Tony Zeoli interviews Brett Deutsch, President/CEO of Crossed Over Entertainment, an independent music promotion and marketing company, about working music to Internet and terrestrial radio stations and DJs.

Brett’s got interested in music promotion through his brother, Frank Murray, who is currently VP of Promotion at Robbins Entertainment. He started at Slip’n'Slide, an early UK dance and electronic music label that opened offices in USA (and is now part of Soundz Unlimited), then went to work under Fred Held at Heat Entertainment. In 2000, Brett and his partner, Melanie Weimer, launched Crossed Over Entertainment.

Netmix founder, Tony Zeoli, interviews Sergio Goncalves and Joe Berinato from Pitch Control Marketing, a leading dance music promotion and marketing company, about all things dance music marketing and promotion in an era of social music. Listen to the podcast in the player above. While you’re checking out the podcast, learn more about Pitch Control on their website here.

Note: This interview was originally recorded as a Skype interview, but because of dim lighting and poor video quality, we’ve converted it into a podcast.

In December, we sat down for an interview with David Porter, CEO of a new online radio service, 8tracks.com. The company provides music fans, amateur DJs or seasoned professional DJs and music programmers alike, tools to create their own, unique Internet radio stations. Users who register with the service can upload any track they wish, sort and create play lists, and then publish those play lists to a streaming radio player. The Flash-based player can then be ported to a blog, web site, or social network like MySpace. One of the best features is the ability to attach other users play lists to your own, creating a viral opportunity for great programmers to have their mixes heard across the network. Initially, listeners will be able to purchase tracks through Amazon’s download service (when available), but the company hopes to integrate with independent and niche download stores as well.

At this point, the service is in its Alpha testing phase. A beta launch is planned for late Q1 or early Q2 of this year. Netmix has partnered with 8tracks.com and will be switching streaming radio services at the end of the month. For the time being, you’ll be able to listen to both until January 31, when the switch will be complete. Netmix will also be advising 8tracks on adding first-to-market innovations for professional and amateur mix shows DJs to incorporate into their stations.

After a 4-day swing through South by Southwest in Austin, TV, I’m back in New York wading through the content I’d generated during the festival. While walking through the main exhibit hall, I ran across a number of companies promoting products and services to artists. Muzu.tv is one that caught my eye. In this Netmix SXSW podcast, Muzu.tv CEO, John Toone explains the company’s toolsets and philosophy.

The two-year old company are planning a late Q2 launch of their online platform of front end and back end tools allowing recording artists, labels, DJs and DVD DJs, record producers, remixers, video artists, directors and more to build and maintain highly customizable online profiles. In addition to general profile features, under a simple set of tabbed headers, creative types can build a network of video channels alongside a library of copyrighted works, which can all be made available for streaming or paid/free download, with rights issues, transactions and tracking all handled within the system.

DJs, remixers and video remixers can create their own profiles, grab samples or tracks from other artists in the system and create new tracks and mash-ups, with all rights, clearances or transactional payments handled through as well.

The service provides promotional tools within the network. Profiles have a variety of social networking features and the ability to handle merchandise transactions, like t-shirts and ticket sales. A wiki provides user generated content organized by city about upcoming performances, bios on bands and other relevant information that can be added or edited and updated by anyone in the network.

Recently, the company made its public debut at Midem, the world’s largest music conference in Cannes, France. In our interview, Mr. Toone relayed that feedback was positive, considering the number of entrants in the marketplace competing for the attention of the world’s bands, musicians and DJs. Mainly, it’s the simplicity that’s key. With an interface that generally keeps the user from having to scroll down to view, presenting the content generally above the scroll in a mostly Flash-based experience, the web sites core principle is K.I.S.S., which stands for “Keep it simple, stupid.”

Operating out of Dublin, Ireland with staffers in London and New York, Muzu.tv CEO, John Toone applied his extensive music legal experience in business affairs at both Virgin and A&M to create a legal and scalable platform to distribute copyrighted works with an extensive tracking system. Copyright owners are excited about the company’s plan to share revenues from video pre-roll and banner advertising with those contributing to the network. Where applicable monies will be distributed back to copyright owners on the sale of new works created within the system should they be downloaded. A pretty neat feature in itself, but widely dependent on creators to upload to the system.

To the layman, one would probably ask how is this different from MySpace, YouTube and other user-generated content companies in the marketplace? A key differentiator is that Muzu.tv was built by music industy folks who have a deep understanding of the challenges facing copyright owners in a widely fragmented space, providing a legal platform to ingest and redistribute content with rights tracking and payments handled organically by the system. Instead of a build and worry about the rights later, which is what MySpace and YouTube orginally did, the creators of Muzu.tv saw the need to provide an efficient rights-based system.

I have yet to look through any agreements a copyright owner would agree to to upload their content, but I believe the system is built on retaining rights while Muzu shares in revenues generated by those rights.

The challenge facing Muzu.tv is to convince the world’s band’s already on MySpace, YouTube and other music plaforms, like CDBaby, to move over to and leverage to Muzu.tv stystem. MySpace’s partnership with SnoCap gives artists the ability to offer their tracks for sale on MySpace’s pages. However, the downside with Snocap/MySpace is the reliance on third-part providers to build widgets. Many MySpace pages are disjointed, broken and can crash browswers after artists add some of these third-party tools. Given the technology the company has built and its founders vision, the technology comes from one source, not unlike Apple’s proprietary system. Although it’s great that a cottage industry is being built around MySpace for third-party solutions, having a place like Muzu.tv could save artists time and money with a closed system that will add new products after extensive testing.

I’m think it’s reasonable to believe Muzu.tv, given the intellectual and technology capital in the company, should do quite well once artists begin to trust the service and use it as their homebase and an extension of their own web sites.

Netmix presents a SXSW 2007 podcast with Dr. Matthew Dunn, CEO of Music IP. The company is a leader in the audio fingerprinting and music recommendation space with a catalog representing over 28 Million tracks.

Instead of explaining what MusicIP is, here’s a quote from their website: “MusicIP’s unique music matching technology defines relationships between sets of music based on acoustic traits and characteristics. With the goal to know about all the music in the world, MusicIP creates products and services to increase listener enjoyment and artist recognition through a one-of-a-kind music discovery experience.”

Please use the download link to listen. For some reason, the PodPress Flash Player is playing the audio at half-speed. I’ve spent the latter part of the day trying to figure out the problem. It’s a bug I’ve been looking for a solution to. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE 3/16: Fixed the Flash problem. Mixed the stereo file down to mono. Working fine now.