Stephen Merritt of The Magnetic Fields publishes guitar tablature with lyrics and chords for his songs.
This kind of thing was almost non-existent in the days when CDs and vinyl records were synonymous with the music business. Back in the old days helping people to play the compositions for themselves was limited to helping aspiring [...]
This forum thread on bradsucks.comnet about where community members first heard his music is a great source of data on how internet musicians should prioritize distribution outlets.
A quick undisciplined survey of the results:
14 soundtrack (Brad Sucks’ music was used as a soundtrack to a video, and the forum poster followed a link [...]
Crosbie Fitch’s comment on my post about interlinking between musician blogs:
I suspect that a lot of the non-linking behaviour on musicians’ websites comes from the subtle cultural indoctrination we’ve been living with for a few centuries now (since the advent of copyright) that a musician who is influenced by others is a lesser musician (by [...]
What’s missing from these three excellent musician sites, all of them full-fledged blogs, as well as from my own musician blog?
Brad Sucks
Jonathan Coulton’s blog
[...]
Here are observations on the site for Ingrid Michaelson’s music.
I like:
Music autoplays on the home page. That’s what the site is about, let’s not waste time and clicks getting to it.
Navigation within the site never interrupts playback. As I write this I’m been having a continuous enjoyable experience with the music for about [...]
Good bloggers have a warmer and more intimate voice than writers in publications like the New York Times. This applies to musicians as well.
So let’s say that, per yesterday’s post here, we’re moving from a world of albums containing singles to a world where musicians release a series of songs that accumulate like posts [...]
Over on the blog for my own music I have posted about an article on my music over on the guitar section of a general reference site called LoveToKnow.com.
The story happened because the author, Kevin Casper, saw me play at a small bar. He had no reason to know about all the online work [...]
In a comment on the cut/copy post, gurdonark posted a mini-manifesto on musician’s web presence.
If I were expressing a similar idea, I might try it this way:
music should be hosted and managed on sites controlled by the musicians
sites controlled by musicians need not follow the rigid label/release dynamics of the past
sites controlled by musicians need [...]
Patrick Woodward’s MILA project is an example of how musicians manage their presence on the web.
There is a personal blog post about creating and managing the work at http://www.patwoodward.com/2008/04/mila-album-on-web.html.
There is a page which is a hub for the work itself at http://milamusic.tumblr.com/.
There are a bunch of distribution points for getting the work in front [...]