Releasing an album of music can be as simple as listing it on iTunes and calling it a day, but I think there’s a better way. I think there’s a way to take advantage of different online stores and services to promote discovery while not losing out on any potential revenue from people willing to spend some money on melodies.

Here’s what I would do if I was releasing a newly recorded album.

In an effort to deter piracy and please the biggest fans, as soon as the album was mixed, mastered, and finished, I would put it up on Bandcamp for $10. People following a band closely enough to know when new music is coming out also probably already use Bandcamp (or can figure it out). I’m convinced that piracy of “leaked” music before it’s released happens by super fans too impatient for the chance to buy it. You can fix that by making it available to buy before people can get it for free.

Next, I...

The general rule of thumb is that if a product or service doesn’t exist, create it. I was looking for a good hub of music news, articles, and rising artists and never really found it. Sure, Reddit has a music section, and you could follow individual sources on Twitter to get a similar experience, but a dedicated hub of diverse music related content was missing. Now Next Big Thing exists.

With the technical help of Jared Moody, the foundation for user submitted links to be voted into popularity is now in place. This isn’t revolutionary, if you’ve used any service since ~2005 when Digg was king, this won’t blow your mind, but the aim is for functionality right now. Elegance is important, but only after you have something worth making pretty.

I love tracking down new music and sharing interesting industry stories with people, but sometimes I don’t have the time to keep on top of...

Bands don’t die anymore, they just break up.

Even just a few years ago, news of your favorite band’s demise could have sent you into a whirlwind of endless repeat of track 2, but now, not so much. Whether through wall posts, blog updates or just 140 characters at a time, bands keep marching on long after the music stops.

There are dozens of examples of bands living on long after they’ve set their instruments down, but why? Because it’s hard to let go of 20,000+ followers, or even just 1000 followers. What if the band decides to pull a Brett Favre and come back from retirement time and time again? What if individual members want to explore new options? This “social media” time we currently find ourselves in demands that no matter how many followers, or how you got them, you don’t let them go. Keeping a band’s social media going could once have been seen as an altruistic thing, letting...

Most people’s first taste of Copeland came with ‘Beneath Medicine Tree’s single, “Downtown.” It’s a song about young love with a punchy chorus that can be hard to forget. A perfect choice of song to introduce the band in 2003 when it was still a time of loud and fast guitars, pounding drums, generally ruled by pop/punk. 'Beneath Medicine Tree’ was different, opening with the soft and delicate song, “Brightest.” For a lot of kids, this was something they hadn’t really been exposed to before, unsure if they loved or hated it. It’s possible the album came out just as musical tides were shifting, or maybe it was ‘Beneath Medicine Tree’ that – even slightly – caused a shift in musical influence for a generation of then high school and college kids.

There’s a raw and innocent aspect to the songs on ‘Beneath Medicine Tree’ that only a debut album can produce. Jimmy Eat World’s ‘Clarity’ is...

It now seems foreign to consider writing in a full fledged word processor, only to copy it over to a CMS, then publish it online. There was a time when writing your blog post in Wordpress or another online editor just wasn’t acceptable, but that’s no longer the case. If you’re writing for the web, there’s a good chance that you’re also writing on the web.

Writing online is currently a blossoming space. The seed was planted, it grew, and finally it’s beginning to show some beauty.

There’s a subtle, but important, uprising happening both in the way people write online and why people write online. Services are coming of age, questioning their roots and beginning to shed the past in favor of a new level of experience. Money and success are also no longer results, but prerequisites to typing this connected content.

The ‘blog’ was only the spark, the catalyst, that put a vision is the...

Soundsupply is a new company, formed in early 2012, that takes the ‘deal site’ approach to selling music. Called “Drops,” Soundsupply creates bundles of 10 digital albums, charges $15 for them, and gives people a 10 day window to purchase the deal. The company has just taken on seed funding from Lightbank, the same people responsible for Groupon.

The currently undisclosed amount of funding received will give Tim and Eric Mortensen, the two founding brothers, the opportunity to make Soundsupply their full time responsibility, trying to grow the originally bootstrapped company into an influential music destination. Though the retail experience may be the obvious angle for Soundsupply, music discovery is also at the forefront of focus and one the founders are passionate about.

The company has already created 6 Drops, with the 7th being released March 18th. No bands have been announced for...

It’s curious the products that swing between highs and lows. Some have so much initial success that competitors race to rip it off. While other products are so disregarded at first, only to come back big later. It’s funny how timing can lead to disingenuous results, catapulting a company off course.

With Nintendo reporting such terrible sales of the Wii U in January and February, you can’t help but wonder if the Wii really scratched the average person’s itch for gaming or if it hit the market at just the right time. Nintendo stated early on that the Wii was a blue ocean move, meaning, with this product they were hanging a hard left and sailing to a place where motion control was king and there weren’t any sharks for miles. Everything about the Wii – including its name – was a bold move when the company first announced the console, and it paid off. You could barely get your hands on one...

Tegan & Sara‘s last album – The Con – was an indie folk rock dream while this year’s model is full of 80’s pop. On 'Heartthrob’ you can literally see montage scenes play as the album starts with “Closer.” This change in style doesn’t appear to be anything other than the sisters exploring new territory, rather than chasing a fad.

If preppy-rock is a genre then Ra Ra Riot mastered in on their 2010 album, ‘The Orchard’. 2013’s ‘Beta Love’ yielded a different genre style though, one with a lot more beeps and boops. I would never accuse a band of changing their style to get in on a trend, but from a glance, it sort of seems like it. Still, the band did the songs justice and put out a great release.

Passion Pit went the opposite way of most bands and actually used less computerized effects on the new album than the previous one. It didn’t hurt their career, but rather now appears to be...

Reports out of CNET today indicate that Twitter purchased music discovery site We Are Hunted sometime last year with the idea of building their own music app. We Are Hunted is both a builder of music products and apps as well as a destination for discovering what music is currently being talked about online. Stepping back for a second, the obvious first question, why is Twitter so interested in music?

Twitter’s first jump into 3rd party services was when they created their own image hosting service a few years back. Even then it just made sense that Twitter wanted control over a media format that has always been heavily traded on the service. Twitter’s recent venture into video with their Vine app also makes sense, but creating an app to discover music still leaves more than a few questions.

We Are Hunted is a data driven site. The service looks at what music people are talking about...

Even if you plan for the inevitable and live like your computer is always going to die, when that time does come, there’s still a few hoops to jump through. Here’s a few apps and services I didn’t realize how much I’ve come to rely on.

Just 6 months ago, I still wasn’t a regular Evernote user, but now I couldn’t go without it. I tried half a dozen times to use Evernote because it seemed like a good product, but the obvious use case was always too vague. Finally after seeing it as just a text editor to write in that then automatically synced my documents to nearly ever device imaginable, I got it. Version 5 also helped to finally give the Mac and iOS versions the little extra design style they were severely lacking.

You could use Pages, store your documents in iCloud or use Notational Velocity storing your documents in Dropbox and be set as well, but for an all inclusive solution...