I hope you will enjoy the new features. Feedback is always welcome.

Your participation is highly appreciated! Spending 2 minutes on this survey can help you and other artists to gain many hours in the future…

We didn’t make an official statement yet, because that is how it goes with a web start-up: it is a constant process of fixing things that are not quite right. Now we feel confident to make the official announcement, but there might still be things that bother you. Please give us feedback, that is the only way to make a high quality service: talking with users and adapting according to their feedback.

I hope you enjoy the new design, which is much clearer, and that you have less problems with remembering the name…

Now you also have the opportunity to spread the word about Musedash and to invite other people. If you click on your user name in the right upper corner and get to see your user settings, you have a link at the bottom to invite new users. Or you can go directly to http://musedash.com/invitations/new.

Thanks for your support!

The first post is about the importance of thinking as a marketeer and to not be afraid to annoy people. The key to great marketing is: frequency. As an artist, you are always a bit insecure about your personal achievements and you think you’re annoying people with your messages. However, the message only gets through if people hear enough about it, even if they might feel a bit annoyed. The writer emphasizes that this only works if you have a good product which is targeted to the right audience.

Read the very insightful article here.

On the other hand, the need for frequency might also become a tyranny of novelty. Jeremy Schlosberg writes a critical essay about the news that Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer, Damian Kulash of the band OK Go, and writer Neil Gaiman (Palmer’s husband) will be writing and recording eight songs in eight hours on Monday April 25 at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, and will release them 10 hours later. This exercise, or game, or what-have-you, is part of the Rethink Music conference being held in Boston next week.

Schlosberg argues that this constant search for new, creative and viral marketing actions can become a burden for artists, who want to work slowly and thoroughly on their art and craft. Read the full post here.

How do you feel about this dilemma?

However, as we are working on it, we had to re-evaluate the MySpace implementation. The figures about MySpace plays and profile views stopped working and are not updated any more. This is due to a redesign of the MySpace profile pages. In an earlier version of Motion Music Manager we managed to get statistics about song plays and profile views, but this was actually done in a rather messy and potentially illegal way, called ‘scraping‘, because it was the only way to do it. We have a complete different situation when whe compare with the data that we fetch from other platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and YouTube. All these services work with APIs, i.e. Application Programming Interfaces. You shouldn’t worry about this term: it means that these websites set up services for software developers to make new interesting applications with data from these websites. We actually fetch your data from and send your posts to these websites via these agreed protocols. It was the ecosystem of software developers working on the APIs of Facebook and Twitter which had a big impact on the growth of platform such as Facebook and Twitter.

MySpace, however, was anything but an innovative platform, and they didn’t have an API when we wrote the first implementation of Motion Music Manager. So we had to ’scrape’ the data in a sleazy way. Eventually, MySpace jumped on the wagon and now there is a MySpace API. However, it still doesn’t offer all the data that we need to offer you the same statistics as before. Therefore, we decided that we will not longer scrape MySpace and that we will offer less data on MySpace than before. To put it bluntly, if MySpace doesn’t take the effort to include these statistics in its API, it makes itself less relevant. Which it is doing in many ways, in any case. The decline of MySpace is at least as impressive as the rise of Facebook and Twitter. It’s a shame, because it’s probably the only website that has almost every band or music artist in its user base. This can offer huge opportunities if they build a very valuable service for all those musicians. Actually, MySpace is for sale. If someone can offer us a huge amount of cash, we can buy it and make it valuable again, as a service with the vision of the future Musedash (formerly known as Motion Music Manager). Wink, wink…

As you may know, I am the person who pushed this project forward. The last year has been extremely busy: suddenly my own band Amatorski became a huge success in Belgium and I lead a so-called ‘feasibility study’ about MMM, funded by the government organization IWT. The development teams of Openminds and 10 to 1 executed the technical part of the study and developed the software for the current beta version of Motion Music Manager.

However, now it is time to move on. I closed a partnership deal with the guys from Zorros, who already run the promising event ticketing service Fikket.com. In the coming weeks and months Pieter will be improving the usability of the site and Francisco will keep the website bug free and gradually add new features. I am really looking forward to it.

I also want to thank Joren, Jan, Bernard, Piet, Tom and Koen for the terrific job they did before.

I still believe that the future for Motion Music Manager is bright! And the same is true for all ambitious self-promoting musicians…

Hilke

There are a couple of important extra features. Now, you can post not only status updates but also blog posts, photos and videos. We also completely reworked the statistics module. You can map the events of your uploads on the timeline of the different graphs. This will enable you to understand which actions had an impact on the number of extra fans, plays, etc. We worked on a new navigation that will help you to switch between the data of the different networks and between the different data types.

Moreover, there were a lot of changes in the background, which are a huge leap for us, but are not really noticeable for you (For the tech people among you: we switched from PHP to Ruby on Rails).

Of course, we are still in a testing phase and there might occur some problems or hick-ups. You are very welcome to point them out to us. In any case, we do our best to make Motion Music Manager a good service and this can only happen if you help us with feedback about problems, feature requests or other comments.

I hope you log in to your account now and enjoy the update of the service.

Of course, I have been quite busy the last months. The main factor is the surprising success of my band Amatorski here in Belgium. Our appearance in Humo’s Rockrally lead to tremendous acclaim and caused huge airplay on national radio, first on the alternative program of Studio Brussel, but the other stations followed later on. Our small debut ‘Same Stars We Shared’, and certainly the single ‘Come Home’, gets a lot of attention and is now even the soundtrack of a Spa (water) commercial, directed by Jaco Van Dormael. In the following months I will certainly come back to the details of this success story, as it can be an interesting case to learn from, for you musicians and bands out there.

As the inspirer of Motion Music Manager, I also participated in the iBoot program of IBBT. This bootcamp helps people with an idea in the technological sector to create a business around this idea. I’ve been working on this idea of Motion Music Manager for quite a long time and I can assure you that it isn’t easy to make it a viable business. Although I hear all the time that MMM is a huge problem solver, there is software development and lots of other stuff to be paid for. You need to devise a business plan to foresee future problems and their solutions. I learned a lot, but we are not there yet. Not at all. Therefore, I hope to get support from the readers of this blog and from the users of Motion Music Manager. Building up Motion Music Manager is quite similar to building up the success of a band. You need to invest a lot of passion (and also money) in it, and you need the support of your fans to make the big step forward.

As you can see, the tone on this blog will get a bit more personal. I will talk about my own band Amatorski and about the successes and pitfalls of running MMM. And I will strive for more interaction with you, the readers and users. Of course, I will still try to help you with lots of advice and interesting reading I find on the internet.

In the end, all this is about knowledge, helping each other and passion!

Motion Music Manager is the online dashboard for the self-promoting musician. It tries to solve the problem of the defragmentation of an artist’s online identity. On the dashboard of Motion Music Manager you can publish new content to all your social network profiles and you can measure the impact of your actions via statistics.

We have been in private beta for two months now. We offer statistics about MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Last.fm and Twitter and the last weeks we have been working on a Twitter module and the ability to send status updates to Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. More features will follow.

Here you can see some screenshots:

We are still open for users who want to be invited to test the private beta version. Please contact me at hilke@mmmotion.com. We are eager to hear your feedback!