Targeted towards music industry collaborators from any field, genre and in any stage of professional or artistic development, Dotted Music offers a wide range of services that will help artists and other collaborators connect to newer audiences and to continually expand their following. Music industry contributors that are looking to expand their online presence can get a customized quote by filling out a short form on the website.

Dotted Music Agency

Some of the services include: website design and maintenance, social media integration and design, copywriting services, press release preparation, advertising, electronic music distribution, logo design, direct-to-fan (D2F) services and many more. For a full list of services offered, visit s.dottedmusic.com.

Dotted Music recently launched the website for one of its first clients: French-Russian dubstep trio PLAYMA. The trio is signed to Audioporn Records, one of the top dubstep and drum & bass labels in the UK. In less than two months, Dotted Music established a solid online presence for the band, using powerful D2F services such as Topspin.

Andrew Apanov, founder and CEO of Dotted Music stated, “I am very proud of this next big step in Dotted Music’s development and also very excited about all the things we are going to deliver to the world this year.”

About Dotted Music LLC

Dotted Music was founded by Andrew Apanov. He has worked as a project manager in mobile development and editor-in-chief at Ultimate-Guitar.com. Andrew has years of experience in the music industry, specifically in social media marketing. Dotted Music is based in the United States, but is composed of a worldwide network of talented music marketing consultants delivering 24/7 well-tailored services with a trustworthy international expertise. Dotted Music is on its way to becoming a leader in online music marketing.

Stay tuned for more news about the Dotted Music agency!

Since launching in December 2011, Webdoc has experienced great fan engagement. When British-Irish boy band One Direction asked their fans to wish happy birthday to group member Zayn Malik on Webdoc, within 48 hours more than 6,800 fans had created rich media posts to show their love; spending on average between 15 to 30 minutes on the page, while creating, consuming and looking for One Direction material online.

Webdoc

British jazz funk and acid jazz band Jamiroquai have experienced similar results, with the band’s Digital Manager Neil Carwright commenting, “As a fan engagement site it really surpassed my expectations. Engagement was far higher than I thought was possible.”

The social sound platform SoundCloud is now officially represented on Webdoc through a drag-and-drop widget. This allows users to incorporate SoundCloud tracks in their Webdocs, played via the HTML5 player.

Songkick allows fans to track their favorite artists’ live performances and to be the first to know when tickets go on sale. Performing musicians can now insert the new Songkick widget in to their Webdocs to sell tickets to their gigs and shows to the public (a nice way to create a digital flyer!).

Topspin is a direct to fan sales and marketing platform used by artists and filmakers to grow their online audiences and convert fans into customers. We here at Dotted Music were really excited about this particular integration, allowing Topspin users to insert various widgets inside Webdocs, but were a bit confused this morning, vainly trying to test the new feature. While it wasn’t a problem to connect a Topspin account and insert an E4M widget, for some reason it didn’t want to show up on the created Webdoc. Let us know in the comments if you have tried the same and it worked fine (or did not)!

Here’s a Topspin video, describing the integration with Webdoc:

And below are links to some of the recent Webdoc implementations:

• Sharing of Nirvana memories around the 20th Anniversary of the group’s album ‘Nevermind’
• A promotion to create a Christmas Card for One Direction

Whether your field is rock or rap, the music licensing companies connect you with leading brands in the circle. Since competition is higher in this field, struggle to get the first seat is tedious too.

The music licensing company offers you services allowing you to publicize your potential to the world. They prepare a pathway for budding and struggling artists to reveal their skill in the field of music. In order to gain worldwide recognition the contribution of music licensing companies in promoting singers and music composers simply knows no bounds. Here are some of the major functions of music licensing companies:

Image credit: lambertwm on Flickr

• Safeguarding your creation: Being a music composer, your music is just like your child. After months of dedication and timeless efforts you give birth to music which solely belongs to you. No one has the right to bring about a change in your creation or hamper its quality. Neither anyone has the right to copy it without seeking permission from the creator. Music licensing companies’ help you get your music licensed, so that no third party is able to duplicate your creation or claim it as theirs. They ensure the safety of your composition. Yes, with copyright done with your composition you don’t have to worry about your creation being duplicated or copied by others.

Believe me, if you catch anyone violating the copyright rules and copying your own composition, then you can simply file a lawsuit against the person, group of persons or the organization concerned.

• Promoting your music: Soon after the licensing of the composition is completed, the music licensing company takes a step further to promote your creation. They leave no stone unturned to publicize the composition, so that it reaches to the maximum audience base and has an impact on them. They give in their best efforts to make the opus popular and reach it to the maximum number of audience. This way your product gets launched and finds a way to win the hearts of the millions of people tuned in to your music.
• Assisting producers in finding a unique composition: The market is already saturated with duplicate music and people are more into copying and remodeling them. However, the music loving audience is tired of listening to such fake compositions. They only want authentic and unique numbers. On merging with music licensing companies, producers are able to find desirable and unique music products.
• The music licensing companies give their very best to make the opus popular: Yes, a typical music licensing company has a music library where compositions of popular as well budding artists are stored. The producers then pick a unique composition as per his tastes. This way your creation gets noticed and popularizes in the field of music.

Now you should know why it is important to contact a music licensing company.

Guest post written by Darcy Matthew.

I see a good deal of bands that have a review section on their website or on social media sites that always are from their backyard and never that far away. That Seattle band for example that only has reviews from Seattle proper and about a 25 mile radius does not come off like a band that is anything more than a band that plays Seattle.

How Do I Get My Music Heard?

When you ask the question, How do I get my music heard? You should also ask, where should I get my music heard?

Why not reach out to a wider audience and other states or even other countries when you are going after getting better indie music reviews? This can help make you look a little more worldly in a sense. It gives you the appearance of more traveled group that is being heard by a wider array of fans and music industry people.

This can be done in emails and basic research very easily and requiring a limited amount of time. Do the research of different reviewers, review sites, review bloggers and email five a day with a basic template review letter that is personalized to the person or company you are reaching out to.

Getting indie music reviews is easier than you think, and the more you can build up for a wider mileage, the more that will be out there about you! There will be negative or bad reviews too but no worries. As a music consultant, I get asked how to get rid of bad reviews and I always respond, asking why. It is not bad to have bad reviews out there. It is more marketing. Your name, your album, your song is now out on another page or another site that it wasn’t on before.

Try it. It’s five emails a day and some research. Tell them why they should check you out, what you are about and go in to some basic detail to make some one want to check you out and possibly review you. Think about the fact that these people receive hundreds of requests, so make sure you do not sound like the masses in your email.

And again, the best music consulting tip I can give regarding reviews is to research and email out to five a day. You could easily find thousands and you never know which ones will give you a review or help you, your music or your website reach a whole new audience you have not been able to reach before.

Loren Weisman is an accomplished music producer, author and music consultant. He is the author of “The Artist’s Guide to Success in the Music Business”, a book to help independent artists, musicians, bands, labels and managers achieve self sufficient and sustainable success.

Soundcloud

To celebrate the milestone, SoundCloud has created ‘Story Wheel’, a new SoundCloud Labs project that allows anyone to record their own narrative around a series of images to tell a personal story. Co-founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss have today launched this new feature by sharing an intimate conversation with the SoundCloud community, reflecting on their journey to date.

Launched in October 2008, SoundCloud was born of the realization that sound is an untapped territory on the Web compared to images, video, and text. The key to SoundCloud’s rapid growth has been the understanding of the simplicity, breadth and potential of sound:

• Sound is mobile: Over five million official SoundCloud apps have been downloaded.
• Sound is developing: Over 10,000 apps being developed on SoundCloud’s open platform. Recent additions include integrations with professional music creation software Pro Tools and Cakewalk.
• Sound is more than music: Over 3.3 million different tags show the breadth of sounds on the platform, which now includes everything from journalists & bloggers (Robert Scoble), to publishing (Penguin Books UK), to education (Stanford).

SoundCloud’s Storywheel showcase can be viewed at this location.

A resolution of silence?

Before I write a blog post for Dotted Music, I always check and re-check the RIAA website. I think the RIAA’s latest antics (okay, okay: exploits) are my favourite blog post topic.

The thing about the RIAA is that it’s always a hot topic. There’s nobody who doesn’t want to discuss or read about the RIAA.

But the RIAA has been relatively quiet recently. I’m not sure if the good guys at the Recording Industry Association of America are yet recovering from an extremely wild festive period, or if their notable blogging and press release silence has something more to do with their real life interest in pushing SOPA.

Whatever the problem, I hope they’re back soon.

In other news, Katy Perry is set to become a Sim. In a collaboration with EA, Katy, or Katy’s likeness, will feature in a special edition of The Sims 3: Showtime.

The game, set for release in March, will probably earn the newly-single Katy a few pennies to play with.

But, most importantly, has Katy really considered the extent to which owners of the game will play with her? We all know how many peculiar Sims videos are uploaded to Youtube on a daily basis!

“I love how you’re able to play out different stories through your Sims characters,” says Katy, “Giving the different careers and watching them succeed. It’s cool to see the Sims’ stage performances in The Sims 3 Showtime decked out just like my California Dreams Tour – even my cotton candy video screens are in there! I always like to think of myself as a cartoon, and now I’m a Sim!”

I suppose that most of us would like the attention, but is this kind of thing really necessary? EMI definitely needs the financial boost, and milking successful artists like Katy Perry is all well and good, but it just supports the view that the modern artist is more than a musician; or is that less?

Samuel Agini is the Editor of Andrew Apanov’s Dotted Music. Please contact him at sam.agini@dottedmusic.com. He will reply to most emails and would love to hear from you.

As can be expected, there seem to be a majority of opponents to SOPA at CES than there are supporters. With so many innovators and thinkers who benefit from the freedom (some might call it madness) of the internet, there could be only one way the scales were going to tip.

Unfailing support for SOPA comes right from the RIAA and, as is widely known, the RIAA definitely labels the internet as a place of madness.

In fact, the RIAA’s reported response to the whole debacle has been reported as typically hard-line, with one spokesperson reported as saying the following: “It sure seems like the deck is stacked to ensure no meaningful or balanced debate occurs on an issue that is very important to American jobs and our economy.”

Aside from the absurd implication that the vociferous RIAA doesn’t actually have much of a say in the debate, the RIAA, according to Mike Masnick, is perfectly right: there is no balance to the debate on SOPA.

Of course, Masnick, in a tetchy and wonderfully focused gush of vitriol, argues his case that the original debate prior to the passing of SOPA was debated on the RIAA’s terms. Infuriated, caustic and, most importantly of all, lucid, Masnick is more than convincing. It’s no accident his article has sparked so much debate since its publication.

But there’s seemingly one hint of bias to Masnick’s article that he surely needs to address in greater depth: his assumption that a majority opinion must be or, is in this case, right.

For although the majority opinion is seemingly one of a general wariness of SOPA, what’s to say that the RIAA is as bad as every torrent addict suggests?

But I think that Masnick’s point is far more powerful than that.

“The Judiciary Committee hearings? [T]he “one” against the bill was Google — who is Congress’ punching bag, and was put there so that Congressional reps could[...]pretend that only “evil Google” is against the bill. [T]he startup entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who create all this innovation offered to step up and meet about these bills — and we were denied.”

It’s the RIAA’s word against Google’s. And Dotted Music has before commented on the RIAA’s hounding of Google in the past. Search results are search results. There is a strong likelihood that searching for illegal digital content on Google will return positive results, but is that reason enough to censor the web?

Grohl's plan for the music industry's success can't be bettered.

In other music industry news, Dave Grohl has a novel idea as to how the music industry can guarantee success. His opinion is, as always, refreshing. Boldly and sagaciously, Grohl highlights the success of Adele’s 21, which has shifted in excess of 17 million copies worldwide. For Grohl, if all records were as good as Adele’s 21, all records would sell similar quantities.

The onus, for Grohl, is clearly on the artist to produce music that is worth hearing. That’s the most refreshing notion to come from within the music industry in quite some time. The consumer wins, but so does the newly successful artists who can sell millions of albums in virtue of their own improved work. But that’s part of what is so endearing about the Foo Fighters. Dave writes songs for consumption, and it has definitely worked out well for him.

Samuel Agini is the Editor of Andrew Apanov’s Dotted Music. You can reach him at sam.agini@dottedmusic.com .

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