In Heavy Rotation: “Endless Flowers” – Crocodiles

Endless Flowers has been out for a while now, but I’ve only just gotten around to listening to it in the last week or so. The main reason for my delay is that it isn’t streaming on Rdio in my country (New Zealand). It’s interesting how this factor really influences my listening habits these days – if it’s not available for streaming, I am a lot less likely to give it a spin. It seems so silly in 2012 that regional restrictions are still applied to a fully digital medium – why would you not want every possible person listening to your music?…

1 Ping Only

Just like the mighty Soviet navy we’ve launched new tech to help you focus on the fans that matter. We’ve called it a PING.

Each week we’ll notify you when a fan has been highly active

We send you an email showing who these fans are and how many points they’ve earnt over the last two weeks. You can use the links in the email to communicate directly with these fans.

Your fan message page filters to your very active fans & lets you communicate via Facebook, Twitter or Email

You use our page to tell your fans via email, Twitter or Facebook:

• thanks!

…

In Heavy Rotation: Sam Cooke

It’s impossible to pin down any one album by the great Sam Cooke, and to be honest, the studio albums he released while he was alive did him little justice. His LPs tended to be collections of covers, usually of the showtune or big band variety, and rarely showcased his unique voice and superb songwriting. Nope, he was a singles man through and through, was Sam Cooke.

And boy, what singles they were.

From his first hit single, the beautiful “You Send Me” (consisting of little more than the same three word phrase repeated over and over – the second word swapped out for “thrill” in the second verse) right through the the sublime, posthumously released “A Change Is Gonna Come” (below), Cooke wrote some of the most powerful songs of his generation.…

We Used Prefinery to Manage our Beta Sign Ups

I’ve gone through beta a number of times, with different companies. It’s always stressful getting ready to launch and figuring out how you’re going to manage & collect beta testers.

This year we discovered the beta system Prefinery. These guys have built a site that handles your beta submissions & management. Yes, we did high-five each other at the MusicHype office – we didn’t have to build our own beta management system on-top of our product.

Prefinery gives you all the customizable forms & emails you need to manage beta testers & invite.…

Cloudy With a Chance of Discovery

For the past 7 years, I have made music in the clouds/streaming subscription music services a personal mission. Early on, I was an “early adopter” to Rhapsody, a Real Networks company. Over the years, I’ve had the distinct pleasure to try them all (Rdio, Spotify, Deezer, GrooveShark, MOG, Rhapsody, Napster). Through this affinity and trial, I quickly discerned that this is the way of the future! Exhausting the fan with numerous hurdles to just hear music is futile and I’m super excited that the major labels have woken up to this world of frictionless music discovery and consumption.…

Fan Drive Winners

Our two big winners of the Fan Drive are Wellington & Archie.

They’ve both won a 6-month free plan on MusicHype, plus they get to give two of their lucky fans a year-long subscription to Rdio, Spotify or Deezer.

And don’t worry we’ll be having another fan drive later on this year.

 …

Don’t pitch your start up – tell a story like Jim Henson

We all get told to practice our elevator pitch and many of us have spent hours on our detailed, yet high-level, 10-slide investor pitch decks (a painful process I know!). After all that you’re armed with those short sentences and a pdf deck, so you can wow Kevin Rose when you accidentally, on-purpose trip over his foot at a conference.

While I agree it’s important to clearly articulate what your business does, I’ve always felt that putting yourself in the “pitcher” mindset is the wrong analogy.…

In Heavy Rotation: Echo Lake – “Wild Peace”

I knew nothing of Echo Lake before discovering them on Rdio this week. I was initially drawn to the beautiful cover – I’m a sucker for brightly colored, psychedelically themed album sleeves: see Tame Impala, or Hot Chip’s new one. It’s a pretty good representation of the music contained within too: ultra shoegazey, with heavy psychedelic elements and just enough pop hooks to keep it interesting. For fans of: A Sunny Day In Glasgow, Slowdive, School Of Seven Bells.

Many Light-Weight Interactions

 I can’t tell you how often I hear from a band, label or management company they want to:

• sell more albums
• sell more tickets
• get more listens on Spotify

Of course they do. This is what any business needs to survive, money in the door.

The only problem is these goals are what Paul Adams calls “heavy-weight interactions,” and they can’t live in isolation.

Imagine you’re in a record store and you notice a buyer picking up your LP and flipping it over to read the back.…

Beta, Be Gone!

Hurrah, we’re out of Beta.

It’s been a very busy seven weeks for our team: updates, bug tweaks, new features and the odd Friday beer.

It has been a pleasure to work with all 450 members who’ve joined us. Wow – we can’t really believe so many of you joined in.

Every time an artist signed you’d hear Hurrah, Oh Boy, or Yippee uttered at our office. It literally means everything to our business that you’ve all taken the plunge. THANK YOU!…