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.…

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.

 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.…

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!…

So much happens every day in the sea of social media. This is great for research, trend watching and keeping in touch. But reaching your fans is getting harder every day.

Your Facebook wall posts and tweets are messages in bottle that you toss out to sea. You cross your fingers and hope most of your fans are going to see it.

In fact that message bobs around, gets read by a few fans and eventually sinks to the ocean floor.…

In this age of electronic bombardment I sometimes feel like no one is listening. You put stuff out into the aether and nothing comes back…

When we first started to write we drew symbols in caves, developed petroglyphs and eventually created an alphabet. Each step allowed us to communicate further and with more accuracy. We were being heard – NEIGH!

I used to be a letter writer in my teens. It was the only way I could keep in touch with my oldest friend in Brisbane, Australia.…

I sat down with Wick-It the Instigator for a two part interview on the importance of fans. Without fans…….there is nothing!

I thought I knew all of the great forgotten bands: The Replacements, with their great songs, unpredictable live shows and self-destructive attitude; Big Star, with their perfect tunes at exactly the wrong time; Nick Drake, with his refusal to tour and corresponding failure to sell records, despite their melancholy brilliance. But somehow amongst all of these lost gems I managed to miss The Nerves.

It was Rdio that finally brought them to my attention. A colleague found them through an Rdio playlist resulting in The Nerves’ compilation album One Way Ticket appearing in my Recent Activity feed – a good illustration of the power of streaming media.…

Wow – what a great first week: praise, bugs and tweaks!

Opening the gate is always a scary moment for any startup, especially in Beta. There aren’t enough hours to get everything done; you’re sure you’ve tested everything, but know a few bugs are lurking, waiting for an unsuspecting member to find them. *Boo*

Thanks to you guys it we had a great starting week. You helped us find a a number of bugs and sent through smart suggestions.

We really appreciate you taking the time to connect with us. Getting early feedback helps us make MusicHype even better.…

It’s official. The new MusicHype is launching at Music Biz 2012 in LA next week, put on by NARM and digitalmusic.org.

We’ll have a table at App Alley, outside the main ballroom on Wednesday from 11am-6pm and we’ll also be floating around on Tuesday. You’ll also be able to catch Kevin doing a 3-minute overview of MusicHype at the Digital Music LA meetup 7-9pm on Tuesday night. If you’re a label, management company or artist who’s struggling to focus on the fans that matter – you need to talk to us.…