Here’s a pair of scripts to simplify posting videos to YouTube. If you’re a Mac user and post to YouTube regularly like me, you might find these time-saving scripts useful.

Calling all musicians: Join YouTube’s Symphony Orchestra. YouTube is offering musicians around the globe the opportunity to join a symphony orchestra via video through the world’s first collaborative online orchestra.

Google Friend Connect is now available and you might want to get your Google profile tidied up. You can connect to me on my sidebar.

Delicious Has A Brand New Audio Player For MP3 Bookmarks so now you should bookmark all your MP3s using delicious.

I’m accepting and sharing MP3s using SoundCloud. Anything you want me to hear? I can’t promise to comment or anything but I love to listen to new music.

Send me your track

On the music licensing front:
Songcatalog connects publishers, labels, independent artists and producers with companies looking to license music for commercial use.

WacBiz could use a website usability makeover and some proofreading, but it might be an avenue for licensing opportunities.

Rumblefish just joined YouTube. Submit you music here and you could get a piece of the action. They also place music in film, TV, video games, advertising and marketing campaigns, podcasts, video blogs, background usage, and more.

And when you need a music business contract…

This is a big day for DIY artists as it marks the first time that musicians not affiliated with a label or royalty collection agency can collect revenue direct from a free streaming music platform. We’re very proud to now offer DIY artists the same royalty opportunities as those presented to record labels acts.

Now’s the time to upload your music to Last.fm. Then sign up for the Artist Royalty Program in the Music Manager.

In other Last.fm news, subscribers have been given access to the new Last.fm beta, which includes a facelift and improved user experience. One notable benefit is when you make your music available to download free, it will be included in iTunes podcasts, reaching an even larger audience.

Great times for DIY artists!

So let’s look a bit at the finances. If I can make about $5-$10 per download or directly sold CD, and I sell 1000, I clear a maximum of $10,000 for that year’s effort. That’s not a living. Let’s say, after 20 concerts I net about $10,000 for three to four months worth of full time effort. That’s not a living.

It’s not all doom and gloom for the fringe musician. But it does provide a realistic story from an avant garde artist trying to “speak my personal truth, regardless of the cost.”

Link

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

If your “True Fan” will purchase everything you produce, or spend $100 a year, with 1,000 fans you can earn $100,000 a year. But you’re not limited to earning money from True Fans. Lesser fans will also purchase some of your material. Momentum could even kick in and get you that hit you’ve been wanting. But as you can see, a hit is not necessary to earn a respectable living as an artist.

There are some brilliant ideas in this article, 1,000 True Fans. Read it now!

I plan to start reading it as soon as possible. I’m in the middle of The Zombie Survival Guide right now, obviously a more urgent read.

Link to announcement.

• The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now
• Past performance is no guarantee of future success
• Copy protection in a digital age is a pipe dream
• Interactivity can’t be copied
• Permission is the asset of the future
• A frightened consumer is not a happy consumer
• This is a big one: The best time to change your business model is while you still have momentum
• Remember the Bob Dylan rule: it’s not just a record, it’s a movement
• Don’t panic when the new business model isn’t as ‘clean’ as the old one
• Read the writing on the wall
• Don’t abandon the Long Tail
• Understand the power of digital
• Celebrity is underrated
• Value is created when you go from many to few, and vice versa
• Whenever possible, sell subscriptions

The opportunity of digital distribution is this:

When you can distribute something digitally, for free, it will spread (if it’s good). If it spreads, you can use it as a vehicle to allow people to come back to you and register, to sign up, to give you permission to interact and to keep them in the loop.

This is a philosophy to commit to memory. There’s much needed explanation at his original post: Music lessons

There’s plenty of audio, a conversation with Brian Eno, another with Radiohead’s managers, and there’s plenty of charts. The last audio segment with Brian Eno has some excellent lyric writing advice. There’s really a lot of great info to dig into.

Digital Audio Insider thinks Byrne disses iTunes, maybe because of “decreased royalties from iTunes sales of Talking Heads albums.” I’m inclined to agree that he’s letting his personal feelings affect his argument, which overall is very good. In the same conversation, Brad Sucks presented a chart on where your music money goes. It’s a great detailed view from the perspective of a self-produced and distributed one-man band.

Byrne: What about bands that are just getting started?
“Don’t sign a huge contract that strips you of all your digital rights …”

Yorke: Well, first and foremost, you don’t sign a huge record contract that strips you of all your digital rights, so that when you do sell something on iTunes you get absolutely zero. That would be the first priority. If you’re an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment. Then again, I don’t see a downside at all to big record companies not having access to new artists, because they have no idea what to do with them now anyway.

Byrne: It should be a load off their minds.

Yorke: Exactly.

There’s a lot to dig into including a cool live video of Radiohead performing Bodysnatchers.

Bryne asks a great question, “Why put together these things — CDs, albums?” Something I’ve thought about a lot and which usually ends up in any discussion about how the industry is failing its customers by selling albums with one, maybe two, good songs on them. After all, we didn’t always have albums. They’ve been a very long experiment—an experiment that works in some cases but not in others.

And now we have this seemingly solid convention of an album release. I would much rather hear songs as they are finished, streamed to me one at a time over the course of a year rather than all at once, once a year. It would give me time to sink my teeth into the lyrics, the emotion, and all the details. You also get a sense of the time and place in which the song was written. With albums, you have to find a solid chunk of time to devote to active listening, which rarely happens for me.

The way I would like to do things is to give away most of my content, saving some for a premium, and bundling groups of songs into packages that make sense. Content creation is fast paced now. People will overlook spelling errors to get your thoughts as you think them. There’s space for short or incomplete pieces of work.

I believe artists can learn a lot from bloggers. Publish often. Not everything has to be a polished masterpiece. Give away what you create in between the polished masterpieces. You can even give away your best stuff. In the case of a musician, reserve the better encoding options, the choice of file type and album art, and the first release to the listeners willing to pay.

What we’ve learned so far is, it’s all an experiment—even the current conventions.

I’m still digging through this article. There’s a lot of audio!

Links: Accidental clicks fade into the background

A change to text ads on the content network

Great copywriters will tell you that your headlines need powerful action words and compelling benefits to get the reader engaged into the rest of your sales letter. While this can be true in the headlines of long-form direct sales copy, writing HTML titles and descriptions requires more thought that just duplicating your headline and first paragraph.

These findings also provide some best practices for writing blog post titles and excerpts, which are similar to the copy that viewers might scan a Google search engine result page.

Key point: Get the first two words right. Help scanning eyes pick out the meaning of your page or post quickly. This rule also includes other page elements on which readers fixate: subheads, summaries, captions, hypertext links, and bulleted lists.

When you attempt to research a specific phrase that is lodged in the front of your mind, you are limiting the results you will see to those that using that exact two word combination together. In the meantime, there could be hundreds of searches being done that you will never ever see or find, because you are logically guessing at a specific phrase that you ***think*** may be important.

He begins by using a single keyword rather than a keyword phrase which allows Wordtracker to show him how that keyword is being used in keyword phrases.

Many people take the approach of checking all of the keywords that make the most logical sense, rather than using a root word that is not illogical or not the most obvious.

Now you can earn money from YouTube videos. All the details are available at the Inside AdSense blog.

Canadian art-pop singer, Jane Siberry, sells her music through an honor-payment system. The Freakonomics blog points out how her variable-pricing scheme ends up bringing in more cash than if she were to sell it through iTunes. BoingBoing calls her “the gold standard for a digital artist’s business.”

If you’re looking for a music 2.0 business to model, this is the one.

I’ve been making money online for about five years now. Not unlike Tim Ferris, but definitely not commensurate to his online earnings! So I’m stepping it up a level or two… or three or four.

One of my current plans is to follow Ed Dale’s 30-Day Challenge. The goal of this challenge is to make ten dollars in profits without spending a dime within thirty days. Ed’s a fantastic internet marketer, someone I’ve been following for a long time, and he’s a very capable teacher.

Another part of my plan is to create a 4-hour workweek internet marketing Master Mind for the integrally informed. I thought about making it only for Mac users who also own iPhones but I figured that might be too narrow.

So if you’re interested in joining me, leave me a comment, drop me an email, contact me or leave me a message via my chat (upper right), or call if you have my number.

The 30-day challenge starts tomorrow so don’t delay. I can tell you that I’ve already seen a jump in visitors to my sites just by using one of the techniques Ed taught during the preseason warmup. Join now!

I’m excited to see what Ed and his team have in store. I’ve followed Ed Dale a while now and can tell you that he’s a very successful internet marketer and a qualified teacher. Even though I’m not trying to make my first $10 online, I’m going to follow along… with a bit of a twist. I’m trying to complete it entirely on my iPhone to make the challenge personal.

If you sign up, let me know. We could set up a small Master Mind team for improved results. And I can tell you that I’ve already learned a couple cool internet marketing tricks during the pre-season training.

Click here for details: 30-Day Challenge

Also, they have a great quiz that you can take to analyze your business. It gives you a custom 5-page report with valuable tips for growing your business.

You need to go download this software while it’s still in Beta so you can get it free. When you go to the page, take the quiz, watch a video with some really powerful marketing lessons, and download the software:

Altitude Business Quiz with Free Analysis

Make sure you check out the entire site. The marketing lessons alone are worth the time, but the software is where the money is. It’s got my mind spinning, that’s for sure!

Altitude Business Quiz with Free Analysis

Open TextMate and show the bundle editor (⌃⌥⌘B). Create a new command by clicking the plus sign on the bottom left of the bundle editor. Name the command “Add Quotes” or something to your liking. In the right-hand pane, leave the ‘Save’ drop-down menu to ‘Nothing’, Copy sed 's/^/${1:"}/' | sed 's/$/${2:"}/' into the Command area, leave ‘Input’ to ‘Selected Text or Document’ and change the ‘Output’ to ‘Insert as Snippet.’ If you like, you can create a key command like ⌃⌥⌘”.

Next, create an “Add Brackets” command exactly the same way except copy this code into the Command area: sed 's/^/${1:[}/' | sed 's/$/${2:]}/'

Now, whenever you are want to add quotes or brackets to your keyword list, copy your keywords into a TextMate document and select them, activate your key command, and voilà, your keyword list has been transformed.

One more thing. If you have a list of keywords that you want to transform into a negative keyword list, do everything above except copy this code into the Command area: sed 's/^/${1:-}/'

• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.

So to differentiate your original content from syndication, scraper sites, or internal duplication, it’s important to have the most links pointing to that original content.

For even more information about duplicate content, you might be interested in this post, Deftly dealing with duplicate content.

Speaking of Google penalties, Google webmaster tools just added a form to report paid links.

Let’s say that you are optimizing ten different web pages to be found on Google, Yahoo, and MSN and you’re optimizing each page for 3 different keyword phrases. Obviously, you’ll want to keep track of each of those keyword searches to see who’s making a run for the top and for when your page finally makes page one. That’s 90 different search engine results you have to follow.

What does the average marketer do? They type or copy and paste each keyword from a master keyword list into as many search engines as they are tracking and enter the results into a simple spreadsheet or database. If they are thorough, they will compare that data with the last time they did the search to see what’s changed.

That’s a lot of work and takes a lot of time. And most internet marketers are tracking a lot more than 10 different web pages. I’ve managed to narrow this tedious task down to a simple 11 character command.

Using Lynx, a powerful text-only web-browsing tool in Unix, I can track the changes on any website and have the results sent to my email. All it takes is a data file filled with URLs. What’s really slick, is this script only emails me when changes have been made to the page. Then, it’s simply a matter of sorting my email by subject and date to scan changes over a long period of time. No more Excel sucking the sexy out of my day.

There’s more than one use for this script. You can also use it to spy on your competition. Every time they make a change to their site, you’ll know and you can see exactly what they’re doing. If they’re doing any split testing, it won’t be long before you know which test won.

The workflow is simple. Type changetrack into Terminal. The results are waiting for you next time you check your email. In Mail, create a smart mailbox that sorts your results. If you use MailTags, you can create a to do in iCal if you need to take any kind of action. I’ve got some more automation tips on the Changetrack wiki page.

It might take you 30 minutes to get the script up and running. But over the course of a single month, it could save you hours. Not only will you save time and energy, but you will have very little resistance to tracking your search engine results — A time sucking task that most SEOs would rather not have to do. Plus, you could potentially increase your income by tracking the conversion secrets of your competitors.

You’ll find complete instructions on my Changetrack wiki page. If you have comments or come up with some other slick workflows, please share them below.

The one sure way to make a lazy man look respectable is to put a fishing rod in his hand.

Music promotion through blogs and social networks like MySpace is getting more and more powerful. Managing this vast world of Web 2.0 can be a daunting task. That’s why I recently created some AppleScripts to help me manage updating all the sites I belong to. I’m still refining the workflow but I plan on posting more about it later.

In fact, that’s why activity has been quiet on this blog. I’ve been “going meta” and examining all of my workflows to see how I can get more done in less time. That way I have more time to actually create music, which has been a major challenge for me as of late.

Stay tuned for a teleseminar on the subject of marketing your music through online social networks. In the meantime, here’s my AppleScript to open all of my Music 2.0 URLs:
Click here to open the script in Script Editor.

It’s never a good idea to duplicate someone else’s content on your own blog. You now have duplicate content issues and can very easily send your page into the Google supplemental index, a place you don’t want to be. Plus, you’re violating Darren’s copyright.

Fair use is one thing. But duplicating the entire post? Not a good practice. Plus, there’s ethics involved. Darren created and managed the project. He should get the traffic. So link back to him. You’re essentially taking traffic away from Darren by duplicating his content.

There. I hope I’ve made my point.

How do people get the right to call themselves PowerSellers?

The minute you sign your name, you lose all the rights to your music and you’ll never see a dime.
-Dick Dale

“The King Of The Surf Guitar” has spoken. Forget about becoming famous and become a business man.

Found via Boing Boing