news.artistspaid

I've never seen anyone do a looping performance nearly this well put together:

Gavin Castleton - Sledgehammer (Peter Gabriel cover)

Guest post by Janet Hansen, scout66.com

I was a jazz snob. And jazz snobs aren’t just limited to jazz musicians. There’s the aging audience too. Often, and quite understandably accused of being the jazz police. They’re the ones who are always ready with an acid stare or, if that doesn’t work, a bellicose hush, if you dare to even pass wind during a performance.

Every marketing specialist worth their salt will tell you emotion drives nearly every decision consumers make. That music drives emotion is no big secret. When used in advertising, music is the emotional auditory link between the abject hard sell, and the all important move-to-action strategy marketers use to create relationships between consumers and inanimate objects

Recently, some of the largest music labels, brands and ad agencies got together to draw up a magna carta on how brands and music should partner. The report is titled, "The 10 Commandments of Music and Brand Partnerships." Despite the lofty title given to the document, the actual conditions are obvious and much more mundane. For example, “…the necessity for the values of the brand to be aligned with those of the artist’s."

Here's a statement that went to all Ingrooves accounts today. They have not paid a cent to me and yet are about to take away the $100 I earned after 4 years with their service. CDBaby "actually" paid me at least 6 times that in the same period and they don't charge maintenance fees!!

STATEMENT:
Effective for the July 31st, 2009 royalty payment, INgrooves will be implementing a minimum monthly service fee of $100 (the “Monthly Service Fee”). After years of thorough analysis, we have concluded that INgrooves must generate this amount in fees per account per month to cover basic costs. INgrooves believes that its clients should easily be able to generate this amount of fees per month with a steady schedule of quality releases. The reality of the marketplace today is that there is a huge amount of time and resources spent on account set-up, retail business development, accounting and legal costs, and we must adjust the economics to deal with these current realities.

If your account generates a fee of greater than $100 per month, then you will be paid according to the revenue share arrangement in your respective agreement with us. Any amounts over the Monthly Service Fee and less than the new minimum monthly payment threshold (see below for more information) in your agreement with INgrooves will simply carry over to the following month and will be utilized to meet the Monthly Service Fee for the following month.

We understand that this new Monthly Service Fee may not work for all of you, and you may prefer to seek out other distribution options. Should you decide that you no longer want your own direct deal with INgrooves, we would like to take the opportunity to refer you to our partner ReverbNation (http://www.reverbnation.com/main/features_tabs#tabview=tab2&feature=labels_landingpage&ref=ingrooves). ReverbNation uses INgrooves’s infrastructure to deliver to top tier digital outlets for a fixed annual fee and also provides great marketing tools for developing artists and smaller labels. We are finalizing the process for moving your existing releases from INgrooves to ReverbNation. Our goal is to make this as simple as possible. INgrooves and ReverbNation work closely to analyze sales data flowing through our systems, and we can easily upstream you back to INgrooves should your sales increase.

As mentioned above, the minimum threshold payment is increasing to $250 for payments by check per month. $100 for wire and PayPal (please note there is an additional $25 wire fee)

Thank you for your understanding as we, and the industry, go through these changes. Ultimately, we have every reason to want you to be successful and feel this is needed to provide you with long term distribution and marketing support.

This notice amends the payment section of your agreement with INgrooves. Please contact your client representative with any questions.

"Only when the tide goes out, do we realize who has been swimming naked"

The Barbados-born Tar Baby is not so much a producer as a one-man pop culture distillery. Taking the time-honored Mackie mixing board method from his Caribbean forefathers, he filters sounds from turntables, keyboards, computers, transistor radios, samplers, movies and God knows what else down into a sweet, soulful post-modern hip hop elixir. It's funky, and it's from Canada.

With so many changes to the music business and more to come, where will artists make their money? This will most likely vary from genre, artist and region. Certain markets make it easy to perform and make money from one's show, others more difficult. Some people by music, while others try to download it for free.

Despite these challenges at finding ways to make a living as an artist, there are tools that will let you manage all of your assets in one place and even give you full control in the process. Loud Feed, though still in Beta, already lets you sell your music directly on the web via fully customizable widgets that can be embedded anywhere on the web.

As times goes on the site will increase the uses for ones digital assets, to facilitate booking, fan management, press relations, licensing opportunities and more. You can try everything out for free now, but the company will be charging using a "staircase model," so that artists and labels only pay for things that truly contribute value to their growth and success.

Check out http://loudfeed.com and airdrop.loudfeed.com for one of their label clients.