Coverfight

Coverfight is over, the results are posted and voting is now up. My cover of Ken's Super Duper Band's Too Goth Too Rock is on there (with background vocals by John Benjamin) as is Henrietta's really well done country cover of We're Not Friends. It was a neat experience though I kinda ran out out energy to obsess over the mix of my cover at some point. I was assigned a solid song that really didn't need much done to it so I did a fairly straightforward cover.

There are a lot of other really good covers in there so be sure to check them out.

musicBrad Turcottelink Comments
iTunes Affiliate Program

The iTunes affiliate program is really, really exciting. I've written many times about the need for more DJs, independent radio and general music filter services on the net. Thankfully, MP3 blogs have become hugely popular in the past few months and are still growing at a crazy rate. Now iTunes Affliates can link directly to any songs, albums or artists on iTunes and receive 5% commission on any sales they're responsible for. Meaning that if you were an affiliate and you were to, say, link to my album on iTunes and anyone buys anything, you get 5%. Holy smokes! That's an incentive to promote my music far beyond anything I as a penniless and disorganized independent artist could offer on my own and that's just plain awesome.

So on top of it simply being fun to share music with your friends, you can now make some cash on the side just from people following your recommendations. These are the sorts of innovations and stunts that the digital music industry can pull off which I think will make it an exciting, interesting place, and I think we've only just now started scratching the surface of what can be done.

Also: Looks like even a smart guy like Cringely thinks it's exciting too. And he summarizes it excellently: "This is like sending tens of thousands of record sales people out on the road except that they can sell anything THEY like -- any of the one million iTunes songs -- making them salespeople with real conviction and maybe even with good taste."

business, musicBrad Turcotterant Comments
Open Torrent Trackers

Does anyone know of any good/popular Bittorrent trackers for legit (aka legal) material? I'm thinking about putting together an EP for one or more of my songs that I've released the source to. It would include the original song, a collection of the best remixes and possibly the source for the track as well.

I don't really want to deal with the hassle of trying to sell such a thing, but I'm thinking a big free torrent would get the job done nicely.

Please drop me a line if you know of any trackers I could use to distribute this thing.

Brad Turcottemisc Comments