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?…

Update: Below, I sang the praises of Ben Folds and his band mates touting their fans, first, for the announcement of a new Ben Folds Five album. The following week I was more than delighted to see that Ben launched a Pledge Music campaign. The campaign launched just over a week ago and has already generated 4,146 pledges, exceeding the bands expectations and pledge goals by 206 percent. What’s interesting is that Ben Folds has 522,000 likes on Facebook and 486,000 followers and Twitter. His blended social equity puts him in the neighborhood of 500k, not bad.…

Last Saturday (April 21st) was the fifth annual International Record Store Day. Taking place on the third Saturday of every April, the day celebrates the independent record store and is accompanied by a slew of limited edition vinyl releases only available on or around the day itself.

The purpose of Record Store Day is to encourage an enterprise that for a while looked to be a dying breed: the independent record store. However, thanks largely to the vinyl resurgence, independent record stores have been slowly but steadily popping up all over the placed, while their mainstream CD-selling high street rivals continue to close in ever-larger numbers.…

Here’s a quick sneak-peek into our recent keyboard tapping, strategizing, wireframes, more wireframes, more strategizing and design work.

These mockups give you a sense of what we’re doing with MusicHype.com and how you’ll be able to identify the fans that matter & give them props.

A huge shout out to the smart digital folks who’ve been so kind with their time & expertise to help us build the best bloody product we can: Sarah Abdel & Xavier Rameriz from Silverback Management, Jeff Kuprycz from AFrame Management, Mike Rosenthal from Paracadute Records, Jason Kadlec from CHNL, Paul Mabray from VinTank and Eric Garland at Live Nation.…

Yesterday I was forwarded a rather interesting post from the guys behind the most recent Kotex campaign using Pinterest. Essentially, this is the first major brand to utilize the power of Pinterest in an organic way to raise brand awareness.

Here is a video, recapping this rather clever campaign:

I think the key take away for musicians is how Kotex recognized and rewarded key influencers for behavior they were already doing. This campaign also exemplifies the importance of permission marketing, or the welcome knock on the door.…

We’re all big fans of The Shins here in the MusicHype office. We’re also big video game fans, so this is kind of a cool one. The Shins recently released their first album in five years, Port of Morrow, and are debuting their latest video exclusively on the Nintendo 3DS hand held console.

“The Rifle’s Spiral” is the opening song on Port of Morrow, and the video is a creepy, Night Before Christmas-esque stop-motion affair. The full video should be made available any day now, but for now it’s the 3DS or nothing at all.…

It’s hard not to like Jack White, and with crazy ideas like this one it’s easy to see why. On April 1st, his label Third Man Records premiered his as yet unreleased track “Freedom at 21″ exclusively by taping 1000 flexidisks to helium balloons and setting them loose over Nashville.

The label have reported a 10% pickup rate, so there’s still currently over 900 of these things still out there floating around Tennessee!

This one kind of reminds me of Rocket Mail, where in the 1930s scientists and mailmen got together and decided that expensive and difficult to control rockets were the future of mail delivery.…

Sometimes releasing your music on it’s own just isn’t enough. It’s no reflection on the quality of the music itself, but in the current internet atmosphere, sometimes you need to do that little bit extra to push your music out to people and get them to notice. At MusicHype, we’re all about looking at new ways for bands and artists to reward their fanbase and incentivize their music.

Knives at Noon have taken an interesting route for the release of their new EP “Second Skin”.…