but as we all know:
"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
Gil Scott-Heron (1971)

http://www.archive.org/details/TheRevolutionWillNotBeTelevised

Maybe NME and The Wire etc did once give attention to good new music, but having looked through the NME in a shop today out of curiosity, its just the same old faces from 10 years ago and that irritating 'we're down with the kids' way of writing they have... but it just seems fake.

The only really honest, pioneering, grass-roots journalism on new music (CC and commercial alike) i have found in the last 5 years or so has almost always on blogs and online magazines. I guess the only thing you can do is to support the CC artists by buying their physical goods if they offer them, but without money from music sales, independent art will never be able to compete against the established media for attention. Maybe the way forward is for successful CC labels with large audiences to evolve into commercial labels, produce physical editions of their artists work on CD and vinyl, and try to make the energy and the innovation of even a few of the artists who release music via CC more well known to the public. Then, I guess, the press will have to pay attention to them!

@mo & all the other former headbangers at phlow: check this out [25MB, low quality only]
http://www.archive.org/download/DTM029/8BitCannibal-8BitCannibalismPt1.zip
metal & death metal classics/cover-versions on 8bit :)

i love shsk'h! they exist in their own wonderful world it seems.

@fabien: i agree with this too i should be exploring mailing lists more than i do. as for the facebook campaign, i did measure the stats closely to see but it seemed to be negligible, compared to other methods of just finding people that would like your music and telling them about it.

http://www.Buzzsonic.com

@pk: You must be more careful. Advertising can be very deceiving without monitoring. You need something to measure. Of course, netlabels usually cannot look at their sales. You might look at your download stats (which is technically very difficult to impossible with CC music, because everyone can redistribute it) and especially count how often you've been featured somewhere (radio, mixes, blogs). You really need to measure your ad campaigns success properly to improve its effect and efficiency. Doing cool & focused ads is a very advanced topic, an intuitive approach will mostly fail and waste cash.

But one idea might help to get more out of simple page visits and track downloads: Why not asking for a mandatory newsletter subscription and a "how can you support?" input field before download? E-Mail addresses are very valuable for further marketing and there's even some kind of tribe feeling if done right. Just my 2 cents...

I think you state some important points. I would like to cover for example heavy metal music and such genres. But I don't listen to these styles, have no expertise, so I keep my mouth shut. I think it's only a matter of time, that there will be more and more magazines like Phlow covering rock, heavy metal and more hiphop. I feel it ;) It's just around the corner.

So the funny thing is that even though this music is available, it's not often that I actually start listening to it. What it did cause is that I started to make my own music also available under a CC license.

But I don't see this kind of music being covered in the main CC-oriented media, which tends to be mainly electronic-music focused.

@ steve: it's those strange netlabels like shsk'h which give me the hope there will be an equivalent of "music as usual" in the netaudio some day - but as long as there's no real scene for beebop, blues, ska, ... [fill that space with any genre except electronic + noise] in the netaudio-movement, there's very much work to do with involving artists...

@pk: it's the elementary and somehow beautiful, but in the same time disturbing gap between "online" & "offline" which let's your festival-goers ignore your releases. however, you should obviously target your audience directly at the festival, announce that everyone should bring with their thumbdrives and provide some very special "peppermill to go" ["a complete label-catalog to take away"], including exclusive live-takes...

@Zoe.LeelA: if anything matters, creative commons does.
just try something else.

@thomas: your pic at soundcloud is much funnier than this one here... :)

hopefully I will start a marketing/promoting articles series here on phlow or netlabels.org to show interested netlabels some great and effective tactics :) Still most of them have a lot to learn.

Thomas makes a good point about the difference between music articles in print and those in electronic formats. If tablet PCs provide a pleasant reading experience, it will increase the chances of "traditional" magazines including links to CC netaudio artists and netlabels. Hopefully, the divide between the two worlds will narrow.

Until then, it's up to the CC community to do the legwork: contact magazines & promo agencies, develop merchandise, ensure that CC releases meet the standards of professional releases: hi-fi sound, correct metadata & tags, high quality thumbnails and full-size artwork, liner notes, zipped albums and individual track downloads in mp3/Ogg/FLAC/Wav formats, CDs & 12 inches EPs, and so on.

Thomas is also correct in stating that music journalists, with some laudable exceptions, are not renowned for their work ethic. :) All that tedious stuff I've just mentioned will help to make things easier for scribes and give them less of an excuse to reach for the latest platter from GenericMegaMusicCorp.

Having said that, the beauty of CC music is that anyone can slap a 90-minute 32 kbps buzzsaw drone on archive.org and invite all and sundry to "enjoy" their magnum opus. Netaudio encompasses everything from rank, cack-handed amateurs, to seamless operations like rec.72 and aaah! Long may it do so.

I agree with Martin that one of the weaknesses of the CC scene is the preponderance of electronica. Now, my love for dance, glitch, ambient and electronica has deepened thanks to all of you lot out there, but I've always found it difficult to source everyday genres such as rock and pop. In addition, songs, those pesky things with lyrics, verses and choruses, are noticeable by their absence. This may be a reflection of the "bedroom" nature of many CC artists and, in particular, the inevitable consequences of the development of DAW software and VSTs that Thomas mentioned. I've read many posts in music production forums where an experienced musician admits to being a complete beginner in using software to produce music: they are invariably guitarists, singers and drummers, the very people who make the rock and pop that is such a graing omission from the free music scene. It's probably a generational thing; it might take a year or three for "traditional" musicians to really catch up with the amazing and rapidly changing world of music software.

By the way, that word "free" is full of negative connotations. Most teenagers and twenty-somethings think that music is free anyway, so CC music is nothing special. In fact, it's distinctly unspecial because anything that is given away free of charge when record companies are trying their best to combat piracy must, by definition, be musically worthless. Free music is rubbish, isn't it?

So, how to change people's opinion? By getting the music out there, right under people's noses, and showing them that CC music is fun. Get on to Spotify, Magnatune, LastFM; email internet radio stations; compile a list of likely publications but don't send "blanket" emails to magazines and newspapers - contact their journalists directly; hold parties and gigs; pump out some merchandise (I want to see (XXXL) t-shirts and mugs, people!); get on Facebook and splash the cash on a Facebook advert (300 MILLION people are waiting to hear from you); tweet your guts out (Twitter is increasingly popular, easy to use, and provides something like a bespoke news service in subjects that interest you); set up a newsletter; begin a mailing list for subscribers; start a YouTube channel (videos are catnip to the curious music fan and make for a wonderfully moveable advert that can be sent and hosted anywhere); explain in words of one syllable how to use Google Reader or similar to take advantage of an RSS feed...and I'm spent. There's lots more that can be done.

Oh, and recommend Phlow and Beat magazine. ;)

Best of luck. :)

i agree with aaahh (a label i enjoy) that the results from promotion can be quite disappointing at times. there's just such a gigantic amount of media out there. and to most people, it's all free. it just seems that most people assume that free releases must compromise in terms of quality. and it's true i think that the artists on established labels are people that work extremely hard on their craft as they do it for a living, and the netlabel musicians are mostly forced to do it part time in between jobs. but as we know there's great stuff in every genre that rivals commercial releases. however people don't have time to filter through it and unfortunately the stigma goes as far as the popular music blogs and zines and they rarely cover any of these albums. with a few rare exceptions.

also on the subject of festivals... peppermill does one! on top of a mountain, every summer. it's fantastic but even there i find that even the people that will come every year and anticipate it, they won't check out our releases on a regular basis, as the festival becomes its own entity. with such a wide variety of styles being released, even peppermill-loving festival goers don't seem to have time to filter through our output. it seems sometimes my own failure in promotion, but reading the accounts of others it seems more and more like it's just not an easy thing to do. on such a small scale as a netlabel. maybe an entirely new approach is needed, not sure.

at least i and others seem to be getting a ton of downloads even if they are scattered throughout the entire planet. so people out there are listening.

But first you have to build an audience of fans, and that includes getting people to play your music on webradio, podcasts, social networks, and blogs ... and in clubs, restaurants, etc.

The main obstacle is getting people to know these artists. So I agree that promoting to traditional journalists and magazines is essential, along with playing the music online.

That's what I like about Beat - you (yourself as tokafi) do it exactly like this in the magazine.

we created a base and still working on a plattform to inform the people out there...with the help of different other netlabel "owners" we started this trip without any competition. we worked together as one not even with any thought of competition. i am really grateful for this and i like to thank anybody out there. BUT i have to say the support really last very fast. We kept and keep on moving on this...releasing the e.p. is one thing. beeing out there and show people that zoeleela is for real is a different story.

my exeprience says out of mind out of control and support. we still keep this litchen warmed up. touring, rmx contest in partnership with thomas and the beat magazine, regular media are publishing my news, dates n stuff but where is the scene that supported me and the netaudio by itself now? i dont like to say ok that´s it. no more a helpful hand of...whatever iam not complaining pls do not get me wrong. but to be honest Zoe.LeelA created something in a realy short time and i think we all can benefit of the things my team and i did. could it be that a girls has stronger lungs than a bunch of dudes who working for this for years? how could it be than my latest video is not beeing embend at the main intersections of netaudio interests.
So where is the complaining now? or is it just us? we ve been able to create a dream in this ugly world of mass media, instead of moving a weight together we just keep on talking like juveniles sitting around bonfire and keep on talking and wasting time instead of doing something...best yours truly ZOE.LEELA

I've never understood why there should even be this divide. To me, the ideal situation would be a media landscape which features netaudio alongside physical releases without making a big fuss about it. If a magazine states that there is no space for netaudio to be included, they are obviously confusing a method of distribution with the actual content...

I make and listen to music in ambient, post-ambient and non-traditional genres. The free music culture created a swath of labels and websites geared toward linking this audience. Analog culture had been singularly unable to serve this audience--brave small labels failed to make money and failed to get their product out to all but an even tinier niche. The technological liberation of this music from traditional print-and-sticks-and-mortar distribution caused a wonderful blooming of the listener base for this music.

Will ceative commons/copyleft/free music ever be a mainstream phenomenon? I cannot tell. Yet if it never expands beyond a vibrant niche sub-culture, I must admit I will still be content.

By all means, there is work to be done. Yet that work is anything but becoming internet alternatives to mainstream culture. Imagine a world in which third world artists net-release vibrant new sounds, and listeners actually donate to them directly. Imagine net-radio
attracting a larger listenership, and creating a larger live audience for those net-artists who wish to perform live.
Imagine 10 magazines of the quality of phlow, but a reach in the millions of readers. These days are inevitable, even if we are but a fad and a dream and a tiny sub-culture. But they are only inevitable because we will make them so.

Just telling people "download here, it's free" is not promotion nowadays. It worked 10 years ago, but doesn't work anymore these days. Every rap kid in the US has at least one free EP he's currently promoting daily over myspace and facebook, same with every techno dub producer in the EU. Every major label marketing plan involves free download somewhere and again, with services like deezer and last.fm, everything is basically free for the user, no matter if it's labeled "netaudio", "CC" or not.

"Free" is probably the most overused, saturated and ignored claim on the web today. And in my opinion not the best method to create buzz.

Oh and finally, it's really no secret that it's basically impossible to get anything reviewed or mentioned in mags as long you as don't:

- Create hardware and:
- Work with a good distributor which promotes the new releases in the magz through ads (this is by far the most important point!!).
- Work with professional promo agencies. Most music journalists use these as filters.
- Explicitly send them proper and interesting press material.
- Already built up a huge audience.
- And the most sadistic point: You don't get mentioned if you have never been mentioned before.

However, as Christian mentioned, the music press seriously lost it's weight in the last years. A single blog post can create much more buzz than any print mag. Not sure if print reviews are really worth all the promo work.

But radio and taste-maker airplay is still one of the most effective music marketing, you're not credible if you're not played by others.

--- sometimes I have the same impression. but in general you're wrong. more and more creative commons labels promote highfidelity sounds. currently there is still much electronic music. but listen to the productions of error broadcast. listen to old productions from epsilonlab or other techno labels like zimmerlautstaerke. the quality is high as ever and the "bad apples" will rot and be forgotten but I think Phlow and others prove how compatible the music really is.

"The netaudio scene is nothing new and far over 10 years old, the music press obviously had their time and didn't really enjoy its output IMO."

--- the scene is not "new" but to most people it is. often no musicians have heard of creative commons music while i talk to them. and i got ignored many times asking to write netaudio reviews for magazine. always the same answer: we have no place for that.

otherwise i did a podcast for the german newspaper zeit for nearly one year. http://zuender.zeit.de/netzmusik

the print media ignore ccmusic musicians. in germany that's a fact. is it elsewhere the same? people please tell me.

but: it is a fact that the "old media" is not really connected to the digital world. there is a "media-gap"... did you ever type a link, you read about in a printmagazine, into your browser? do you remember any link, some presenter told you on the radio/tv? Most printmagazines or radio/tv stations have websites, but they don’t know how to use the internet. Most of them don’t even link to external sites, for heavens sake!

almost every blogpost about aaahh records had a deeper impact in terms of a promotional effect then any radio, print or tv thing.

we have a huge mailing list, we know some multipliers and aggregators (mostly blogs) we contact personally, when we got a new release. we try to be as open and transparent as possible, we are eager to cooperate with other (net)labels and do co-releases. important is, that we take our time. even more important: we give our releases time to "ripen slowly". we see aaahh more like a community than a plattform. we try to get people involved (by remixing, for example. or booking), we want our artists to get to know us and the other aaahh-bands. we believe that all this is part of a good way of running a netlabel. because all the interwebs out there make it so easy to get people together. Is it time consuming? Hell, yes! Is it profitable? Hell, No! So, why do you do it? Because it’s great fun!

And there is much more a netlabel could do: A label-festival/event. A mailorder-service (for people who want to by physical stuff). A booking agency. … Just to name a few examples.

We are still thrilled about the scene and we are looking forward to what is about to come in the future!

cheers,
christian // aaahh-records

well, but most netlabels, even popular ones, even the lovely peppermill, are mainly doing the niches and, frankly, electronic music is and has always been niche-music...
hmm... if the next madonna- or beatles-album is getting released on warp, electronic music may come out of it's niche, but until then...

or the other way around: just try to imagine the whole netaudio scene without any electronic music - what would it look like right now? or the phlow-mag / beat-mag without any relation/reference to electronic music?

don't expect any big changes regarding public attention for the netaudio scene as long as it cannot compete with the main sources of the commercial music market.

@ fabien: it's the strength of netaudio to resist, e.g. not to offer the cheap single track "to go", but beautiful tied albums with heavy duty artwork and lovely linernotes for real music lovers... :)

You mentioned some very important points. Promotion is dramatically underrated in the netaudio scene IMO, if not completely ignored by most.

The current listener's habbits either point to free on demand streaming applications (last.fm, deezer, ect) or tend to exclusively use the big shops (I-tunes, Juno, Amazon) to search, find, enjoy and sometimes buy the music they like.

So, there is no big demand for zipped free music downloads hidden on a nerdy label website. From the listeners perspective, every song is free for listen and easy to find. No matter if it's Madonna or the Beatles, it's streamable for free on last.fm, napster, deezer and buyable at many places for very low cash (many prefer paying instead of searching). And here's the funny part: 99,9% of all netaudio music is not. WHY??!

The biggest problem if you ask me is that "netaudio" tries to build up a parallel world to avoid competition with the "real world". thoughts like "Oh no, it's unfair to compare it with Warp, my releases are free!" are symptomatic in the scene. So, it's no wonder the scene isn't really taken seriously in the press and broadcast, music fans want cool music, not hippie ideology and politics upfront.

The netaudio scene is nothing new and far over 10 years old, the music press obviously had their time and didn't really enjoy its output IMO. I don't think there's much to expect.