Entertaiment and Information

February 2012Monthly Archives

Epictunes The right place for unsigned bands

Epictunes, a UK based company takes on the industry to provoke a music revolution.

Epictunes believes that true musicians, bands and artists are being replaced with corporate goldmines.

“Times are about to change” says company founder Matthew Ridout.

With the recent worldwide boost of unsigned bands who needs the record companies? If there is a platform to sell your music directly to fans why not cut out the greedy middle man?

With the recent explosion in the UK of The Artic Monkeys and Gnarls Barkley the music loving public are only too aware that there is good music to be found on the internet. As both these now very famous bands discovered by generating their fan base on the internet first.

Bands and artist now need a place where they can do this. Some people might argue that myspace is that place. With myspace now worth in the region of 400 million US dollars is that not a corporation itself? It’s as hard to get heard on myspace as it is on national radio. This is where Epictunes comes in.

Epictunes boasts an array of features to try and help unsigned bands and artists to reach their audience. It’s free to join to make use of the standard features of the site, you can upload up to four tracks, photo of the band, a profile and a direct message system.

For a small subscription fee bands can upload unlimited songs, post blogs, upload photos, upload videos, feature on a CD, get promoted on their radio stations and feature on their monthly podcast.

Epictunes is indeed the stepping stone to recognition on a world wide scale.

The site is located at Epictunes Site

Digitalization of Entertainment

Consumers have moved rapidly to adopting digital formats for consuming entertainment-related content. The most obvious example of this is music and video downloads, with Apple’s iTunes and YouTube as leading examples. Apple has sold more than one billion songs via its iTunes music store and it continues to demonstrate a spectacular rate of growth. Over 30,000,000 individuals have purchased an iPod portable music device, and tens of millions of other consumers use one of dozens of other portable devices to listen to music. Other platforms for listening to music are equally successful, and in the case of Microsoft’s Windows Media Player even more dominant with over 90,000,000 systems running the software globally. Real Networks Rhapsody, and Yahoo! Music represent other major entrants in this space. In addition to those companies selling licensed music downloads for a fee, peer-to-peer networks such as Limewire and Morpheus claim to have tens of millions of users sharing music and other files on a continual basis.

As consumers have become comfortable purchasing (and stealing) music online, they are now beginning to download other digital forms of entertainment, including music videos, short-subject films, television shows, and even full-length Hollywood pictures. Traditional media companies have recognized the opportunity to establish new revenue streams and leverage old assets by enabling consumers to download television programming for a fee, and the adoption rate appears to match the early days of music downloading. The increasing penetration of broadband connections (over 50 million homes in the US), advances in software that enables high-quality downloads, and content companies recognizing an enormous opportunity to distribute directly and inexpensively to consumers has created a tidal shift in the number of digital media assets available for download to computers, handheld devices, and even cell phones.

Companies such as YouTube are at the forefront of the intersection of video entertainment and the fragmentation of media due to the empowerment of the consumer. Hundreds of millions of videos are downloaded weekly from YouTube (as well as dozens of competitors), and a significant portion of those videos are not “professionally” produced. More importantly, new talent in various entertainment fields are being discovered through these distribution platforms and forever changing how entertainment is conceived, produced, distributed, and valued.

Drum Tips Why didn t you get the Gig

Have you been auditioning for different bands and not getting the gig? Musicians are very critical of the other musicians they play with, although they will probably not be brutally honest about what they see and hear. We don’t want to hurt your feelings so we say something nice and then never call you again. I have auditioned many, many musicians who never got a call back. Here are some the most important aspects of an audition – mistakes musicians have made when auditioning for one of my bands:

1) Skill – can you keep up?

I have auditioned many guys thought they could play but couldn’t keep proper time or didn’t know what chord changes were going on, got lost in every song – just couldn’t keep up musically.

2) Listening – are you paying attention?

I have played with a few really skilled musicians who paid absolutely no attention to what was going on around them. It was like they had spent years practicing by themselves in their bedroom. They could play amazing things but what they played made no sense in the context of the band. The notes you play should complement what everybody else is doing and the song should work as a whole.

3) Personality – are you a nice person?

This is a big deal – I have played some shows with great players who live their life a sentence or two from a punch in the face. Remember when you were a kid and folks told you “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I have met many great musicians who desperately need to revisit that concept. They were so full of negativity that it was really hard to be in the same room with them for very long.