merge.fm blog

New video shorts and features

Fri, 04 May 2012 22:21:52 -0500

You may have noticed the new video shorts on the landing page and your musician dashboard explaining how to hold various studio events on merge.fm. We made these to help show you as simply as possible how to use the versioning platform to quickly and easily set these up. But don’t let this limit you to these specific events. The platform is designed to allow you to use your creativity to make any interactive experience or event you can dream up for your fans. If you have an idea for an event that needs an extra feature or two in order to launch, just let us know and we’ll help you make it happen: support@merge.fm

We also recently launched a comment notification feature. For example if you want to notify or reply to someone with the username honkytonk, just include @honkytonk in your comment and an email will automatically be sent to that user letting them know you mentioned them.

We also built email notifications for new song versions and a variety of smaller updates throughout the app to improve the user experience. More on the way as usual!

Abandon Jalopy

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Blind Melon bassist Brad Smith is putting up some great content for his solo project Abandon Jalopy. A big thanks to Brad for his feedback and to his fans for putting up some awesome remixes! Check them out here.

Fan contributions feature

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:22:33 -0600

Just launched the fan contributions & remix feature! Now after you buy access to a song, you can add your own ideas. Then just click Contribute to upload and post your new version to let the band and the rest of the fans see what you’ve done. Enjoy!

Stadium rockin’

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:06:22 -0600

After I was in a band for bit and started playing out, it didn’t take long to realize that some shows went much better or worse than others. In my first band, we found out quickly that there were lots of reasons why a particular show might not go so well. Sometimes we weren’t playing tight, sometimes we weren’t singing on key because we couldn’t hear ourselves too well, maybe we picked the wrong songs to play, and the list went on…way on. The good part was that we had a lot of control over most of these things. So the story went on and we fixed a lot of the initial things most bands of first-timers go through. We started making a little money and the first thing we did was throw it back into getting better gear. As the lead guitar player, I obviously first bought a ridiculously massive amp, then more effects pedals, another guitar, and finally a wireless guitar system. When asked why, at the time I might have told you “because I want to have freedom on stage” or “I have big feet and I get tangled in my guitar cable.” Then you’d call BS and think that I just wanted to be like my stadium rocking idols on our 15 foot wide stage at the bar.

At some point along the way, one thing that started getting to us was the abundance of not-so-talented live sound guys at the venues. Who knows what the actual split was, but it seemed like about half the guys found some way to blow it. One thing’s for sure: with a bad mix, it’s unlikely that it’s going to be a killer show. Before the show, if the guy said he was a kick-ass drummer, you could almost guarantee that the drums would be thumpin’ and the rest of the instruments would sound annoyingly weak. But other times it would just be too loud overall or the vocals wouldn’t be loud enough etc etc. So you might think that this would be an easy problem to solve because all we should have to do is go tell the sound guy to fix the mix. But at most venues the way it usually went was we arrived and set up our gear on stage, the sound guy set up all the mics, then he told us to play one at a time for the sound check, and then we’d start the show. Then one of three things usually happened: 1) we played the show completely oblivious and assumed we sounded awesome, 2) if the show was video recorded, we’d check it out afterward and get mad at the sound guy because we couldn’t hear the guitar solo or whatever, or 3) someone in the audience told us during the show that the bass was too loud or the vocals were too quiet, and we had no idea whether or not to trust them.

Now here’s the part where you can stop thinking that I was a tool with a fancy wireless guitar on a tiny stage. I realized after a few months…err right away that wireless let me finally go out in the audience and listen for myself how the mix was. Early in the show while everything was still ramping up, I would sneak out into the middle of the audience while playing some easy part of a song, listen for a bit, and then go way in the back to the sound guy and make him fix any big issues. Suddenly the problem was solved and just like that, our sets hit a ton more consistently.

Worth the few hundred dollars to go wireless and risk looking like a wanna-be stadium rocker? Darn right.

Adam
co-founder of merge.fm

Improved user interface

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 18:34:06 -0500

A large round of design and user interface improvements was just launched…better dashboards, sign in + sign up pages, and landing page to name a few.

More to come!

You put that microphone where?

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:11:00 -0500

It’s been a while since the last post about recording, so here’s a quick story on an experience I had with mic placement. (You can stop reading now if for you: audio recording < rebecca black live…and yes that is a less than sign which should break some universal rule in this case).

So I had this $100 no-name acoustic guitar that actually sounded all right with a good set of strings on it. But every time I went to record something with it, it sounded like garbage. You read about how this mic and that mic are good for recording acoustic guitars and here’s where you should place them, then you should do this, blah blah blah. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the darn thing to sound nearly as good as how it sounded to me when I just sat there and played it. Then, like most ideas I get, I was doing something else and it just randomly popped into my head to try moving the mic around a lot more than you’re supposed to and see if it sounds better. So this time I had someone else play it and then I put on some ear-cup headphones with the microphone signal coming in live. Then I moved the mic near the ground, up high, way far back, under the chair, then finally next to the guy’s ear pointing down at the guitar and POW! Magic sounding all of a sudden! But when I sat back and thought for a sec, it made perfect sense because when I took off the headphones and just listened from different places, it never sounded as good as when I was the one playing it. So for whatever reason, that guitar’s sweet spot was above it right at your head (a clever trick to make me buy a cheap guitar that I thought sounded good).

Once the idea sank in that many instruments, amps, and even voices tend to have a sweet spot where they sound that much better than anywhere else, suddenly all my recordings got that much better…even with cheap recording gear. It’s actually pretty amazing the difference it can make.

—Adam Steele

New feature launched: sales tracking

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:40:32 -0600

Just a quick update…

We launched a feature today to let artists track their sales. Musicians: just sign in and go to your artist page to see your sales next to each song.

You also might notice that we tweaked a few other things around the site.

Enjoy!

Downloads and Design

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:34:53 -0600

We’re still at it and we’ve made some improvements to merge.fm based on all the feedback from artists. Here’s some of what’s new lately.

Download
We received a lot of requests from both artists and fans to add downloadable music content. So we built a feature for artists to add a mixdown mp3 that fans can download if they buy access to the song. Artists can just go to the Edit Song Properties tab to upload/change/remove it at any time.

Design Updates
In our rush to get everything launched and in your hands as soon as possible over the last few months, we haven’t spent all that much time on design. But we finally caved and gave the main page a facelift, added search, added social buttons, and tweaked a few other things site wide. If you notice anything that doesn’t do it for you, let us know and we’ll fix it up.

Great show saturday night

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 13:22:47 -0600

Victory Over Tyranny and Blackjack Radio put on an awesome show at 709 W. Nevada on Saturday night! Check out a live recording of VOT’s music here: http://merge.fm/artists/victory-over-tyranny. A huge thanks to Ross Robinson for doing an awesome job running sound and getting the music up on the site.

Custom song prices

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:15:00 -0500

New feature just launched: artists can now set their own price for each of their songs. Thanks for the suggestion Isaac!

More improvements on the way!

mergefm car

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:26:14 -0500

A little less like a cop car, and a little more like a mergefm car! Huge thanks to Dean’s Graphics for helping us out with this, and Jeff for volunteering his car!

Goodbye monthly subscriptions

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 13:08:19 -0500

and hello per-song access.

Over the last two weeks or so we’ve been working hard at switching merge.fm away from our monthly subscription pricing to a much better per-song pricing, and I’m pleased (as punch) to say that the new system is live. Go check it out! Even better, may I suggest buying something from local Champaign artist withershins?

Why the change? Well to be honest, you guys. You told us the monthly thing was too much of a commitment and we listened. I’m really excited about the new direction, too. You can still get the amazing experience of seeing and interacting with your favorite artists as their unreleased songs are being written, that hasn’t changed. But now for the first time ever you can go back in time and see how your favorite album songs were made.

So give it a try, and tell me what you think. I know you’ll love it :)

— will leinweber

The guy in the crowd

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 22:43:47 -0500

by Adam Steele

I know I’ve been telling a lot of stories from my old band lately, but here’s another one that just popped into my head. So out of the dozens of frat shows we played, the very first one was somehow the best because the crowd got into the show more than any other crowd we ever had…even more than the crowd from the last post when we broke the stage. There was crowd surfing, people storming the stage, random duets with people in the crowd…and it was the only show we ever played where the crowd chanted the band name (in a good way). I was thinking about that show the other day when I was looking through some old pictures and why of all the shows we played, that first show was like that. It wasn’t the tightest set we ever played, and we hadn’t even figured out how to tweak cover songs to our style (the up tempo rock version of red red wine always went over really well). Then I came across a picture from that night and I saw a guy that I remembered.

Then I remembered how he was the guy who at first we wanted to punch in the face because he was drunk and kept grabbing one of the microphones and yelling into it. But then he started yelling the band name again and again…and everyone started chanting. Then he grabbed the mic and started singing along, and others started to do the same and went wild. Then he led a bunch of people on stage who started dancing. Then he jumped into the crowd without warning and they were forced to catch him, which kicked off the crowd surfing.

As I think about this now, I realize that he is the main reason for the show becoming what it was. So if you’re out there guy, thanks a ton! And if others reading this are in a band now, then you might try finding a guy of your own, bring him to your shows, and buy him a beer.

Break the stage

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:10:00 -0500

by Adam Steele

In my old college band, we had this one fraternity that we used to play at every few weeks. You know how some bands have a regular gig at a local bar? Well, we were all under 21 at the time and with unbending underage laws at our small collegetown bars, a semi regular frat show was the closest thing we could get. But frat shows have their advantages sometimes. Anyway, this particular frat had their own home built stage. It was actually the first stage we ever played on come to think of it. It was amazing because we would let the crowd come up on stage most nights and it was always all out compared to our other shows. So during the third or fourth show we played there, everyone was up on stage as usual and we got the crowd jumping to the beat pretty hard. And then like magic, at the climax of the night near the end of our set, the stage collapsed and everyone fell into a huge pile on top of each other. We sort of managed to finish the song since the drummer was on part of the stage that didn’t cave in. The rest of the set was like the crowd was injected with speed.

The next week, I started hearing multiple people that I didn’t know talking about this crazy show that they heard about. This was the first time that I had ever overheard people talking about our band! I was floored and got that tingly feeling you get when (insert the other time you got tingly here). This was also pretty amazing since there were 40,000 students at our school and there were only about 100 people at the show.

So the other day I was reading Made To Stick which talks about things you can do to make things memorable to people and I realized that the reason this happened was because we did something unexpected…which it turns out is one of the things that studies have found make people remember something.

This got me thinking that if I were in a band now, maybe we would try to ‘plan’ unexpected things like this to get people talking about us…

Commenting is here

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 20:30:01 -0500

Anyone can now add comments to any song version. All you need is a free account.

Huge thanks to Deborah Henson-Conant for her feedback

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:26:00 -0500

We received some incredible feedback recently from Deborah Henson-Conant and it led to a redesign of the fan info page and the artist info page, as well as the addition of an FAQ page.

A huge thanks to Deborah who happens to be the best electric harp player we’ve ever seen. Her music is really worth a listen: hipharp.com

Keep the feedback coming!

New features update

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:11:00 -0500

We’ve been working hard to improve merge.fm based on your feedback. Here’s what’s new.

We’ve received a lot of requests for a delete song feature, so we built it sooner than we were planning. If you’re an artist, just mouse over one of your songs and hit the red x in the upper right to delete it.
Letting musicians download their tracks was another one that was requested a lot. So we built this one as well and if you’re an artist, the button for downloading is right next to the red x for removing when you mouse over one of your tracks.
Each song now tells you the last time it was updated, and songs are now ordered with the latest update at the top (with the exception of the “free preview” song). The point is to let everyone get an idea of what is happening at a glance.
We updated the fan and artist info pages based on your feedback: http://merge.fm/pages/for_fans & http://merge.fm/pages/for_artists
We added error pages that give you an idea of what went wrong: http://merge.fm/artists/wrong

We’re very close to finishing the first feature to help artists market their merge.fm page on their other band websites. We’ll let you know when it’s ready!

As always, drop us a line anytime if you have any questions or feedback. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Shortening gig setup times on the cheap

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:23:32 -0500

By Dan Willis

“Squeak,” “pshhh,” “ewa-ewa,” ah, the sound of brand new tupperware in the morning. One of the most un-commonly thought of products when thinking about music, but none-the-less it is one of the most important objects for gigging on the cheap.

When my band first began playing around Pennsylvania with all of our own sound equipment, it… was… chaos. Although the show only lasted from 11pm-2am, we wouldn’t get home until 5am sometimes. And by then, we were way too exhausted to unload our cars until the next afternoon. I was fed up! So I took matters into my own hands.

Now I knew I couldn’t cut down on the quantity of equipment, so I decided to start shaving off the minutes it took to setup and tear down the system. My first stop was my local Wal-mart. I’d seen one of my friends, who ran live sound and DJ’d around town, had all of his equipment organized into these large plastic bins. So I bought the biggest plastic bin with wheels (wheels are extremely important) I could find and brought it home. I quickly realized throwing everything into one bin wasn’t exactly organization and didn’t help the timing problem. So I went back to the store and found ten or so smaller plastic bins in assorted sizes that fit together to fill the entire rolling bin. So I organized everything into the bins and the next show we had, we cut the setup and tear-down time in half!

But I wasn’t finished yet, I knew I could cut it down more. So after some very short pondering time, I picked up a set of velcro cable ties from the music store, masking tape and a sharpie from an office store and went on organizing within the boxes. By the time it was all said and done, we had cut our setup/tear-down time from 2 hours to 45 min!!!!

Take it to the next level if you want and blow the bank on those overpriced gig rack cases. They are about the last things I would buy, except maybe if you go on an international tour.

#3 - Music Marketing Tip Three

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:56:27 -0500

By Dan Willis

Close your eyes, count down from ten and let me take you back… Back to the time before apple’s meteoric rise back to prominence, before the iPhone, before the iPod, before MP3 was a common turn of phrase. Back to Walkman’s, stereo systems, CDs, tape decks and desktops with a whopping 1GB of disk space.

Now you’re hanging out with your friends in your room. You have a three-piece stereo system on top of your dresser, with dual tape decks and a 3-disc CD player. You saved up for weeks to buy it with your crappy $5/hr minimum wage job. The rest of your money of course went to CDs, but how did you know what bands were good. It’s not like you went out and bought just any band’s CD. After all, they weren’t the cheapest medium of music to ever hit the market and you didn’t have much change to spare.

Now although you listened to a lot of radio back then and that was a major influence on musical tastes, the most important referral was from friends. You’d all gather in each other’s rooms, break out a binder full of CDs and relax to the gritty voice of Chris Cornell from Sound Garden. There’s nothing that brings friends closer together than getting introduced to something you end up both really digging. And nothing will bring you and your fans closer than the same! So whether you’re on stage talking about the other acts that night or writing a blog about your influences, plug some of your favorite music. Your fans will love you for it and feel a closer to connection to you… and this means they’re more likely to hop on your boat!

Music Marketing Tip #1

Music Marketing Tip #2

New merge.fm features

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:32:05 -0500

Well, it’s been 2 weeks since launch and we have some new features to let you know about.

Each artist now has a free preview song that is open to the public to give people a chance to try it out. Look for this indicator on the preview songs:
Artists can now see how many subscribers they have when logged in on their artist page.
We’ve revamped the landing page and video, as well as added a new “for fans” and “for artists” section to help explain what merge.fm is all about. You can also check out the video on youtube and use it to spread the word:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPu7VQveMYo

So far, Elsinore and Withershins have racked up a few subscribers and we’ll be sending them checks next month. Congrats guys! We’re just now starting to bring on bands and work closely with a select few to figure out what works best to make this thing awesome for your fans. If you’re interested in signing up your band, check out the instructions at the bottom of the artist’s page:
http://merge.fm/pages/for_artists

As always, drop us a line anytime if you have any questions or feedback. Looking forward to hearing from you.