Mike McCready

As per my last post on this blog, I’ve been playing around with About.me for the past few days, curating my profile and checking out others’ profiles. I think About.me is really interesting. It’s fun to just flick through the featured profiles, and to just stumble upon random ones. It’s like people-watching in an airport [...]

About me is a great tool for creating a splash page about yourself.

No explanation necessary. Just press play.

I’ve been thinking about a clever way to describe our new Song to Opportunity (S₂O) Matching system and that’s the best I’ve come up with so far. It turns your song into an opportunity magnet.

Today we’re rolling out (in beta) what I consider to be our first tech-sexy feature – Automatic Song to Opportunity Matching; or as we lovingly call it – S₂O Matching.

Here’s how it works:

I hear a lot of confusion about Facebook’s privacy policies. Apparently a lot of people are planning on quitting Facebook collectively on May 31st. I saw this piece yesterday and thought it explained what’s going on reasonably well. If you want to get a quick understanding of it just watch this short video:

I think this is an interesting question. Let’s eliminate the dream vultures – those who prey on the aspirations and naiveté of artists. We know scammers only work for themselves. But the good thing about those guys is that it’s harder and harder to be a dream vulture in this business. The prevalence of social [...]

Click here to listen to episode one of my brand new podcast that features great new music that I’ve come across recently. It’s the podcast that goes with my music blog at http://song.cat. Check it out. Update – The podcast was just approved and accepted by iTunes: Click here to get it on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=370842199 [...]

Let’s say you don’t work in the music business. Let’s just say you’re an average fan and a musician somehow gets your attention long enough to convince you to listen to their music. You listen. You hate it. Maybe it’s just not your style. Maybe it’s just plain bad. Either way, you’re less likely to give the next musician the chance. And you’re even less likely the time after that and so on until finally you’d rather kiss your sister than listen to another artist try to convince you to give their song a spin.

I do not blame any artist for feeling jaded. The music industry has a long history of mistreating artists and you don’t have to look very far to find artist-facing internet sites that are well-meaning but that can’t live up to their promises. Many times that’s due to the fact that they can’t muster the traffic it takes to help an artist promote their music. Other times, they don’t have the ability to attract industry professionals to their sites to do deals with the artists. Either way, there are simply a lot of dead end sites for artists out there. Artists end up uploading their music over and over again to tons of sites and have little to show for it. Frankly, with over 13 million artist profiles on MySpace alone it’s no wonder it’s harder than ever to stand out.

It’s about time we sent this guy to the loony bin!