MUSIC INDUSTRY BLOG

MySpace and Toyota have teamed up to promote Rock the Space, an unsigned artist contest where the winner wins a record deal with MySpace Records plus $10,000 worth of Fender gear.  There’s an entire experience around the submission process, from uploading music and photos to customizing your “demo tape” widget and getting your friends to add it to their page.  The design-your-tape wizard is pretty cool.  Five finalists will be selected for a public vote.  Deadline July 1st.  Free to enter.  Details here.

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When Sellaband launched in August 2006, it introduced music fans and unsigned artists to a revolutionary approach to meeting and collaborating with one another.  By providing a financial incentive at the very core of its proposition, the German upstart pioneered an investment platform that provided fans with a stake in their favourite artists’ assets, and artists with a means of raising capital for recording and distribution from the folks who care about them the most: their fans.  A seemingly far-fetched idea, the platform took off and, today, boasts an extensive fan funded artist base that has managed to raise over $2,200,000 collectively.  Although a handful of fan funded music dotcoms exist, including SliceThePie and TheNextBigSound, Sellaband is leading the trend that has yet to illustrate its full potential as an industry shifting force.  The company is now setting its sights on the US market with a high-profile endorsement from Chuck D.

Online music will arguably be the fastest moving and consistently evolving industries in 2007. Previously undiscovered artists will come to the fore via high-traffic tastemaker blogs such as Stereogum, innovative retail platforms such as Amie St. and the ease and availability of content distribution. The traditionally reluctant giants of music, such as Universal and EMI, have already embraced the idea of becoming more than a ‘record company’ by providing their large catalogues to a variety of digital platforms and, I expect, will re-brand themselves as leading digital purveyors rather than the illegal file-sharing ‘arm of the law’.

With the much anticipated advertising-driven download services such as SpiralFrog, Napster and eMusic lending themselves to mobile networks such as Cingular and TicketMaster’s $13.5m investment in iLike (founders of Garageband), the music space will become, quite literally, universal. More artists are likely to show up on the radar due to, say, an unexpected public vote on a music community such as PureVolume or a great show at a festival sponsored by the renowned artist service, Sonicbids. By the end of the year, I believe that the increase of independent music communities and number of online artist profiles will pave the way to greater choice, more accurate recommendations to consumers and more alternatives to expose previously unheard-of music.

And while all of these multi-million dollar start-ups promise more exposure and business for unsigned artists and a better experience for music lovers, as musicians, we can still depend on good ‘ol fashioned live venues – another sector on the up & up. T-shirt anyone?