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Over the past few years the music industry is going through some serious growing pains. And while the industry is still new digital outfit as an ill-fitting coat of cassettes, I, for one, love hearing about young startups, which are trying to turn the music industry is better (and more modern) place to go and do business. Although digital media gave bars access to a wider audience and cheap distribution channels, it is still as hard as ever for artists to make a buck and blast their music and brand messages widely, efficiently and effectively.
Early adopter community has gone bonkers over the Turntable as the platform for detection of fm music, although it is true that even fans turntable skeptical of its long-term viability. And it's nice to finally Spotify in the United States, as well as cool services like exFm, SoundTracking, Rexly and e-commerce VibeDeck, of which some youngun funk music space.
Last month, Brenden Mulligan, founder, ArtistData (syndication tool for musicians to post information on the Internet), started a new musical venture entitled poster with a simple task: create a simple way for bands to build a real Web presence without the need to maintain this presence.
Band does not have many options when it comes to maintaining a simple but unique Web personality; Of course, there are some great sites for direct fan sales, digital out-of-band management, career Coaching (and BandCamp, for example, offers some excellent Web hosting page), but many of these sites are trying to do too much and end up with fragmented user interfaces.
Thus with the landscape in the manner and with keyboard Cat plays Myspace poster intervened on stage is very timely. Bands like simple, automatic (and friendly) way to keep eIdentity and poster does this in such a way that is not unlike About me. As Alex wrote last month, poster, thus allows bands to create and authenticate them through Facebook or Twitter and connect easily with third-party services, such as Soundcloud, Bandcamp and ReverbNation. (And social media services like Posterous, Tumblr and YouTube.)
Bar you can customize the poster design, changes in simple things like font and widget positioning, but they really don't have to get their hands dirty, because their page is updated via a connection with those other platforms by a third party.
With this in place today, only a month after its first launch, the poster goes from a limited beta. What does it mean? When the framework initially to invite or sit on a waiting list before getting in, but now the poster is open and available so that anyone can register. And it's still free.
Another notable update that comes along with the evacuation of a limited beta is that the poster is now offering a "preview" version of "pro account" (Mulligan said, was in great demand since launch), which offers a greater degree of customization, including custom domain names, fewer poster, branding, more social networking make, and so on. Currently in preview mode, which means that artists can choose to test features without paying the pro accounts. When you declare pricing, Mulligan told me, the artists will be able to choose to keep the advanced or return to the main free account.
Among other updates, poster now allows the artist to add custom meta tags to customize the navigation pane, delete the poster title, add as/subsequent buttons include Google analytics accounts, create custom icons for mobile devices, tablets, Web browsers, and Facebook, as well as the ability to add links to your music on iTunes, Beatport, CD Baby, top spin and Bandcamp (or adding custom links to the sites, the poster is not yet supported).
These new features offer some great additional features beyond what is clearly a rapidly growing user base. Since launch, the poster has been on a tear as Mulligan told me that today, more than 10 000 artists have signed up to use the service, all in just over one month. Among the artists now using poster Owl City, which have 6 million Facebook likes, Paramore, who loves FB 18 million, and Kearney mate, who spend most of last week as # 1 on iTunes. Not too shabby.
Currently poster continues in download mode, but Mulligan clearly ramping start Monetizing through the addition of pro accounts, which are likely to be implemented in the next few months.
This magnificent site, so get out there and check it out and let us know what you think.
