Cambridge, Mass. /Music Industry Newswire/ — iZotope, Inc., a leader in audio DSP processing, has released RX 2 and RX 2 Advanced, updates to their award-winning audio repair software suites. With a range of new features and functionality, iZotope has expanded the scope of RX into any field where audio is recorded or restored by both consumers and professionals. Additionally, iZotope is offering introductory pricing on RX 2 and RX 2 Advanced purchases and upgrades throughout October 31, 2010.

RX 2 and RX 2 Advanced are designed to repair common and uncommon audio problems like tonal and broadband noise, hiss, buzz, hum, clicks and crackle, distortion from clipping and interfering sounds like cell phone rings, dogs barking, car horns, string squeaks, dropped drumsticks and just about anything else.

“RX 2 and RX 2 Advanced are crucial tools if you’re recording new tracks or restoring old ones. Whether you’re on location with a TV show or recording a voiceover at home for a company presentation, it’s a challenge to get a good recording. RX gives you all the tools you need to repair damaged audio and deliver the best recording,” explains Jeremy Todd, CTO of iZotope, “RX also includes specialized tools to restoring old recordings from vinyl records, tape and other sources with tools like Declick, Decrackle and automatic azimuth alignment. RX 2 and RX 2 Advanced are a complete set of the best processing tools with an immersive visual editing interface enabling you to quickly repair and deliver high-quality audio.”

RX 2 builds on the success of the original’s Denoise, Spectral Repair, Declick, Declip and Remove Hum modules with iZotope’s latest DSP algorithm improvements and the new Decrackle and Channel Operations modules. RX 2 Advanced extends the standard RX with an adaptive Denoiser mode, a Deconstruct module, third party plug-in hosting, iZotope 64-bit SRC™ resampling, MBIT+™ dither, iZotope Radius® time and pitch control, ability to export an edit history, multi-resolution mode for Spectral Repair and automatic azimuth correction.

RX 2 and RX 2 Advanced include new visual editing features and functionality such as the Magic Wand, Lasso and Brush tools designed for selecting audio in the product’s spectrogram. Similar to working in popular graphic design programs, these tools allow natural freehand selections around problem sounds. The Magic Wand can automatically select a sound and even automatically select its harmonics. After selecting, Spectral Repair resynthesizes audio allowing the user to seamlessly remove unwanted sounds or even fill in gaps in the recording.

RX 2 and RX 2 Advanced further improve the workflow from the first release. Like the original, they are available as both a suite of plug-ins for a DAW and as a dedicated application. An extensive edit history tracks every change the user makes allowing unlimited undo and compare processing. RX 2 Advanced adds the ability to export the history to an XML file for archival or forensic documentation. The application also saves complete session information, so the user can restart the application and continue working with even the audio selection and undo history being remembered. The updated Batch Processor allows the chaining together of modules to operate on multiple files, all optimized with the use of multiple CPUs.

RX 2 and RX 2 Advanced are ideal for restoration engineers, video post production engineers, forensic specialists, audio engineers, recording musicians, broadcasters, podcasters, archivists, videographers and anyone who records audio.

Specifications:
Windows (XP, x64, Vista, 7)
Mac OS X 10.5 or later (Universal Binary)
Standalone application
Plug-in formats: Pro Tools 7+ (RTAS/ AudioSuite), VST, MAS, Audio Unit, DirectX

Price and Availability:
An introductory price of $249 USD for RX 2 and $749 USD for RX 2 Advanced is available through October 31, 2010, and $349 for RX 2 and $1,199 for RX 2 Advanced thereafter.
Upgrade pricing is available for RX and RX Advanced owners.

For product information, demo videos and ordering information, visit www.izotope.com/products/audio/rx/.

VIDEO:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJGEo1YoJMo

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Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: The answer to that question is “no” because we all hear differently. This is not a big deal for most situations in life, but it can be critical in the music industry. Your music moves you. My music moves me. But do we like each others sounds, and why?

Every time a song is played, listeners react with love, hate, tolerance or indifference, but here’s a question that affects everyone in the business of music: why are some songs embraced by huge numbers of listeners while others appeal only to a relative few?

Who is Listening?
Certainly the distribution channels have a lot to do with this. After all, you cannot like a song you have never heard. Still, all things being equal, if two songs are played to the same group of people, one song will be more popular, sometimes by a large margin.

You can put aside the skill of the artists. Assume both songs are performed by competent musicians. Hell, the songs could even be performed by the same musicians or the same song performed by two different artists and there would be a preference from the listeners.

The Ears Have It
The reason people react differently when listening to music is that they literally hear things differently. Our heads, it turns out, are unique listening chambers.

“Although we say that someone has ‘a good ear for music,’ credit actually goes to a good mind for music,” writes Robert Jourdain in his book, “Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy” (no, ravers, it’s not what you think; the book’s subtitle is “How Music Captures Our Imagination”). Jourdain gives credit to minds “that can hear simultaneous melodies, simultaneous rhythms, even simultaneous harmonies.”

Some research shows that you can study the art of listening. “Only the most basic mechanisms for recognizing individual sounds are ‘hard-wired’ into our nervous systems,” states Jourdain. “Every other aspect of listening is partly or entirely conditioned by learning,” he adds.

Amazing Journey
Let’s take a sonic trip through your noggin. It begins with some vibrations pulsating in the air. Let’s say these vibrations are something great like Miles Davis, The Beatles or Arvo Part. (True, they could be something dreadful like Kenny G, Michael Bolton or Mannheim Steamroller — the point isn’t whether the aural pulsations are any good, the point is how they travel from the air to your soul.)

At the start, sounds enter your big floppy ears (read “cute little ears” if you are a girl) and then proceed down a dark and mysterious hallway called the outer ear canal. Some of your ear canals have cobwebs and debris left over from that day in preschool when a kid dared you to stick raisins in your ears. Despite this, the sound bounces along the corridor, making the eardrum vibrate. Yup, there’s a humming in your head.

Now, just past the eardrum, you’ve got three itsy-bitsy bones (no, not from any other preschool dares or college pranks). These bones have delightful names: the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup.

Okay, technically, they’re called the malleus, the incus and the stapes; for that matter, the eardrum is actually called the tympanic membrane, but I’m not writing this for the sake of science but to try to explain why some people like good music and some prefer bad music.

Judgment
“Wait!” I hear you say. Who am I to deem some music bad? Okay, my credentials include creating or producing ten albums currently on iTunes, co-writing and performing tracks that charted in a couple of countries, and co-writing a song with country legend Merle Haggard. But I am the first to admit that my combined sales are less than that of Los Del Rio, the perpetrators of that wretched piece of tripe called “Macarena.” So look, either bear with me on this or bale out now and go back to listening to Pat Boone, Whitesnake and Insane Clown Posse. It’s your choice.

Back on the Sonic Trip
Still with me? Terrific, because we need as many good music lovers as possible in this world. So okay, the 3 tiny bones are a-vibrating, and then they transfer their vibrations to a chamber in your inner ear. A chamber filled with fluid and lined with hair.

No, I’m not kidding. Now, this chamber doesn’t have a nifty colorful name like the saddle or the bullhorn; it’s called the cochlea (pronounced “furry wet cavity.”) No, just fooling, it’s pronounced “COKE-lee-uh.” And the very sensitive hairs in your cochlea also have an un-glamorous name: cilia (pronounced “teensy tresses.”) Yup, kidding; it’s “SILL-ee-uh.”

Anyway, the thing is this: the cilia tickle the nerve-endings that send the sonic signals into your brainpan.

“Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains,” writes Daniel Levitin in “This is Your Brain on Music,” it seems that “music is distributed throughout the brain.”

Your head is your real control room. “Music listening, performance and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified,” notes Levitin, “and involve nearly every neural subsystem.”

The fact is that when I play you one of the Golosio songs, the way you hear it depends on the size and shape of your ears, the condition and obstruction of your ear canals, the construction of your hammer/anvil/stirrup, the tautness and size of your eardrum, the structural design of your cochlea, the state of the fluid, the number and size of your cilia, the architecture of your cranium, and the synapses of your brain. Even the outer ears themselves have a unique quality, somewhat akin to fingerprints.

No wonder some of you like Master P instead of 2Pac, Air Supply instead of Marvin Gaye, Bon Jovi instead of James Brown, or Yanni instead of Debussy — you quite literally cannot hear the difference in quality between the ridiculous and the sublime.

It’s not simply a matter of song superiority. Performance matters. Just listen to all the songs in “The Big Chill” soundtrack versus those in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Almost everything is superb in the former, and almost everything is atrocious in the latter despite having compositions among the greatest this side of Cole Porter.

Good Listeners
All right, it’s true that we cannot all be great listeners. Sometimes I hear more than the average person. The first time I heard “Walk on the Wild Side” from Lou Reed’s great “Transformer” album, I noticed the difference in the nonsense syllables that follow the two places where he brings in “the colored girls.” Not only are the “doo dah-doo dah-doo dah-doos” of a different length, the sound processing is markedly different. It’s obvious to some of you but has to be pointed out to others.

Some people are great at it. I think about Matt Forger standing in front of my sound system and saying, “Pretty good but there’s a bump in the lower frequencies.” He actually got fairly specific and it turned out that he was absolutely correct. That’s why I like having him mix and master tracks from Golosio artists whenever possible. Hell, I’d have him produce everything, too, if we had the budget to fly him around the country for all the sessions.

Ears the Thing
The thing is, when you encounter someone who doesn’t get –

* the magic of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”
* the majesty of Jimi Hendrix’ “Are You Experienced?”
* the glory of Carole King’s “Tapestry”
* the wonder of Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder”
* the splendor of Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly”
* the magnificence of Etta James’ “Rocks the House”
* the magnitude of Big Brother & The Holding Company’s “Cheap Thrills”
* the beauty of Bill Evans’ “Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra”

– it could just be that they cannot truly hear it.

What?
BTW, as a side note, it’s the cilia (the ear fringe, as I call them) that get damaged when you go to see Motorhead and you don’t use earplugs. For that matter, if you go without ear protection to see Front Line Assembly or Nine Inch Nails or even bad bands that play above 96 decibels, you will never hear quite as well again. (Although for the lovers of John Tesh, Vanilla Ice, America, Lee Greenwood, and Pink, maybe that explains a lot.)

Article is Copr. © 2010 by John Scott G.

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Hollywood, Calif. /Music Industry Newswire/ — ­EASTWEST, one of the industry leaders in virtual software instruments, follows their critically acclaimed Hollywood Strings Diamond Edition virtual instrument with the announcement of “Hollywood Strings Gold Edition,” bringing the best professional scoring tools within the reach of any composer.

Designed for film, television, and video game scoring, Hollywood Strings breaks new ground by pairing unrivaled sound quality with unprecedented user control. It was recorded in EASTWEST’s award-winning Studio 1 by their top team of Doug Rogers, Nick Phoenix, Thomas Bergersen and engineered by award-winning Hollywood veteran Shawn Murphy.

Hollywood Strings has earned top reviews since it’s introduction to the market this summer. “This thing is a monster, and it has quickly set a new bar in what you can get out of a library of orchestral string samples,” said Film Score Monthly. “On to the sound, and, unsurprisingly, it’s excellent,” said Computer Music Magazine, who also bestowed their Performance Award upon the product. Sound on Sound magazine said “There’s no doubt that the fabulous sound, musical versatility and depth of expression of [Hollywood Strings] place it in the highest echelon of professional string libraries.” And in their upcoming November issue, Keyboard Magazine says, “Expertly recorded and programmed. Extremely flexible and musical. Impressive range of articulations and playing styles… Hollywood Strings is a no-holds-barred sample library that can indeed faithfully reproduce the ‘film score’ string sound.”

Hollywood String Gold Edition provides all of the sounds from the Diamond Edition in 16-bit resolution and includes a single, mid-tree mic position, all articulations with the exception of bow-change legato, and does not include Divisi mics. The Gold Edition ships on multiple DVDs.

Hollywood String Gold Edition was designed to run on most music creation computer systems, and the system specifications are consistent with most other EASTWEST/QUANTUM LEAP products.

Hollywood Strings Gold Edition is scheduled to ship September 27, 2010 for $795USD (€599).

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SAN BRUNO, Calif. /Music Industry Newswire/ — DJ Jimmy Stewart Jr. and Sesene Entertainment are joining forces at a free fundraising event to support the victims of the San Bruno, CA fires. The event is scheduled for September 25, 2010, from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the San Bruno Recreational Center and San Bruno City Park at 251 City Park Way. “It’s a cause close to my heart because San Bruno is my hometown; I’m Bruno born and Bruno bred,” says Stewart.

And, the label that backs Stewart – Sesene Entertainment – is planning to donate $5,000. Additionally, all sales from “Body Rock,” Stewart’s latest album, will be donated now through September 25, 2010; and Stewart will also donate 20 percent of his booking rate for the next year to support the Glenview Fire victims.

Stewart’s number one priority is making music and he has been heavily influenced by turntable DJs; electronic music is also a passion.

“I’m one of the only electro/turntablists who is consistent in the world,” adds Stewart. “Turntablism isn’t what it was; I feel that it’s my duty to show people around the world that the turntable DJ is still alive and continues to refresh and captivate audiences.”

Stewart is very excited to share his talents at this San Bruno fundraiser that will feature three music stages; three other DJs; and multiple bands such as Weapon Eleven and The Murkins.

The event will also feature food provided by Don Pico’s, Rib Shack and Tom Henderson Catering and beverages from the San Bruno Lion’s Club, Barefoot Winery, Monta Grano, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and Hess Winery. Games, a kid’s corner and other activities will take place throughout the day.

About Sesene Entertainment:
Sesene Entertainment is a worldwide entertainment company specializing in production and talent management. It finds, manages and takes up-and-coming artists to the next level.

For more information about Sesene Entertainment, or to download Stewart’s latest tracks, visit: www.seseneentertainment.com .

VIDEO:

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Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: For some time Billboard Magazine published a “Top 200” chart, which purported to identify the 200 best-selling records in the country. It used a variety of methodologies over time to comprise this data. Initially it relied on “store reports” from a limited (“small-n”) sample of retail record stores, together with feedback from local radio stations, to determine what records were popular in different markets. Record companies relied on the Billboard charts as a proxy for actual record sales. Each record company had a staff of several persons – typically in its accounting department – tracking both its own and competitor activity. The results of these analyses were used to allocate economically scarce marketing and promotional resources, and also to evaluate market share.

Looking back on the early 1970s the structure of the domestic record business seems almost quaint. Many labels were small and independently owned, typically distributing records as best they could through an ad-hoc consortium of local and regional intermediaries. Record stores predominantly were “mom-and-pops” (this does not mean they necessarily were owned or operated by mothers and fathers; rather it is a term of art for non-franchised, non-corporate, one-location, individually-owned stores). Radio stations also typically were locally-owned. There was some national account advertising, but local advertisers predominated. While radio stations were formatted along genre-specific lines, they had greater flexibility to identify and play particular records in response to local market preferences. Typically there was one concert promoter in each city, who booked all of the big acts into whatever venues were available.

There came a time in the mid to late-1970s when this changed dramatically. Record labels began consolidating into larger distribution groups such as WEA Corp. (Warner Bros. – Elektra – Asylum). As a counterpart, record retail also began to consolidate. Large “central warehouse retailers” emerged, such as Musicland Group and TransWorld Entertainment. Rack-jobbers such as Handleman and Lieberman basically ran the in-store record departments for large “black-box” retailers such as K-Mart and Sears. “Category-killer” stores such as Tower boldly proclaimed to stock every record ever made, or at least those currently available in catalog. While some of them remained influential as trend-setters or taste-makers, the over-all influence of mom-and-pop stores waned. Record companies dropped them as separate accounts, requiring them instead to purchase inventory at a mark-up from consolidators known as “one-stops.” Commensurately, radio stations began to consolidate into large national groups. Playlists became more regimented in order to attract specific types of consumers, targeted by national advertisers. Concert promotion began to consolidate into large regional firms, able to guarantee acts large advances and book them efficiently into chains of venues they controlled.

Billboard was slow to respond to these developments. Eventually it recognized different genres of music had different product life cycle characteristics, so it established separate charts to track them. It implemented various reforms to its data-collection process. By and large, however, these were superficial. As the record business became more corporatized (and more lucrative, with the advent of CDs), record companies became incentivized to manipulate the Billboard charts. This typically was done for a single purpose: to create the appearance of sales activity, when in fact the actual volume of records sold was less. This appearance of sales activity in turn palliated the management of artists under contract with the label; and justified disproportionate claims on marketing and promotional resources, which still had to be allocated as an economic commodity among competing claimants. The old store-reporting and station-reporting call-out techniques were easy to game, particularly with the rise of independent promotion and payola-type kickbacks in the mid to late-1980s.

Retail reporting technology continued to evolve however with the creation of scanners, bar-codes and computers to store and analyze the resulting data. Suddenly it became possible to track consumer purchasing behavior in a way that corresponded more accurately to actual purchases. A company called SoundScan was able to navigate the complex politics between record retailers and record distributors and introduced retail tracking technology to the record business in the late 1990s – early 2000s. Initially it too relied on a small-n sample size, however this continued to increase, and SoundScan continued to refine its algorithms to arrive at a better estimate of the overall N population. Record companies finally were able to discern what actually was selling in a particular ADI (“area of dominant influence” – a term for a retail marketing area). It also became possible to construct far more accurate overall national sales charts, such as the Billboard top 200.

In parallel, a company called Broadcast Data Systems (BDS) made it possible to identify the actual number of times (and when and where) a record was played. By correlating SoundScan with BDS data, a record company could achieve a reasonably refined estimate of marketplace activity using real, data-driven statistics. This made it possible to devote (still-scarce) marketing and promotion resources to breaking records in places where they actually were demanded, and to evaluate competitor performance. There remained ways to manipulate both the SoundScan and BDS charts, however, over time it became more difficult to do so. In most instances this required more effort than it was worth, in the sense that the cost (and legal risk) to maintain a data-manipulation staff outweighed the economic and quasi-economic benefit potentially achievable by doing so. SoundScan in particular still has important exceptions to its coverage; for example, it does not include sales data from several large black-box retailers, which (despite their large market share) only incidentally sell music.

Here is a quarterly compilation of the Billboard Top 200 sales chart for each calendar quarter from 1970 through 1986. Although an interesting historical project, I doubt it would be worthwhile to enter this data into computer-readable format. The main reason why is because it lacks construct validity; all it really measures is position on the Billboard chart. For the reasons set forth, this has only a poor relationship with actual record sales, and there is no way to determine what they were, anyway. In my judgment, during this period, the amount of this variance could be as high as 50%.

Article is Copr. © 2010 by David Kronemyer.

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75% Commission! Hop On The Gravy Train! Learn Internet Success Today!
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Great Conversion Rate! We create awesome Hip-Hop, Pop, R&b, Latin, and other urban style music. You can have instant access to this music and use it Royalty Free. This music is hip, creative and today. Mt. Dew just used our music in a National commercial.
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Sweden /Music Industry Newswire/ — According to Toontrack, the new set “Allen Morgan II S2PP” was produced “in conjunction with our good friend Allen Morgan, this pack of presets for Superior Drummer 2.0 picks up right where Allen´s last pack left of. Giving you yet another great set of tools to spice up you Superior Drummer 2.0 mixes.”

Rock, pop, country or metal – whatever the project, these audio gems will help you bring your drum mix to life. Just download, install and mix – it really couldn´t be much simpler.

Allen Morgan has worked with a diverse range of artists spanning from Country giants such as Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire to pop acts like NSYNC and rock acts such as Nine Inch Nails and Stevie Nicks. Allen is known for his innovative mixing and his ability to create unique, expansive soundscapes and being able to lend a contemporary touch to all his work without ever losing track of the organic feel. Aside from traditional mixing and producing, he is also quickly becoming one of the most sought after programmers/re-mixers in the business.

For use with Superior Drummer 2.0, the price of these new presets is $9 (US) as a download from the Toontrack Music site.

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Ontario, Canada /Music Industry Newswire/ — ASK Video Interactive Media, a leading creator of software tutorials on DVD, is now shipping The Studio Edge: Pro Audio Recording Series Tutorial on DVD, announced in July. This first installment, entitled Studio Concepts, Gear & the Physics of Sound, is designed to give home recording enthusiasts the solid grounding in audio engineering and sound recording that are crucial to success in the studio.

“If you’re starting to put together a studio and are feeling overwhelmed with everything around you,” says Steve Kostrey, President of ASK Video, “let us help you out by teaching you the fundamentals of audio so you’ll never feel like an alien in your own studio again.”

The tutorial’s author, Jim Pavett, provides a detailed overview on every aspect of the recording process, with hands on projects covering how to set up monitors, how to handle phase issues, and how to properly place microphones. Although there is some theory involved, everything is explained clearly, complete with hundreds of helpful visuals. Throughout the tutorial, Jim also provides opportunities for the user to get involved. Whether it’s figuring out which frequency one’s hearing tops out at, or moving around the room to figure out the best place to put the monitors, there are tons of practical lessons to try out.

The DVD uses ASK Videos proven user interface to present more than 3 hours of instruction divided into 92 high-quality video chapters. The chapters range from physics of sound topics such as Sound Waves, Ohm’s Law, Frequency, and Phase, to studio concepts like Headroom, Compression, EQ, and Delay/Reverb as well as covering specifics related to studio gear such as Microphone Placement, Patch Bays, MIDI, Computers, and more.

Pricing and Availability: The Studio Edge: Pro Audio Recording Series, Studio Concepts, Gear & the Physics of Sound is now available for $69.99 USD.

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Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Let’s say you want to make some money in the music business. Let’s also say you have no scruples about how you get the cash as long as it looks somewhat legit. There are many dark alleys down which you can run, but there’s also a brightly lit pathway that is a relatively safe way to screw artists out of money: You can put on an indie awards show.

Here are the steps you need to take to become a player in the indie scene by selling naive musicians the dream of fame and fortune.

1)
To begin, you will need a name. A few moments of searching on the Internet will reveal the names of your competitors so you’ll know what to avoid. Then, you can simply put several words together to capture the spirit of your particular dodge. How about this: Southern California Audience Media Music Indie Event.

That’s right: welcome to the S C A M M I E S.

2)
Next thing you do is get a website. See if you can get a friend or relative to host it for free by promising them they’ll get access to all the female contestants backstage.

3)
You will also need a snappy logo that you can put on the website as well as printing it on stationary, press releases, and banners.

4)
Set a date for your show that is many, many months in the future. This allows you to work your “magic” for as long as possible.

5)
Then you start affiliating with as many firms, companies, sponsors, managers, attorneys, artists, publicists, bookers, agents, and music publications as possible. “But some of these people are bottom feeders,” I hear you say. Ah, but that’s known as “name recognition.” Sign ‘em up with an online trade: you run their name, photo and logo if they’ll run your logo and write up an announcement in their newsletter.

See if any of the legitimate industry publications will be fooled into affiliating with you. Some of the Hollywood trade papers often have an intern assigned to increasing their “web presence” and you might just wind up with their logo on your page sitting right next to some of your fellow bottom-feeder organizations, thus lending you a bit of perceived prestige.

Bottom line here: any time you can trade logos with anyone, do so. The idea is to have so many logos on your site that it looks like a NASCAR jumpsuit.

6)
It is very important that the SCAMMIES have a large number of categories. Let me emphasize this: you need LOTS of categories for your awards show. The more categories, the more entries. The more entries, the more cash up front from the entry fees.

All the indie awards shows do this. In five minutes of searching some online sites, I looked at the awards categories for seven different indie awards shows. The fewest categories offered was 27; the highest was 80.

Eighty! It’s actually not that difficult. Consider: Best Male Guitarist, Hard Rock. Then feature the same for Bass, Keyboards, Drums and Vocals. Then feature the same for Female. Then do it all again for Pop, Jazz, Blues, Country, Hardcore, Reggae, and Cover Bands. Oops, sorry: “Tribute Bands.” Add categories for manager, publicist, songwriter, band name, logo, CD package design, video, etc.

Okay, okay, I know that the Grammys, an organization to which I belong, has more than a hundred categories. But the Grammys are not taking money from indie musicians. You have to have a commercially released recording to enter. Presumably, this means there is some actual business being conducted.

7)
Make a deal with an electronic presskit firm to charge independent artists at least thirty bucks for each entry.

Then you post invitations on eight hundred thirty-five thousand websites, blogs and ezines. Be sure to hit up all the niche music sites and discussion boards.

9)
Make lofty-sounding promises that cannot quite be measured. You want every artist who reads about the SCAMMIES to think that their songs will be heard by every important person in every aspect of the music industry. Just don’t say that.

Consider this sentence: “Now is the time for your music to be heard by platinum-selling artists, superstar producers, ad agency production teams, motion picture and television music supervisors, and the presidents of every major music distributor and touring organization in the world!”

Or this one: “Your music deserves to be played for true industry insiders, the people who can put your career into fast-track interstellar overdrive to fantastic success!”

Or this: “Of course, you can hold back and not advance your career, or you can Make Your Move today towards achieving every bit of success you know you deserve!”

Of course. Who wouldn’t want all that? Put those sentences right next to the “Enter Now” button on your website and lots of gullible artists will dig into their pockets or ask their parents for the entry fee.

10)
Get some local promoters, industry hangers-on, and questionable managers to agree to judge one aspect of your venture. They don’t have to be involved for more than a few moments. All you have to do is arrange to send them some MP3 files for them to “judge.”

For example, if the booker for that run-down blues club on the wrong side of the tracks will agree to judge the preliminary round for best blues guitarist, that’s great. Now you have another “name” to feature in your long list of judges on your site. If they want to show up at a bunch of your preliminary events as well as the main show, terrific. If they just want to be quoted in one of your press releases, then that’s fine, too.

Maybe you’ll get lucky and find an aging rock star who wants a bit of publicity. In exchange for using their name and picture, you feature them as a “Celebrity Honorary Judge” in all your press materials. They don’t actually have to do anything. (Hell, I have seen some shows where the celebrities listed on the site had no idea their names were being used at all.)

11)
Send out a weekly e-newsletter about what’s happening with the SCAMMIES. It can be long or short, but it needs to say that “There are still great opportunities to get on stage, get your music heard, get a bigger fan base, and get on track for success!”

12)
Offer entrants the opportunity to feature their artist photo and/or logo on your site. It’s simple to create a “Featured Artist” page on your site and each entrant who pays a few extra bucks gets the first position on the page. And they stay in first position right up until the next artist pays a few extra bucks. See if you can encourage a competition in this part of your site. Hey, you might create another category: Artists Showing Support. (What a fitting acronym that makes.)

13)
Upsell. Hold monthly showcases at local clubs. Tell artists it is absolutely not mandatory but that it is a way to build fan awareness (you are going to make online voting one aspect of your award show, right?) Plus, you can let them know that the “special, unique, spotlight premiere platinum artist showcase events” will help influence the judges when artists are in that all-important Final Round.

Oh, did I mention that these are pay-to-play showcases? Each artist will purchase tickets which they can sell (“you can make a profit on your performance participation!”) prior to the showcase.

You can also sell pay-to-play slots for the pre-show performances. And pay-to-play slots at the pre-show dinner. And pay-to-play slots at the main show itself.

Naturally, you will encourage each artist to buy seats to that pre-show dinner. And buy seats to the main show. (My favorite line from this ploy was worded this way: “Dinner seats are $45 or reserve a table for ten for the special price of just $450!”)

14)
Worried that the press will expose you? Not a problem. You have already offered to trade online banners with all the local press. And you are offering judgeships to the writers and editors of those publications. And you will be running at least one co-op ad paid for by one or more of your sponsors. Remember, the mainstream press rarely attacks advertisers, so you can imagine how rare it is for smaller publications who you have roped into participating with your show. Plus, some of these publications may be running their own awards shows, so they know how the game is played.

Follow these steps and you will be on your way to hell. Oops, I mean you will be on your way to a highly-regarded position in the indie music community.

Article is Copr. © 2010 by John Scott G.

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