Sell digital band assets on your website with a new shop widget from Kiqlo.com

The team at MyMusicSuccess came across a new site this week that could prove very useful for the independent musician who wants to sell everything from MP3's to Screensavers, Band Desktops and other digital band merchandise directly from their website.

Kiqlo.Com is developing a portable 'Shop Widget' that you can integrate onto any website or social networking page that accepts widget code.

Currently the widget cannot be used with MySpace as MySpace block any flash widget that links to an external page, however the owner and developer of Kiqlo Rosario Iannella told me that they have plans to develop a MySpace compatible shop within the next couple of weeks.

Kiqlo is a completely free service, and takes no cut from your sales. The platform has been in development now for around a year, however they already have over 1000 vendors selling over 11,000 items through the stores every day.

The service uses the PayPal payment engine, so its very simple to recieve payments by setting up an account with PayPal and linking it with your Kiqlo shop by just entering your PayPal ID into the Kiqlo system.

Although you are able to sell MP3's through the shop with the Kiqlo MP3 playlist shop, you can also earn extra revenue by creating and selling downloadable wallpapers, exclusive backstage photosets, your bands biography in an ebook, literally any digital asset you want to create to create a one stop portable shop for all your bands digital assets.

Customer service is second to none. When we signed up to the service at MyMusicSuccess, we couldnt sign in as we had just upgraded our FireFox browser to the latest version. I emailed Kiqlo and within an hour the problem had been fixed and I was up and running. Rosario Iannela the creator, owner and developer of Kiqlo is fully commited to his project, and similar helpful experiences are documented in the companies forums which is always encouraging to see.

If you are looking for a way to raise money for your band, selling digital assets from your band is a great way to offer your fans a low cost investment into your brand, and using Kiqlo to sell these items directly from your web pages and social networks is a no brainer.

Head over to http://www.kiqlo.com to sign up for your free account and start building your digital asset shop today!

Taylor Bright Takes US Teen Pop To Japan, And Starts Fall Campaign On XLTrax Radio

Philadelphia's latest teen pop rock sensation Taylor J Bright relaunched her Japanese website to support the ongoing promotion of her current iTunes hit single 'Striped Socks'.

Taylor is a songwriter, singer and actress who began her career on the stage. She has numerous professional theater credits including the 30th Anniversary National Tour of the Broadway hit Annie, Annie Warbucks, Carousel and 13 The Musical. Taylor has also appeared in several commercials and print advetising campaigns.

Taylor's music is well suited to the Japanese market, with a major part of the Japanese domestic music audience consisting of teenage demographics, this audience is also very technologically aware, and with Taylor's new Japanese web and mobile prescence Japanese fans will be able to visit her site, preview tracks and purchase MP3's directly from their mobile handsets, by far the most popular method of consuming digital music in Japan.

Taylor is making headway with her music career on an independent basis, an unusual story of success in a market dominated by major recording contracts and long standing teen brands like Disney, but her music stands up against her peers, and would fit easily into the iPod playlists of fans of Miley Cyrus, The Jonas Brothers and other similar pop rock glitterati.

With producer Kenny Lamb ('N Sync, Building 429) and engineer Chris Rowe (Taylor Swift, Jewel) on board her team, the forthcoming debut CD thats in production right now is sure to make an impression upon its release.

Taylor is about to start her fall radio campaign for 'Striped Socks' with MyMusicSuccess partner and leading online radio network Xltrax. She is currently in the studio recording an exclusive interview with the station, and you'll be able to hear the interview, alongside Taylors hit single, playing out wordlwide on the XlTrax network over the next few months.

To get your copy of Taylor Bright's new single 'Striped Socks' and see her brand new video check out the following websites.

http://taylorbright.musicsugoi.jp
http://www.taylorbright.com/
http://www.myspace.com/taylorjbright

Marketing Your Music – Why Pay As You Go Music Promotion Makes Sense For Independent Artists And Labels…

One of the biggest challenges for independent artists is getting their music marketed effectively on ever tightening budgets.

If you’re an independent artist without a record company helping you market your music, you have to ask yourself “what can I achieve on my own, and where are my skill gaps where I need some assistance to get the word out?”

Some of the biggest mistakes that many artists make when they have completed their latest musical masterpiece is to try to target a mass market by throwing out twitter shouts, emails and anything they can lay there hands on to whoever might listen.

Whilst this might initially get eyes on your site, nearly 80% of your effort will be wasted on targeting people who have no interest in your music. It’s not going to grow your audience, its definitely not going to increase sales or downloads and will leave you frustrated with your results.

It’s not enough to put up a widget on your website with a buy button and hope people will come by and purchase your track. It’s a proven fact that it will take 6 exposures to a given product before someone will even consider reaching for their credit card and buying something - your music is no different.

Think about it. listeners to your music will have needed to have heard of your music at least 6 times before from trusted sources, whether they’ve seen it in the music news, read a review, heard it on an online radio station, seen an ad, or perhaps had it recommended by a friend.

You need to treat your music in the same way as any other business treats the product they wish to sell. And that means researching who your target market is, where they hang out, what they read, what and who they respect. That’s specialist knowledge that you definitely need help with.

Of course when record companies were doing all of this work for artists, they hired in a PR and Promotion agency to make sense of the marketing of the artist’s music, and deducted the costs from the artists advance.

As we all know that model is no longer viable for most unsigned independent artists. Hiring in a PR or Promotion agency that uses the retainer fee business model is not within the reach of independent artists that need to pay for their promotion themselves.

This is why MyMusicSuccess runs on the Pay As You Go promotion business model.

We saw that a lot of independent bands could not access good PR without being asked to pay thousands up front with little real promise in return.

We’ve changed the whole ethos and thinking on how PR and Promotion should be delivered for unsigned independent artists and labels.

We see ourselves as part of the artists' team, however we believe that the artist should only pay for the work they need doing , not a retainer. So we're only here when you need the services delivered, and with Pay As You Go PR & Promotion, you buy only the services you need when you need them. It's becoming a very cost effective way of working in the current economy and is getting amazing results for our artists.

Hire in the right help to market your music, treat your music as a business and the customers will come your way.

6 Years On: The State Of Music Digital Distribution

Over the last few months we’ve been helping a number of our artists streamline their digital distribution strategies to help maximise their income from the sale of their MP3 downloads. It’s been an educational experience, and we’re coming out the other end with an interesting overview of the digital distribution landscape.

In the last 5-6 years we’ve seen music aggregation platforms and digital distribution expand in an extremely fast way, and musicians have an incredibly vast array of options to sell their music online.

As we’ve said many times on this blog, in the current music marketplace YOU are the record company, which means treating your music as a business, and choosing the right business partners to suit your style of working.

Back in the early days of digital distribution, there weren’t many choices if you wanted to sell music online via the large download stores. CDBaby were one of the first operators to deliver your tracks to iTunes and Amazon and increased their reach to many other stores over time. Tunecore also led the way in the early days with a quick and easy way to get your music into a similar playlist of online shops.

Now every music site and their proverbial dog are delivering to iTunes, Amazon and many more stores besides. Social media platform Watunes even delivers your tracks to the iTunes store for free, so how do you decide where to place your valuable catalogue of music?

One of the key questions you need to ask yourself before jumping into the first digital distribution partner agreement you come across is:

Who is the right partner to sell my music on behalf of my music business?

For new artists that are just starting out, you’ll have the luxury of surveying and testing out all the distribution services out there, both old and new.

For artists that started delivering their music to digital stores a few years ago you may be looking to streamline your distribution instead of having a large array of services delivering small amounts to you each month and taking their separate fees from this.

In our recent project streamlining the music inventory of one of our artists, we found out an awful lot about the current state of digital music aggregators, and the biggest issues we experienced with many of the companies involved was simply down to the way they deal with their customers.

During the project we encountered some surprising experiences with the various digital delivery services customer service departments, yours may be different of course, but for the benefit of those musicians that are looking to streamline their catalogue delivery we though we’d share our experiences with you.

We were given a brief by our client that they wanted to deliver all of their music to iTunes, Amazon and the other download stores through one cost effective source, as they were fed up receiving reports from several different companies each month, and also having to spend several separate fees to put up their album with each company when they released a new single or album.

The client had been making music for just over 5 years and over that time had delivered their music to download stores through CDBaby, TuneCore, and European distributors FEIYR.Com

We looked at the amount of money the client was spending to deliver their music to all of these services. CDBaby was still charging $35 per album, although this does get your CD on their store if you have a physical release, (albeit at a manufacturing and shipping cost to yourself), Tunecore were charging $19.95 per album per year for digital delivery, and FEIYR although a specialist dance distributor was costing around $20 per release if you chose all their stores.

We’ve been finding out a lot about the new digital delivery model at Watunes.Com who deliver tracks to the iTunes store for free. Their VIP service charges just $29.95 per year and covers all releases in that year, plus we received answers to our questions the same day when we contacted them.

So we chose Watunes as the sole provider for our client’s music, as we also had some advance information given to us about the imminent release of their social music platform with some groundbreaking new services for independent artists that will enable them to make some real cash from their music.

When we looked at the client’s portfolio on iTunes, it was evident that there were 3 to 4 different versions of each of their releases all at different prices in the iTunes store because of the different delivery platforms they were using. It’s confusing to the customer and makes the store look unprofessional so we set about putting that straight.

The first port of call was to get takedowns carried out at the client’s current distribution channels in order for us to then channel all their releases through Watunes.

Takedowns are basically requests to an aggregator asking them to stop selling your music at a particular store, and doing this really showed the poor level of customer care given by some of the more established digital distributors.

We first contacted CDBaby and asked for our clients releases to be pulled from all the digital stores. We got a response that asked us to confirm this, which we did, and… nothing. So we contacted them again…. Nothing... We are still waiting for communication from them, and by the looks of their forums and twitter pages so are many others.

It appears that CDBaby have now finally taken down after many weeks the requested tracks, but since that first email they haven’t responded to either our client or us, and our client continues to get no response from their helpline or email on this and other accounting issues. Not a recipe for success after their recent takeover by Discmakers.

Next stop Tunecore, once again contacting them proved very difficult. Once we did get a response, they did eventually remove the tracks, but it took a while for them to engage in communication with us. Why is it so difficult to look after your customers and afford them a timely response…

Lastly we contacted FEIYR.Com the German based dance distributor, who responded quickly, but stated that to remove tracks from their stores would cost 29.99 Euros per release. With 10 releases our client would have to pay nearly 300 Euros to have their tracks removed.

This indeed was stated in the terms and conditions small print of FEIYR.Com when our client signed up so there was little we could do to avoid the charges, but this really does drive home the message that you need to read the terms and conditions of your contracts with your digital distributor carefully. Don’t just click I AGREE, read the terms and conditions fully. It will save you money in the long term

We asked Watunes what would happen if in the future we decided to pull our tracks from the online stores. Their CEO Kevin Rivers replied within hours to our email saying that they don’t charge for takedowns, and if artists wished to move from Watunes in the future, they can only wish them good luck and make sure they attend to their request as soon as possible.

They also advised us that Apple take their artist down within 3 days if they receive a takedown request. All the other distributors told us it would take us at least a month for takedowns.

Watunes delivered our clients tracks very quickly and smoothly to the iTunes, Amazon and other download stores, and when we asked them to update a tricky publishing credit directly with iTunes, they responded to us within hours and had the change implemented within a few days. Our client was very happy with their customer service, and it seems we have connected them to a business partner that is committed to serving customers well.

All in all the experience left us wondering why companies such as CDBaby and Tunecore, that have built up a reputation as the leaders in their field pay such little respect to their customers, and in many cases just ignore them completely. Reading through various forums and twitter feeds (including the companies official forums and blogs) showed an enormous amount of other musicians experiencing the same frustrations.

In the current economic climate the only successful way to build your business is to engage with customers and look after them. Maybe its arrogance, maybe it’s just ever tightening margins. We think it’s just the personality of the company as a whole.

So what did we learn from our experiences that would offer good advice to artists looking for the best deal for distributing there music in the new digital music market?

Before joining a digital aggregator, make sure you do your homework and research the company well. Read as many experiences from other users as you can, ask other musicians their experiences, and check out what others are saying about the company on Twitter and other social networks.

Above all read the terms and conditions very carefully, and before you place your valuable music assets with a distributor, build up a relationship with them, get to know the company values and ethos.

Drop the CEO a line to see if they respond, speak to the staff via email or phone and see how they treat you. You should expect a full response to any questions you have within 24 hours, that’s not just courteous, its good business practice.

Really take some time to grill your business partner thoroughly about possible charges and get to know the company before you decide to go into partnership with them.

Choose your digital distribution business partner well, and you’ll enjoy a long and fruitful relationship with them for many years to come…

Jazz Diva Dena Taylor - Determined Vocalist Produces Masterpiece In The Face Of Adversity

Dena Taylor: Round Midnight CD Review

Jazz, Texas, USA

Artist Homepage: Reverbnation MySpace Facebook
Artist Downloads: iTunes Amazon CDBaby
Sounds Like: Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Cole Porter

Review by: Tara Isabella Burton - MyMusicSuccess.Com

Smoky, sexy, soft - the velvety voice of Dena Taylor dominates not just a corner of the room but indeed the entire wall of sound created by the "on" button of the stereo.

The jazz-tinged piano-ballads featured on Round Midnight, a selection from Taylor's latest album, combine a retro melancholy reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holliday with a self-knowing wink and a nod - in all the tracks, particularly "Let's Face the Music and Dance"

it is clear that Taylor combines the power and passion of her deeper melodies - such as "Round Midnight," arguably the sample's best song - with a hip, even modern take on a classic Cole-Porter sound: the happening drumbeat of "Let's Face the Music..." or the slight world-music-sound of "That Old Black Magic" are but two examples of the edge that Taylor brings to the "standard" sound.

But it is Taylor's voice that dominates the sound most. A gorgeous, rich mahogany voice, it is showcased prominently on the album - perhaps too much so, the production can times can feel excessively focused on the vocals, which echo just a nanosecond longer than they need to - and with good reason. Taylor's talent is the real deal - an instrument as powerful as a jazz piano or saxophone in evoking the mournful yet sassy strains of jazz and blues so central to Round Midnight.

Taylor's road to success has been hard-won, even inspirational. After a difficult and traumatic childhood, Taylor spent twelve years abroad in the military, combining her years of service with a series of low-profile concert and event gigs, ultimately choosing marriage over her first record contract - a choice Taylor would later discover led to an unhappy marriage and an unfair postponement of her dreams. Upon leaving the military, Taylor found herself in a tragic car accident that left her with severe brain damage - it took her a full two years for Taylor to regain her powers of speech and motion.

Today, Taylor is following her dream by giving "voices to the voiceless" - a power she was once herself denied and lends her personal support to a number of good causes that support others who have endured adversity.

It is a testament to Taylor's talent, however, that her sound never seems "preachy." Rather, the adversity Taylor has faced lends her voice a hard, knowing edge - like that of a Gladys Knight at her prime- that gives her music a ripened maturity so many pop stars lack.

That she is able to combine this maturity with the infectious and youthful rhythm of songs like "That Old Black Magic" is further proof of her skill as both a performer and a musician.

Kandystand Hit The West Coast Dance Chart Ahead Of Shakira!

MyMusicSuccess artist Kandystand this week starts their ascent on the US West Coast Dance Chart with their latest single 'OYH - Open Your Heart'.

With great club support since its release in July 2009, the single has started at #46 on the US Soundworks DJ chart ahead of Shakira.

Open Your Heart is an electro tinged remix of the 80's Madonna classic, and is also receiving airplay in the US, Europe, and Australia. It is also featured on the Xltrax Radio network through the MyMusicSuccess XLRadioPromotion service.

Kandystand - OYH (Open Your Heart) is available for download at all online digital retailers or get your copy here

Soundworks Pool Top 50 Chart
compiled 5 August 2009

TC LC WoC
1 1 15 Katy Perry * Waking Up In Vegas * Capitol
2 3 15 Pussycat Dolls * Hush Hush, Hush Hush Remix * Interscope
3 2 21 David Guetta ft. Kelly Roland * When Love Takes Over *
Astralwerks
4 6 19 Livvi Franc * Now I'm That Bitch * Jive
5 4 27 Lady Gaga * Love Game Dave Aude Remix * Interscope
6 10 15 Chrisette Michele * Epiphany (I'm Leaving) * Def Jam
7 9 17 Lionel Richie * Just Go * Def Jam
8 26 10 Pink * Funhouse * LaFace
9 8 19 U2 * Magnificent Remixes * Island
10 13 17 Kaci Battaglia * Crazy Possessive Remixes * Curb
11 5 15 Jessica Jarrell * Armageddon * Mercury
12 33 10 Beyonce * Sweetdreams Remix * Columbia
13 7 21 Black Eyed Peas * Boom Boom Pow * Interscope
14 28 10 Ida Corr * Ride My Tempo Remix * Ultra
15 16 15 Lasgo * Gone * Robbins
16 25 15 Miami Starfish ft. Jermaine Stewart * Clothes Off! *
Groove Factory
17 36 10 La Roux * Bulletproof * Cherry Tree
18 14 19 Sharam ft. Kid Cudi * She Came Along * Ultra
19 24 10 Bill Bennett ft. Abigail * Forever Young * Big Rhythm
Studios
20 41 10 Naturi Naughton * Fame 09 * Lakeshore
21 15 29 Deborah Cox * Beautiful U R Remixes * Deco
22 23 19 Flo Rida * Sugar Disco Fries Remix * Atlantic
23 11 29 Gathania * Blame It On You Remix * Hard2Beat
24 29 15 Kristinia DeBarge * Goodbye * Island
25 32 10 Pet Shop Boys * Did You See Me * EMI
26 12 27 Depeche Mode * Wrong Remixes * Mute
27 27 17 Barton * Valentine * Netspheres
28 17 27 Pitbull * I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho) * Ultra
29 30 15 Freemasons ft. Sophie Ellis-Bextor * Heartbreak (Make Me
A Dancer) * Freemasons Music
30 31 17 Simply Red * Money's Too Tight To Mention '09 * Simplyred
Music
31 21 15 Perry Twins ft. Niki harris * Bad, Bad Boys * Perry TWin
Music
32 35 10 Whitney Houston * I Didn't Know My Own Strength Remix *
Arista
33 34 10 Bananarama * Love Comes * Fascination
34 NEW Cascada * Evacuate The Dancefloor * Robbins
35 22 17 Wynonna * Sing Remixes * Curb
36 40 10 Marcie ft. Mike Rizzo * Midnight * EsNtion
37 43 15 LaKisha Jones * Let's Go Celebrate * Elite
38 39 15 Mike Bordes ft. Angela S. * Don't Know What U Got * CDM
39 44 10 Raygun * Just Because * RCA
40 NEW Tiga * Beep Beep * DFA
41 NEW Alyson * Sticky Sticky * PM Media
42 50 10 Fedde Le Grand & Funkerman * Scared Of Me * Ultra
43 NEW Richard Vission & Static Revengers ft. Luciana * I LIke
That '09 * Meterhead
44 38 15 Ameerah * The Sound Of Missing You * Robbins
45 49 10 Noisettes * Don't Upset The Rhythm * Universal
46 NEW Kandystand * Open Your Heart * Team Hayward
47 NEW Shakira * She Wolf * Sony
48 NEW Sean Ensign * Fly Away * Titan Sounds
49 NEW DJG Project * If I Could Be You * Amathus Music
50 NEW Jenn Cuneta * I Want That Man * Bill Friar Ent
PICKS:
Anjulie * Love Songs * Concord
Madonna * Celebration * Warner Bros
Mariah Carey * Obsessed Remixes * Def Jam
Various * Ride With Me * Hartecast Music
Vanessa Williams * The Real Thing * Concord

3 Steps To Making Guaranteed Music Sales On iTunes Using Twitter.

Post by Simon Adams: MyMusicSuccess.Com

So you have delivered your track to the iTunes stores, and your music is on their virtual shelves. Are you happy with the revenue you are generating from your downloads? Want to know how to guarantee sales of your track atiTunes using just Twitter as a lead generation source? Then read on…

Putting your track into the iTunes store through an aggregator merely makes it available for sale. That is very different from ‘selling’ your track. In one of my previous articles I give some good advice that you have to treat your band as a ‘start up’ business to make sure that it generates some money to support your musical activities. Whether you like it or not, if you want to make money out of music, you’ll have to start developing a sales strategy for your music at some point.

There are three steps to successfully selling your music to music fans who actually want to buy your music from iTunes.

1) Identify a person who regularly buys tracks from the iTunes store

It’s no good asking someone to buy your track from iTunes if they are not in the habit of buying music, or if they don’t use the iTunes store. So the first thing we need to do is find lots of people who actually use the iTunes platform to discover and more importantly regularly purchase music there.

There is a really simple way of doing this, using a very clever keyword search on Twitter.

Go to http://search.twitter.com and type in any or all of the following phrases:

Bought from iTunes
Bought on iTunes
Purchased from iTunes
Purchased on iTunes
Downloaded from iTunes

With any of these searches you will immediately see a whole list of people who regularly buy their tracks from iTunes; they actually put their hand in their pocket and buy the music. They are not interested in going onto file sharing networks or trawling the web for a free MP3, these are people who buy their music from a legitimate download store…


2) Identify the buyer’s musical taste

At this point whatever you do, don’t just follow everyone who buys from the iTunes store, you’ll waste both your and their time and effort; you need to hone down which of these people will be interested in buying YOUR music.

OK, so now we have identified someone who is committed to buying music, now we need to find out whether our style of music would be something they’d be interested in buying too.

Read each of the posts that you find using the twitter search; most of the tweets will mention the band name in the tweet






Now go off to your favourite search engines and search for the artist they purchased. In the case of our example tweet, searching for Erika David on Google brings up herMySpace page where she is described as R&B / Soul / Pop.

Does your music fit that genre? It does? Then it is very highly likely that djstephie, is going to listen to your music, and buy it from iTunes too if she likes it...


3) Build a relationship with your buyer; get them as a long term fan

OK so now we have identified the ideal person who is most likely to buy your music, and we have identified that they buy their music from the very place you have your music for sale. Now we must build a relationship with that person, don’t ask for the sale right away.

Follow the person on Twitter, drop them a message, ask them about what they do, engage in a chat with them about your music genre. Mention you are producing music in a similar style to what they are currently listening to. They are guaranteed to ask you for a link to your music, and when they do, give them the direct link to your iTunes store.

Repeat the process on each tweet you identify as a match to your music.

Congratulations, you are now officially the top music salesperson in your very own music company!

As you can see from the above steps, you’ll make more sales every day from your music by being efficient and working smarter only on potential fans that are likely to be interested in purchasing your music. These are your ideal fans and if you nurture them, they’ll buy everything you release on iTunes and champion your music to others too.

You can also use the same method for other download stores, try searching twitter for this phrase too and use the same 3 steps:

bought from amazon mp3

If you want to automate the search for potential buyers of your music, use the free Tweetlater service from http://www.tweetlater.com. This web application allows you to enter phrases to look for on twitter such as the ones I mention in step 1, and it will send you an email digest on a regular basis of the tweets it has found matching these phrases.

However all that will do is identify your ideal music buyer, you must invest the time in steps 2 and 3 to make it personal, and when you do that, you really leverage the power of direct contact to ‘close the deal’ and secure a lifelong fan.

MyMusicSuccess becomes the #1 Music Professional at RandRWorld.Com

MyMusicSuccess is proud to announce that it is the #1 professional on the popular music social network RandRWorld.Com

Thanks to the artists who rated our services we are now the most highly ranked professional music service provider on the network.

With more artists linking up with us every day we're continuing to grow, and help more independent artists worldwide spread the word about their music.

In addition to getting involved in helping up and coming new artists promote themselves, whether its online, on the radio or to the music industry, MyMusicSuccess is also placing regular educational blog postings into the network as an informative guide to the new music business.

Join our network at http://www.randrworld.com/mymusicsuccess