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What exactly does a music library do. Music libraries are becoming more important to the indie musician as money gets tighter and the demand for indie placements rises. Songplacements.com is now the premier music library in southern California, helping artists land opportunities previously only available to the majors. With that being said, the insider has a great piece on exactly what a music library is and does. Knowing how company's such as Songplacements.com operate empowers you, the independent musician, allowing you to better exploit our services, and hopefully land more placements!

Came across this article that will definitely increase successful placements. I particularly like the points of saving money with a home studio, building a library, and finding a song writing partner to help compensate for any weaknesses, that you may have.

An organized hustle for placements.

Explore music has recently published the results of a poll determining the scariest theme songs in film. As a songwriter i find this list as an invaluable tool that you can use to compare songs in your library that you have deemed scary. Take a listen to each song in the list, most can be found on Youtube, and listen carefully to what instruments are being used and how they are being used, then mimmic these styles and sounds in your productions. Music supervisors are constantly basing their selections off of similar sounding songs, so having songs that mimmic the top 5 should definitely help with increased placements. Remember good artists copy, great artists steal. Landing at number 1 by the way, Psycho Theme (Psycho) by Bernard Hermann.

Checked out the informant over the weekend. Overall a pretty good movie, although it did drag on. Here's a review of the soundtrack, look carefully at what the reviewer touches upon, it may give you some insight to creating even better music for placement.

The 10 Commandments for getting into the Composing Game There is no magic bullet, i repeat, there is no magic bullet to getting a foot into the composing industry, but what you might be able to find is a healthy formula that when applied - just makes sense. www.scorecastonline.com has posted 10 huge tips on getting into the composing game, and since TV and Film is a large part of our business these tips could definitely help you land more placements. I'll leave you with tip number 9 which i consider to be the most important tip. Don't give up your dreams.

Britney Spears: Baby one more time,

The Bonnaroo music festival cleverly cleverly uses its myspace page to unveil its latest lineup. If you head over to www.mysapce.com/bonnaroo right now you'll be greeted with cuckoo clock that reveals another act every 6 minutes or so. During the course of the day artists will be making their own announcements through the myspace page. Acts that have magically appeared from the cuckoo include: Cross Canadian Ragweed, John Foogerty, Medeski Martin & Wood, Weezer, The Flaming Lips with Stardeath and Wite Dwarfs perfroming The Dark Side of the Moon and the Avett Brothers. Head over to the bonnaroo myspace page and see how long you can wait inbetween announcements before you ADD kicks in and forces you to destroy your computer.

Here's an interesting one. Remember when the labels were on Apples heels to allow for a more flexible pricing structure than the 0.99 cent that apple had set? It even got so out of hand that _ started removing content from the iTunes store (Like a big baby!), only later to put it all back in, remember this? Well ever since apple conceded in allowing labels to increase popular tracks from .99 cents to $1.29 digital revenue has slowed. Warner saw and 8 percent growth in the holiday quater verses 20 percent the year before while digital album downloads gre 5 percent in december, down 10 percent in the sept quarter and 11 percent in the june quarter. Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman seems optimistic thought saying that the price change has been a "net positive" for warner, but agreed that a 30 percent price increase during a recession probably wasn't the best move. No duh.

The how to practice guide goes over the essence of simplification, and how exactly it is applied in music. Music simplification is a method of practice that visually breaks music notation down to it's simplest parts. The 7 step example covers 1. Removing dynamics 2. Removing other markings 3. Get rid of tricky notes 4. Taking it further 5. Removing yet more notes 6. holding repeated notes 7. Putting it all back together. Of course it doesn't do justice without the pictures.

Growing your brand on the internet should be similar to growing a tree in your back yard. The internet is an intimidating place when growing your brand as a musician, many bands have already have already racked up hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of fans, followers, myspace plays and you want nothing more to turn your 100 into as many as possible, you know, to catch up. Don't get caught up in the hype. Many of these followers are are faux. Some experiment's finding that 200,000 followers only led to 25 clickthroughs, because their following wasn't grown virally. Conversely, if you grow your 100 fans like a delicate plant it doesn't take long before your true fanbase overtakes the faux disconnected user base. On the internet Viral growth

Are you getting ready to go back into the studio and record your final vocals soon? If the answer is yes, then you might want to take some last moments and study up on things such as posture, breath support, jaw tightness and keeping critic out of the vocal booth. Why? Cause with time being money and all nothing sucks more than being in the booth with an itchy throat, bad takes, the pressure at max and having no clue what to do to get back in the zone.

Telling the lizard brain to be quiet. Seth Godin explains that fear, rage and reproductive drive are all characteristics of the lizard brain. It's predominant fear factor hates change, forward movement and the unknown which of course if a very bad thing if your trying to move forward as a musician. The lizard brain holds you back and keeps you from being successful. Seth's advice? The lizard brain will accompany us in our time on earth, but we can tell it to be quiet, we are listening to something else right now.

All that studio equipment that you're plunking all of your hard earned cash into deserves to be protected. Nothing shows just how much you don't use all of your fancy equipment like a congregation of dust. CompuCover is a company that makes custom-fit covers for your gear. They've been in business since 1979 so you don't have to worry about them vanishing in thin air when you need a replacement and they're cheaper than the dirt gathered between your Tritons Keys. One custom CompuCover sleeve will set you back a cool $16.95 in comparison to the $50-70 price tag of the competition.

If the name Ian Rogers doesn't ring a bell it will soon. Ina Rogers is the CEO of Topsin media, a music client that analysis how your brand is doing online. The data that his company collects suggests that the campaigns that take the shape of a snowball have a much better chance of showing a return on investment. Which as someone cadidly pointed out in the comments is the traditional definition of artist development. Ians 3 points that success seeking musicians should follow are 1. Goal: Have more fans tomorrow that you had yesterday 2. Grow fan connections as well as dollars. Everyday should mean more email addresses, twitter followers, Facebook fans, and MySpace friends and of course dollars. 3. Action: Do something small weekly, something big monthly

Myspace is now officially a joke? The Hitler meme videos that have been floating around on the internet picking up victims to parody just committed another crime. This Hitler meme is a video about the firing of Myspace CEO Owen Van Natta after just 9 months on the job. The video is speculated to have been an inside job and repeatedly mentions News Corp Digital Chief Jon Miller and newly promoted co-presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones. Man, Myspace is falling apart over there.

Labels put more musicians in the poor house.

Polk provides surround sound capabilities from a wireless system.

Rockseter+Pro Born promises to turn dead tracks in to big live sounding mixes deliver professional studio sounding

Pre Mastering Last week we saw a lot of interest in our mastering explained article, so this week we thought we would being you the prequel of mastering explained, preparing your songs for the mastering process. These tips are in no way a doit yourself guide for getting your songs to killer quality. Mastering should be done by the master, mixing should be done by the professional, let these tips serve as a guideline for being able to participate in the conversation with whomever you've hired to take your recording to the next level. http://musicproducersforum.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/tips-for-the-mix-to-the-master/#more-693