Pump Your Audio

Pump Audio is a company that licenses independent artist's music for television, film and advertising. You keep ownership of your songs and get 50% of the fees they get, plus performance royalties. It seems like a good deal:

Pump Audio was founded by musicians with experience as artists on both major and independent record labels. We know that the record label system provides no real solutions for the vast majority of independent artists.

In response to this, Pump has created a real marketplace within the production community for independent music. And nobody in the world places more independent music in production than we do—in fact, no one's even close.

Unlike many of the traditional options in the music business, you have nothing to lose by submitting your music to Pump. What you gain is the potential to earn money from having your music placed in a TV commercial or TV show.

And no matter what, you keep ownership of your songs and are free to pursue all other opportunities. We wouldn't have it any other way.

CD Sales Slipping

Here's an interesting article from Rev. Keith A. Gordon's Blog "Ryan Adams Sucks". It's his take on why CD sales are falling.

The shit hit the fan this week, and it wasn’t like a fat kid doing a cannonball into the deep end of the pool but rather like a gale-force hurricane smashing into the state of ship of the recording industry. A front-page Wall Street Journal story by Ethan Smith reported that CD sales have dropped 20% this year-to-date compared with 2006. Smith considers this “the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music.”

Uh, maybe....

Let’s break down the points covered by the WSJ article and commentary offered by other pundits on a point-by-point basis and the Reverend will offer his own commentary.

Learn Chords the Legal Way

Wired News reports that guitar tabs site MXTabs.net is working with song publishers to share ad revenue and offer legal tablatures for aspiring guitarists:

Several websites have sprung up to help musicians share these notations, but as soon as they get encyclopedic enough to be really useful, they tend to get closed down. One of them -- MXTabs.com -- is being resurrected by MusicNotes as a legal service that will offer a reduced number of tablatures along with ads whose revenues will be shared with music publishers.

I guess the old site was .com, and the new one is .net. MXTabs.com is just a page of links.
Here's a related article about a site that was shut down.
I'd be flattered if someone wanted to learn how to play a song I wrote. It's not like anyone's getting rich playing in a cover band. Am I way off base? Would you insist on getting paid by someone who wanted to learn your songs on their own?

Music Choice

Music Choice is a provider of music and videos to cable companies, on-line, and on mobile phones. They take submissions from independent artists. Here's how you can submit your music (from their FAQ page):

Q. How do I submit my music to be played on Music Choice?
A. Please mail your CD, along with an artist profile and press information to:
Music Choice Programming, Attn: Unsigned Material
328 West 34th Street, New York, NY 10001

All music genres will be considered, but there is no guarantee of airplay. Each submission is reviewed individually and tracks are selected for possible airplay. Because of the large volume of submissions that we receive on a daily basis, it is impossible for us to notify artists if their music has been selected or to return materials. Keep listening to your favorite channel to find out if your music was chosen for airplay. By submitting your music to Music Choice, you grant all rights to broadcast and perform your music.

Old News is Good News, or I'm CooCoo for Cracker!

Man, that's a stupid headline.
Anyway - I knew Cracker had re-recorded some of their songs last year, but I didn't know the story behind it. Turns out Virgin, the record label that dropped them, was planning to release Cracker's greatest hits without the band's input. The Cracker guys were a little pissed about that, so they re-recorded all the songs on Virgin's version of their Greatest Hits album, added a bonus track and released an all-new Greatest Hits album on the same day that Virgin released theirs.
Here's more on the story form BloggingMuses, and an interview with David Lowery of Cracker on CMJ.com.
Support Cracker (and Banddot) by buying the album from Amazon. Just click on the link below (please).

More (somewhat) Useful Articles

Record-producer.com has a bunch of articles on producing, a lot of which are interesting even if you're not a producer. My only problem with the articles is that they tend to tell you what to do, but not how to do it. Here's a tip from a particularly un-useful article. Want to know how to soundproof a door? Buy a soundproof door. Seriously - that's what it says. Here's the whole article:

The best solution to access is simply to buy a sound proofed door.

This will be expensive, but it will be worth it. It will probably have magnetic seals around the top and sides, and a compression seal at the bottom.

It will also be very heavy, meaning that the wall it fits into will have to be strong enough to support it.

A reasonable alternative is a heavy fire door, with the jamb fitted with rubber compression seals and extended all the way around the door, including the bottom.

To gain better insulation than a single door can achieve, a 'sound lobby' is sometimes constructed so there are two doors between one side of the wall and the other.

I know it's hard to come up with things to write about, but c'mon. Why not just include that in another article about soundproofing a room or something?
Here's an article for them that I wrote titled "How to Be a Record Producer":
Find someone who would like to be recorded - perhaps a musician or band, or maybe a poet. It could even be an author who wants to make an audio version of his book. Then produce a record for him or her.
I wonder if they pay for submissions?

Too Little, Too Late?

Jon sent me this link about plans to save Rock and Roll. I hope there's still time.

...recent developments in the music world, such as the unaccountable popularity of the Dixie Chicks and Sufjan Stevens, have created a "perfect storm of lameness" from which rock might never recover. While Iommi refused to say when the vault would be opened, hard rock sources believe it will take place just prior to next month's Fall Out Boy–Honda Civic tour, which many fear will suck the remaining lifeblood from all that still rocks.