's not all down to the impossibility for smaller bands to rise above the noise level.

The often interesting magazine The Quietus had a well done and thought about piece about this a few weeks ago. It's a long read, but straight to the point(s).

http://thequietus.com/articles/06318-how-the-music-industry-is-killing-m...

Here, at Kollector, we do believe radios and tv sync revenues, which were hard to follow until recently due to the lack of a tool like Kollector, will now take a growing part in the revenues available...

There's no doubt about how big is the crisis in the music industry. And that goes well beyond the simple "hey, it's all down to piracy" because, frankly, that excuse is getting old but we all know that.
Too many artists ? Blame it on the usability and affordable prices of cool hardware and softwares but it's a great time for audio (and visuals) creators.
Not enough labels willing to invest money in developing artists ? Sure, there are cold feets but numbers don't lie (if you can get them)
Not enough creativity coming from the composers and re-spicing of old formulas for bands ?
Not enought ways to get the money you've earned in this business ? (altho Kollector has a clear idea about that precise point)
Too many other areas people can get entertained with ?(mobile phones, Ipads, videogames, movies,...)

The list is endless, and it's a topic one cannot hope to close in a simple blog post, but here's an interesting angle from Frank Woodworth on how to set up a record company that will
take full advantage of this time and age.

...