Monday, November 26, 2007

Your Music Must Be Seen to Be Appreciated

It had been a glorious sunset on the mountains. One of those days when majesty and glory seem to be in the fresh scarlet lit air. It was a day for discovery and I wanted to find some new music, a new band to listen to and share with my friends. I went to that awe-inspiring compendium of video on the web YouTube to try and find some new Independent Music groups. To my amazement I found nothing but the big major label brand names that are everywhere anyway. I wanted to find new music!

I realized as quickly as the winter’s night closed the last sunset there was a problem. With days of work I could find a few interesting groups on YouTube, but quite frankly, the picking is very slim and I know there is a lot of good music waiting out there. Look, that is what you need to think about, look and be seen. You have to be seen to be heard and music video is the way to do that.

The first goal is to get you musicians to create more videos from your already existing tracks. My next goal is to point you in a direction where you can be easily found.

Towards that first goal I shall point you all to get on your movie maker programs that should be on the computer you peruse the Internet with. Assuming you have a PC. If not you must get access to a simple editing program. Dump your full quality soundtrack onto the timeline and start making a video. Take images of the band or make them up and create a video around your music. Something tasty.

A good place to get images and film clips that are public domain, for your new impressive video production, is the Internet Archive at http://www.archive.org/details/movies. There should be plenty there for you to work with and get your taste buds moving. I have not only pointed many a band to this treasure trove of clips but have seen the extraordinary videos that have been fashioned out of them.

If you are stuck for creative juice in video gather up your friends. Ask your visually inspired friends to do it for you. It is on your computer, easy to use and produces a file you can upload almost anywhere.

Once you have that file you must upload it everywhere. I mean everywhere. You have to get on YouTube because you just have to. At the same time you can be sure that you will never be found there. The only views will be your friends, family and you. YouTube thrives on the traffic you bring them and you will get a few strangers that may fall into your material. It is a billion to one shot but people get hit by lightning too. Do not depend on this to be your key to world stardom or discovery. You must expand out and find places to be seen.

I always suggest that musicians put their stuff up at MusicTV http://www.MusicTV.com/share/ because they are a strictly niche music site. Here you upload your music video where they convert and hosts your material in FLV format. They give you code to put the video on your own site, blog or wherever at the same time as promoting you on a music only site. You put your own keyword tags and do not have to add “music video” or “Independent Music” and can focus the keywords on what your group is all about. You can additionally select up to three categories, or genre, to display under and the search looks at tags and descriptions to provide results. The tags become relevant to search as well as the terms in your description.

You can put your music and favorites into a group and be found in groups and search. All of a sudden you pop up in searches everywhere! You get on the front page easier and you can be found. People are there for music and it is broken down to genre for them with easy search. Everything is fed to the blogosphere with RSS feeds! That means all content is broadcast to all the important news consolidators on the Internet. It is a great starting point for any group.

The best feature at MusicTV is I can find and share all the new music on this site because the site is all legal. No one is allowed to upload “Madonna” except Madonna. So that makes this a home to the Independent musician. MusicTV.com is an independent music site for independent musicians who want to be seen since 1996.