DailyTekk compiled a great list of music industry tools for managing artists and new releases.

Haulix is listed in the Marketing & Promotion section.

http://dailytekk.com/2012/04/18/75-music-industry-tech-tools-for-artists-bands-managers-and-execs

**Thanks to Chris McConnell**

Awesome.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the importance of website advertising - it can serve as a legitimate source of income.  However, I also believe many sites are taking it way too far and not considering the user's experience.

Let's take the popular CNN.com for example. News sites are usually the type of site that one visits daily or even multiple times per day. Nothing is more annoying than going to the site and trying to COMPETE with ads that drop down. It's like the ads and your cursor both grab the scroll bar and fight to take it over. And yes, the ads usually win - even if the scrollbar hijack only lasts a few seconds.

Animated ads are okay sometimes.  Static ads with placement that is out of the way are fine.  But these huge expanding leaderboard ads are a deal breaker for me.

"My way of fighting the competition is the positive approach. Stress your own  strengths, emphasize quality, service, cleanliness, and value, and the competition will wear itself out trying to keep up."

-- Ray Kroc - Founder of McDonald's

In the past 3 years, we've seen a wide variety of things promoted through the Haulix system. Here's a brief list:

- Box Sets
- Singles
- Live Albums
- Tribute Albums
- Movie Soundtracks
- Songs Submitted For Commercials
- Songs Submitted For Video Games
- Artist DVD/Album Splits
- Book Promotion
- Streaming Teasers

It's fun to see unique ways in which customers exploit the flexible nature of our software for promotions.

Duplicate headers received from server. The response from the server contained duplicate headers. This problem is generally the result of a misconfigured website or proxy. Only the website or proxy administrator can fix this issue. Error 350 (net::ERR_RESPONSE_HEADERS_MULTIPLE_LOCATION): Multiple Location headers received. This is disallowed to protect against HTTP response splitting attacks.

Chrome did a security update recently that makes their browser adhere to web standards more "strictly." It in turn broke quite a few websites/applications out there.  If you get this error in your C# application, here is a fix:

When calling the Response's AddHeader method, make sure attachment has a semi-colon after it (instead of a comma) and put quotes around the filename.

context.Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", string.Format("attachment; filename=\"{0}.zip\"", title));

Times are changing everyone!

http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/05/technology/digital_music_sales/index.htm?hpt=hp_t3

With business, I'm continuing to learn that it has so many similarities to cultivation practices of bonsai trees.

Like a newly planted tree, a new business has many rough edges. Its roots haven't settled to their resting place and the foundation is unstable. Although adding new price plans or new features to the software plays an important role in the evolution of your business, most of the time is spent trimming off things that aren't needed or refining things that aren't quite perfect yet.

While we trim, we have a mental vision of how things should be, but that vision changes over time, so we trim more. We rotate the tree and try to look at the business through the eyes of our customers or from different angles. We continue to trim. It feels good to take some of the branches off - the tree begins to take shape. Others may have an opinion on where they think more pieces need to get added or taken off and we learn that it's ok to say "no" so that our core vision stays on course.

Running your business can be a delicate cultivation practice. It's important to listen to others' opinions all while staying true to your own vision. We're always trimming in hopes of achieving successful harmony.

All bias aside, the true passion behind this blog post comes from real-world experiences of mine over the years of being a regular recipient of digital promos via free file hosting services like MediaFire and YouSendIt (there are others out there).


So, you are a publicist for a firm or record label and you have a budget you need to stay under.  Maybe you are an independent artist with very little money to work with for promoting your band. You already recognize how crucial it is to get written about. You want to get the most promotional bang for your buck. You've gone out and done your research.  There are a few nice digital promo services out there, but they are way too expensive and take too much time to register for, RIGHT?


You decide to use a free file hosting service, because, well, it's free!


If this person I am describing is you, I have a couple questions:

1. Do you realize how much time the average journalist (who has decided to take on your album) spends listening to your album and writing about it?

Answer: Minimum 2 hours

2. Do you care what their experience is like when consuming your promo?

Answer: Obviously not


If I'm donating my time or even getting paid to write for a publication and you send the music to me this way:

Do you think sending music to a journalist in this manner gives them the sense that you even care?  Try and count how many spots on this page try to literally trick you into clicking their ad by making the ad appear to be part of the page's user interface.  I'm not even counting the regular Target and College advertisements or the annoying pop up ad.

This is a huge slap in the face to someone who invests time to write about your music. If you take the easy (free) route when you promote, you're cheating the artist you represent, you're giving the writers a vibe that you really don't care and it makes your business look shady.  If you want the press to put in the effort to do a good job, then give them the respect of getting the music to them in a clean and efficient manner.  Use a professional digital service, have a developer wire the downloads up to your own site or send the writers physical copies.

Case closed.