Link your own effin' life
The Web seems to be shifting more and more towards community sites, where people exhibit themselves and their interests. It bringing the web back to its roots amateurish roots. Extroverts can put up content (mp3, whack-ass opinions...) without much effort, and the audience can surf to related stuff quickly.
It's the finding related stuff that's really improving.
For musicians, MySpace seems to be the biggy these days, a social networking site that quickly became a music hosting site. Find a date, find a band to take 'em too. But if you are maintaining a band website, there's some other sites that make posting content easy. And more importantly, link you the rest of the web and introduce you to other music and musicians. Garageband.com is a neat way to get opinions on your music. The site requires that you review a few dozen other artists before you can post a song of your own. It's a benign pyramid scheme: in order to post your work, you've got to do a little work. But you get a bunch of objective advice. Nicer than just letting your work languish.
Tagging: the fad word of 2005. It refers to adding descriptive words to content you post on the Internet, and the sites that index those keywords. The two breakthrough sites aren't directly related to music. Flickr let's you post your photos, tag them, then look for others using the same tags. Type in http://flickr.com/photos/tags/punkrock/ and you'll see the ever-shifting world of what folks think is punk rock right now. Del.icio.us let's you do something similar with your bookmarks, and peer in on what others think is worth looking at twice on the Internet.
Recently, del.icio.us started categorizing bookmarks that point to media files. So right here is where you can see what mp3s have been bookmarked. And here are mp3s that have been bookmarked and tagged as punk. We created a "blackstrap" del.icio.us account, and here are all the music files linked on our website: http://del.icio.us/blackstrap/system:filetype:mp3
Uploading Music * Review Sites * Music Blogs * North Carolina Rock * Making your own web site for almost no money
MUSIC SITES
Uploading your music:
Garageband.com I think it's descended from the old mp3.com site, where anyone could post their music, but they've put in interesting limits- you have to review others music (or pay) before you upload your own. This guarantees feedback, and most of the opinions are helpful. Highly recommended.
MySpace Where everyone is hosting their music and linking to the local bands they play with, and linking to the major bands, and the major band's publicists click on the starts behalf
We get a lot of hits to this page from folks searching for "how to upload music to myspace." I think what might be confusing is that you can't do it from you personal MySpace profile. You have to go to MySpace Music and go through the Artist Sign up process.
Or you can convert your individual profile by logging in to your account, then cutting and pasting this URL into your browser,
http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=BandProfile.convert
Which will run some script on the MySpace side of things. As far as I can tell, if band members all want to manage the MySpace site, you will have to share the password. Which is why it's probably just as easy to sign up for a fresh account.
OpSound A spot for Creative Commons licensed music. That is, music which has an alternative copyright which allows others to use your work.
Common Tunes A similar index of Creative Commons music.
AudioScrobbler/Last.fm Neat site that posts your listening habit to the web, by monitoring your computer's music player. But also, links you to others with similar taste, and lets you tap streams of music similar to your listening habits. And, if you open up a label account, you can get your music into the stream. If one of us is currently feeding their music to the site, it's posted on the front page of blackstrap.org. Bendy's page here.
15 Megs of Fame Slick site that allows uploads. Doesn't seem to generate as much traffic as the sites above, but worthwhile.
PodShow is a site to submit your music to be available to podcasters.
ODEO collects mp3 and audio files that are included in RSS feeds around the web. Which mean that they scan the web for freshly updated music blogs, and let you listen to the music links through their interface. For you music to be included, you'd have to link to your files within a blog entry. Most online blogging software generates an RSS/Atom feed for each entry. Sign up at Odeo, and point them to your site. This would only be productive if you blog frequently and include links to audio files. Here's how our site looks, processed through their service.
Reviews
Places to send your underground rock recordings
Pitchfork while the writing isn't always horribly overwrought, it is frequently useless at actually giving an impression of the music. Still, they are the taste makers of the independent music world right now. And if a record gets a rating of 7 or above, it seems to get buzz. They do a good job at sorting through the endless heap, and they are open minded.
Dusted. Bendy, our guitarist writes for them. Better editing than Pitchfork, and more oriented towards the stuff that falls below even the indie rock radar. They don't give out number ratings. Check out the radio stations they contact assemble their charts. These are the radio stations you should be contacting- they're most likely to give your unknown stuff a fair shake.
Splendid. They try to review everything that's sent to them. Quite a feat. If you are looking for something worthwhile that has absolutely no buzz, here's the place.
Where else?
Metacritic looks gives a birds eye view of what records are getting notice, and the list of publications that they observe is a very good list of what is setting the scene.
Grunnen Rocks catalogs the world of garage punk.
Book your own fucking life is the descendant of the Maximum Rock n' Roll publication to link up touring punk bands and DIY labels. And look at this amazing list of bands who've put out two or more albums.
Music Blogs
Music Blogs are like endless mix tapes: technically illegal if you are posting someone else's music, but so obviously the product of passion (and disinterest in major label music) that they flourish. The right side of the TOFU HUT page is a gateway to what's happen' circa early 2005. Largehearted boy and Scenestars are made up of Southern bloggers.
There is even a blog focusing on the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region, The Oak Room. Highly recommended. And if you are in a scene somewhere else, why not do the same thing?
If you are in a band, why should you blog? It will drive traffic to your site. It's working for us. Every day, we get a bunch of hits from people searching for info about the type of music we discuss in the blog. And our own style of music isn't far off. So they come for the gab and the links to mp3s, and poke around and check out our music.
Write about the music you like. Put some effort into it- think about what really makes you like a song, rather than just "it rocks." You'll get a better idea about what is good in your own music. Moreover, you will be creating associations between your own music and the music that influences you, and those links will get linked into the web.
North Carolina Related
trianglerock.com keeps
track of what's going on in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area.
alt.music.chapel-hill is the longstanding listserv/usenet group on
the same scene.
WXDU
was instrumental to the formation of Blackstrap. PG and Bendy met while
deejaying there. Like WXYC, the contribute to the Dusted charts.
WXYC
is more free-form and generally more youthful than WXDU, just like
Chapel Hill compared to Durham.It was the first station to stream to
the Internet 24 hours a day.
ncpunkonline punk from North
Carolina, of course
The Oak Room is a music blog about the Triangle scene.
NC Punk Tabs has a podcast of NC punk stuff, and sticks up guitar tabs of punk songs, local and otherwise.