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What's new with Tamago click here. Past Articles:

Musicians, Artists, Writers, Photographers, Videographers, and Software Developers - Do You Have A Business Model?
Extracting audio files from Video
How to turn your PC into a music studio for less than $1000.
Declaration of Musician Independence
Publishing on Tamago
Are You a Writer
Are You a Musician? Photographer? Artist?

Musicians, Artists, Writers, Photographers, Videographers, and Software Developers - Do You Have A Business Model?

The may seem like a dumb question to many. Why do I need one? If I do my work well, customers will come. This seldom happens and when it does it’s news worthy. The opposite of this is more operative; if you do a bad job customers will go elsewhere.

Unless you are prepared to do your own marketing and a lot less of your art then you will need some help. First you need to understand the changing lay of the land.

First, over half of the work of musicians, writers and software developers are sold over the internet as downloadable files. This will only increase to the point of only boutique publishing of hard copy of books, CDs and Photographs.

Second, the old publishing houses are in decline since self publishing has become fairly easy and inexpensive. What the old publishing houses did offer was aggressive marketing. The reality is that that marketing was geared to those that they felt could get the biggest bang for the buck. This included people that were already successful or were rising stars that the publishing houses made and “owned”.

Internet downloading and self publishing has made the market more democratic but how does one market oneself in this new reality. Every artist should have a website. A group of artists (up to ten) can share a business site at Aplus.net each with their unique domain names, pages and email addresses at those domain names for just $7.00/month. I don’t think $0.70 a month will break any artist, even homeless ones.

In addition to ones own website and domain artists can get free profiles on FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter and UMakeITCool. An artist can sell their digital media files on Amazon, UMakeITCool, and if they have already made a CD or two, iTunes. The artist can buy search advertising on a large variety of search engines and on UMakeITCool’s internal search engine.

The next step is get friends, followers and anybody you can get to help out. The best way to make this work is see that they get a piece of the profit. You can pay them directly or preferable, you can have them get payment through a referral system. Amazon and UMakeITCool both have referral systems that pay those that refer a particular media file to a buyer. So let's build a referral network. Get every Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, Friends and Acquaintance websites put in references to particular product profiles on Amazon or UMakeITCool. Complete strangers will do this for you if they think they can move some of your media since they will make money.

The advantage of UMakeITCool over Amazon and others is, it is a one stop shop and you can upload your media to it seconds after you make it and be on the market, tweet to your marketeers and be off and running.

What could be sweeter? Pure frosting maybe. In the UMakeITCool system the buyer has the option to tip the artist, a friend or himself with a small part of the price. Also, the artist gets both user and artist pages they can customize and they can reference their other sites including Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn and virtually any other site they have a presence in. The frosting? UMakeITCool puts cash in the artist’s search advertising account.

UMakeITCool is non-exclusive, uses no DRM (users hate it). Now artist’s have a business model and UMakeITCool makes it happen.

Check UMakeITCool out.

Extracting audio files from Video

I had a DVD that contained a performance of a Musical Performance. I was given permission to put the Audio on Tamago. So, how do you do that?

The first challence was to turn the individual VOB files on the DVD into mpeg files. No Problem. I downloaded "Magic DVD Ripper" and it created a folder full of mpeg files in short order. Then I wanted to strip the audio from these and create MP3 files. After trying a few products that didn't work I found "Audio to Video Converter." This worked well but only converted the files one at a time. I suspect there is a way to do a whole batch at once but it wasn't immediately obvious.

At this point I edited, created samples and concatenated files together using "WavePad" from NCH Swift Sound Software. This is my tried and true, simple to use audio tool from the folks down under.

I also needed a tool to get a still photo out of the video file. I purchased VideoSnaps Lite Edition to do this for $39.00. I feel the price is a bit much for this product and the free trial implants their logo on top of the photo so you can't do much of anything with that. When you stop the video to make a JPEG make sure you click the radio button marked "Current" otherwise you will get the snapshot at the beginning. I got three of those before I noticed that button. It takes a couple of minutes for the software to build the snapshot so you have to be patient. This software is from a company called Neuraltek also in Australia. Multimedia seems to be the Aussie's bag.

How to turn your PC into a music studio for less than $1000.

There are many ways to go about this but I found a relatively simple solution. You can always use cards that plug into your computer but then you have the computer fan noise to contend with. Besides, the less you have to cart around the better. M-Audio makes a neat little solid state stereo recorder that is about the size of a pack of cigarettes that is very adequate for most gigs. It's so easy to use that even a cave man can do it. (Sorry Geico.) Here's what I put together:

The MicroTrack comes with a funny little bow-tie stereo condenser mic which is perfectly fine for conversations but not too great for music. It's probably worthwhile to record with the bow-tie first to see if you really need to go out and get some better mics. Your instruments, room acoustics, background noises or other problems may need to be solved first.

The Microtrack comes with a 128MB CompactFlash card. That may seem like a lot but not when you are recording high quality WAVE Audio. I picked up a 2GB card at Fry's Electronics for $25.00 after rebate. With this card I can record practically as long as the batteries last which is 2 hours. There is no reason you can't have a fist full of CompactFlash cards and keep you recorder powered up during a gig. There is an LCD screen on the Recorder which will tell you how much of the Flash card is used and the charge left on the battery.

The MicroTrack has a USB port and cable that makes it look like a disk drive to your computer so the files you've created on your CompactFlash card are now accessible to you. As a first test I tried the little bow-tie mic and recorded my voice. It sounded quite real. Now comes the hard test, recording piano. I set up the mics on either side of the piano with the booms dipping down toward the harp. My wife tried out a short Schubert piece. Pianos are loud! I found that even at the lowest gain settings I had to back the mics away a bit to keep from clipping. When I played back the recording it sounded pretty good.

Now you will want to edit the Audio you created. There are many fine tools that are relatively inexpensive. I have used WavePad and Audacity. Audacity is free and comes with the MicroTrack recorder so you can't beat the price. Now you are all set to go. Enjoy!

Declaration of Musician Independence

In the past musicians had to sign up with recording companies in order to succeed. Part and parcel in these deals is a signup for a long duration and for a sum and royalties that look fine when you are a starving musician but turn out to be quite paltry when you’ve had even mild success. Yes, a few make it big, very few. You have better odds with a major state lottery. So, what’s the alternative?

It turns out that in this day and age an individual can turn their garage or spare room into a pretty reasonable studio for less than $1,000. This means that you don’t need the recording company for that. So what do you need the recording company for? They claim that they have the distribution system so you can’t distribute without their help. That was true before the Internet. Now you can have your own website for less than $10 month and sell CDs, tee shirts, coffee mugs and anything else that is related to your music.

That still doesn’t get you off the ground. You have to get people to your website. You need others to promote your music and provide an easy way for them to sample it. Many musicians go to CDBaby (www.cdbaby.com) to sell their CDs and go to Tamago (www.tamago.us) or the iTunes store (www.itunes.com for iPod only) to sell downloads. Practically everyone under 30 now plays their music on portable MP3 (or iPod) players so it is a simple matter to download a song for that purpose off the Internet. All three of these outlets have pretty good search engines to help a user find what they want. Tamago probably has the simplest means for a musician to publish; it takes less than 5 minutes to publish a song and their search engine is very “Google” like.

Downloads are the major growth market whereas the CD market has been shrinking for the last couple of years. The pace of this trend will quicken soon when home entertainment systems will be Internet enabled and computer centric. It is a goal of both Microsoft and Intel to make the home entertainment system Internet and computer centric and I suspect that products along these lines are appearing now. When this happens the CD will go the way of the 331/3 RPM record and become a footnote in history.

Another trend to be aware of is that their will be a major shift back to MP3 away from the iTunes format for the iPod. This is due to the fact that every cell phone manufacturer is designing or already has on the market cell phones that are MP3 players. I think it is safe to say that in the near future all cell phones will have MP3 players by default since this capability is not difficult to include on board a cell phone chip. People, in general, (unless they're total geeks) don’t like to carry several electronic devices if they can get that functionally combined into one device. It won’t be long before you can get a phone that contains a camera, MP3 player, WiMax, GPS, voice activation, speaker recognition, encryption, video, and all the functionality of a PDA in one device. Okay, the first ones will be a expensive but like all electronic devices the price will shrink and have added capabilities that we haven’t dreamed of yet but find we can’t do without.

Getting back to the subject at hand, what does independence buy you? First, it means that you can take advantage of technological trends as they happen and not wait for the goliath recording companies to change course. Second, it means that you can make as many deals as you like with a myriad of outlets as long as none of them are exclusive. Third, it means you will not be a slave to a recording company, going where and doing what they require of you. And fourth but definitely not last, it means you can take home a bigger share of the take.

Publishing on Tamago

The material you want to publish should be in a form that is readily usable by the intended audience. Music ideally should be either .wav or .mp3 files for the greatest universality. Images in .jpg files are the most universal. Videos in .mov, .avi or .wmv are the most common although .mpg is still in use. eBooks and written material can be in a large number of formats the most common being .doc and .pdf. The intended reader device is generally the final determiner of the format to use. More details on formats are available under each publishing category. See Publishing on Tamago

Although it isn’t mandatory you should also provide a sample file in a format generally available on a PC. In the case of images you might want to put a watermark or the word “sample” on top of the image. In the case of eBook, video or music files a short excerpt generally suffices.

Also not mandatory but highly recommended is a picture that to go with your file. If you are publishing images in .jpg format you will get the picture automatically. With any other media you will need to supply the picture. Any picture is better than no picture even if it’s a picture of your cat. The picture must be in .jpg format.

Writer?

Musician? Photographer? Artist?

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