Super Cute Thursday (unplanned) continues, with an adorable indie rock coloring book. It’s hardly the first. STS9 and recently the lovely Riceboy Sleeps limited edition by Sigur Ros’ Jonsi and Alex came with coloring books. Perhaps inspired by musicians entering parenthood, it’s all the rage.

If you can’t be pressured to select just one band for your (or your kids’) coloring pleasure, here’s The Indie Rock Coloring Book, a project of the Yellow Bird Project, which gives to artists’ charities. You get to not only color but solve mazes and connect-the-dots.

Hey, with music increasingly intangible in the digital age and record sales dropping, it seems the kids’ activity book could be the future. And you get artists like MGMT, Iron & Wine, Bon Iver, and – pictured here – Joseph Arthur with his various stompboxes. Other artists involved with the project include faves like Au Revoir Simone, Broken Social Scene, Of Montreal, Rilo Kiley, and … many other goodies.

Electronic artists have been having a wave of babies themselves, so it seems an all-electronic coloring book is next. Perhaps a maze in Ableton Live’s Clip View, color-the-oscilloscope, monome Sodoku, fold-your-own-Moog… I could go on, but I’ll let you suggest some ideas and artists. (CDM Activity Book, perfect for long tours?)

Daily Dose Pick: The Indie Rock Coloring Book [Flavorpill]
Coloring Book
Yellow Bird Themesong

A young, aspiring musician walks into a consumer electronics store. (Let’s call it Big Buy, and imagine people wearing… red polo shirts.) They wander into the game aisle and muse at the latest music games in the video game section – $60-100 in price. But there’s an endcap with something else: a box of Pro Tools that’ll run on their computer, plus a ready-to-use audio interface, for $99-129. Instead of Guitar Hero, they leave with Pro Tools – a name they already knew.

See full details of the new lineup, with photos.

This idea is nothing new – for many years, it’s been possible to do great stuff with $100 on a computer. But the most powerful brand in music production (Pro Tools) has remained notably absent. Instead, that hypothetical consumer would find a smattering of consumer-only choices with names they likely wouldn’t recognize. Meanwhile, the name “Pro Tools,” and the software interface that made it popular, have been limited to more complex offerings sold through specialists.

Today changes all of that. Gone is the idea that “Pro Tools” is only for the high end. Gone is the iLok hardware dongle. (You still need either the Micro or Fast Track interface plugged in, but the target market for this product may not care.)

There are three offerings:

A vocal studio, bundled with a USB mic (similar to M-Audio’s Luna).

A “recording” studio, bundled with a simple USB bus-powered audio interface (the previously-available Fast Track.

The “KeyStudio”, bundled with a 49-key USB keyboard. The software comes with 60+ virtual instruments, says Avid, so you’ve got quite a lot to play.

The software included in each has some limitations – it has 32 tracks (16 audio, 8 instrument, and 8 MIDI), and more basic routing options (3 inserts per track, 2 audio inputs, and 2 outputs). The absence of multitrack recording is probably the biggest restriction. But you nonetheless get a range of virtual instrument sounds and effects, plus a full complement of editing and mixing features.

On the same day that people are rediscovering The Beatles through a video game, and video games are causing people to rediscover music making, you can buy a studio for about the same price.

Now, if you’re reading this site, that’s probably not news. But it could be news to quite a lot of people who haven’t discovered computer music making. And it represents a tectonic shift in how the titan of music making software treats its flagship.

What’s hard to overstate is how profoundly Avid has changed overnight some of the rules they themselves wrote. There’s no diplomatic way to put this: for years, Avid/Digidesign has been a dinosaur, with all the negatives and positives that can come from that. They have all the heft of a dinosaur, the footprint – and all of the kind of ongoing assumptions about how to do business. The whole modus operandi of Pro Tools seems to have been protecting the crown jewels. The idea of something called Pro Tools sold to a genuine mass market at this price, without any differentiation between “consumer” and “pro” or “mass-market” and “musician” is largely new. And that could point to a sea change for the whole industry further in the future.

In fact, even Avid’s competition has followed the unspoken rule that your flagship product and the crippled version you sell to the mass market have to be kept isolated. Apple is careful to distinguish Garage Band from Logic, iMovie from Final Cut. Ableton’s entry-level versions of Live have key features removed – even the LE version that costs about twice what Pro Tools Essentials, with hardware, does. Cakewalk doesn’t call its entry-level software SONAR. MOTU doesn’t have an entry-level Digital Performer. Steinberg has Nuendo, Cubase… and, remember, most people who have never heard of any of these things have heard of Pro Tools. The result is the industry takes a bunch of names that aren’t well-known to the general public, and then …adds more.

The kind of gymnastics manufacturers do to keep the low-end from being the “real” product sometimes border on absurdist.

For instance, take M-Audio’s Fast Track, the interface now included with Pro Tools Essentials Studio. It’s a simple box with a USB jack and some audio inputs. But a first-time consumer probably wants to plug it into a computer – including a Windows PC that lacks a pre-installed GarageBand – and have something happen.

The Fast Track is marketed as coming from “M-AUDIO,” a company most people outside our bubble have never heard. It’s “compatible” with Pro Tools “M-Powered” (not an actual word). Oh, except that’s a separate purchase – and it comes with a special plastic USB dongle that you have to plug into your computer called the iLok. The average consumer hasn’t ever seen hardware copy protection.

On the Fast Track product page, the fine print about how the other software bundles work is longer than the description of the actual product.

*M-Audio Session software is available in Fast Track USB packages sold at consumer electronics retailers, and currently works only with Fast Track USB and M-Audio Micro hardware. If you purchased a Fast Track USB package from your local pro audio dealer, you received a professional software bundle including Ableton Live Lite. If you wish to purchase Session for use with your Fast Track USB, it is available directly from M-Audio for only $25 (valued at $69.95). Purchase Session now.”

What’s Session? That’s another software product, unrelated to Pro Tools.

Hell, I’m confused, and I do this for a living.

Now, instead of that complexity, you can get one box that includes both the Fast Track and Pro Tools Essentials, without any of the fine print. (As pictured.) If those stores had decent commissions, I’d just park myself in one around the holiday season.

Don’t get me wrong: Pro Tools Essentials has tough competition. GarageBand has been down this path before, minus the hardware and the “Pro Tools” name, but with the very serious “Apple” name attached. The aforementioned Rock Band franchise will now have its game songs produced in Reaper, a $60 piece of software that does for some of its advanced users what Pro Tools might. The hardware tie-ins here, ironically, may be less valuable to people than the software – Pro Tools, more than a keyboard or mic, is likely to sell the packages.

The bottom line, though, is that a box that says “Pro Tools” at $99 is important to the whole industry. And if Avid is redefining what a “Pro” tool is, something bigger than even Avid really is shifting. The technological shift is hardly new, but the ability to recognize that in the market has been a long time coming.

I’m curious to see what will happen next.

Avid, the parent company of music product makers Digidesign, M-Audio, and Sibelius, has decided to assert the brand of its mothership more aggressively. As near as I can tell, that means you won’t see the M-Audio, Digidesign, or Sibelius brand names any more – along with video maker Pinnacle. You’ll see, presumably, Avid Pro Tools? (Right now, you see the Digi site with an Avid banner across the top that says “Digidesign is Avid.” But that was true before, so I don’t really know what this exactly means.)

Avid has also unveiled a new logo made, cleverly, to look like transport buttons on video and audio equipment.

I have to say, I have extremely mixed feelings about this, for a number of reasons. And by mixed, I mean mixed – this could be really positive, or really … not. The good news is, having one brand and one brand strategy probably does make a whole lot of sense. The (potential) downside:

• Avid may be the weaker of the brands here. It’s known among video people, but not necessarily even beloved there. Digidesign and M-Audio, meanwhile, touch wider user bases, and have real resonance with musicians.
• Will combining video and audio products actually work? Will a single brand really help? Sony has tried to do just this, with less-than-stellar results – perhaps because the video, audio, pro music, and “consumer” music markets (and their many factions within those umbrellas) are so particular. Sony has much bigger brand recognition than Avid (understatement), but even that hasn’t really made products like Acid or Sound Forge or (for video) Vegas substantially more popular. It works for Apple, but that’s because people associate Apple’s products with the computers they buy – and, well, they’re Apple and normal rules don’t seem to apply.
• You can’t read the new logo. Sure, the triangles are clever, but you can’t actually read the letters. Also, aren’t old-school hardware transport buttons a bit dated in this day and age? I’m going to assume all of that gets sorted out in practice, so I’m not actually worried about this, but I did have to point it out.

On the other hand, Avid’s combination of Digidesign, M-Audio, and Sibelius, plus the Avid/Pinnacle stuff on the video side really is a whole heck of a lot of what the music and video production world is about, and that hasn’t been clear. So despite the caveats and dangers, there is potential here. It’s all in the details.

And more important than branding is how Avid relates to its customers, and how the company operates. If that goes right, the brand will respond.

The press release promises not just a new identity, but a “new strategy” and “a new operating model.” But it isn’t clear, yet, what that actually means in the real world, particularly on the audio end.

http://www.avid.com/us/pressroom/brand-identity.aspx

The press release isn’t terribly encouraging, though, as it immediately shifts to Avid-centric, ultra-high-end / pro video solutions. Those products are extremely important. It’s tough to know just how anyone could find a way to relate that to a person buying a $100 plastic MIDI controller at the other end of the market, so I don’t envy the job of the business folks at Avid. At the same time, I do believe it’s possible to run a business that covers that gamut.

I’m going to talk to the Avid folks about this next week to get a better understanding. But because I expect many pro audio folks will react similarly on first brush, I decided in the interest of bloggy disclosure to go ahead and publish my initial reaction.

Let us know your questions or thoughts, and I’ll pass them along to Digidesign/M-Audio Avid next week.

The urgency of being way behind a single dominant player can make electronics makers do some odd stuff to promote their products. iPod, once an icon of digital cool, has achieved such ubiquity that it doesn’t even try to be hip any more. The thing is being promoted with American Idol, for crying out loud — not exactly indie cred. We saw Microsoft enlisting indie musicians and animators to sell Zune, of course.

But here’s where things get surprisingly amazing: Sony is using weird and wonderful Japanese experimental music to promote Walkman.

Now we’re talking.

And whether or not Walkman is cool again, this is for sure: Japanese experimental musicians? Mind-blowingly cool. And, apparently, in love with using light as a controller for sound.

Atsuhiro Ito uses contact mics on a fluorescent bulb he dubs the Optron. Instead of just being stage eye candy, the bulbs are really making the sounds here; coupled with guitar effects, he can solo on the bulbs. It’s what the Knitting Factory will be like after the nuclear winter. I can’t wait.

Taeji Sawai uses a light pen to draw melodic lines and rhythmic onto a screen. The basic effect – track light from a single source – is old. Yet he’s clearly got a brilliant aesthetic mind that makes it all work; the elements are strikingly simple but never fail to be engaging. And there’s a strong connection to work by his fellow sonic inventor Toshio Iwai.

Thanks to our friend Donald Bell of cnet, aka very talented and (cool) musician Chachi Jones, who has a great write-up:

Sony Walkman promos are awesome, confusing

Confusing? No, I’d say Sony is confusing; the real question is why their Walkman can’t be more like these ads. Plus, since neither Don nor I can read Japanese, how do we know those characters don’t say something like “Hey, guys, sorry for that bit with the lousy boring electronics – we’re coming back from the dark side to make awesome things again”? Okay, maybe not. (Do let me know if the next one says “Fine, you damned snarky blogger, I’d like to see you run a giant multinational corporation.”)

Admittedly, the problem here is this makes me want to toss my iPod touch out the window and build my own open source MP3 player with Popsicle sticks and wire, or, at best, mod an original Walkman so I can play circuit-bent OGG files using power from a bicycle. At the very least, I’m ready to add to my Atsuhiro Ito and Taeji Sawai collection. And I don’t think their full body of work is on iTunes. That’s just as well.

So, Sony, thanks. Now, will you let us run homebrew music apps on your PSP? Please?

I usually try to steer clear of the marketing crud, but this is too bizarre to pass up. Taco Bell, anxious to jump on this whole “indie music” bandwagon, is using the only currency it has: combinations of refried beans, cheese, rehydrated ground meat, and tortillas.

Here’s the plan: they find 100 bands, and give them $500 in Taco Bell food while they’re on tour — just in case the burritos were the one thing breaking your tour budget. (Okay, there is that whole fuel cost and lodging thing, but get some bikes and a tent and you should be fine.)

The grand prize: the kind of fame that can only come from including hot sauce packets in your marketing plan. And to think, all this time people have been chasing music press and blogs and word of mouth and such. PR helpfully tell us that they’ll get “a well-known indie rock producer” to record the single. (Wait — aren’t “indie” and “well-known producer” supposed to be mutually exclusive?) But it’s really the hot sauce packets that seal the deal:

The singles will then be promoted on www.feedthebeat.com and through online advertising and in-store efforts in the Spring of 2009, as the Web site address will be featured on Taco Bell’s iconic Sauce Packet, which reaches more than 208 million people in about a month.

Oddly, talking about this has only made me hungry. I know, I know — I’ll try to find a real burrito, not a Taco Bell.

If a CDM reader happens to win this, we’ll be proud to see your name in lights extra spicy.

feedthebeat.com

Reader Mark notes that, as covered in Pitchfork, Girl Talk got the right idea after last year’s contest and shared their taco winnings with fans. Now that’s good publicity.

Readers: got better ideas for viral condiment marketing? (Oooh, wait, I shouldn’t say the word “viral” in the same breath as a fast food joint, should I?)

“Got Balls?”

I couldn’t let anyone miss that. (Hey, I think it could have worked as an ad campaign.) I’m not going to touch the debate any more; if you don’t like the Voyager OS, you’ll use something else. But I will say, useful as presets and MIDI are, it is possible to make music without them.

Hmm, I can come up with a few alternate slogans for other products we saw:

The not-yet-functional LinnDrum II prototype: “Silence is golden.”

Camoflage X-50 Korg: “Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit …”

Roland’s C-30 digital harpsichord? Um, well, “Are you old school?” really covers that one.

Okay, music fans: reach the very vanguard of geekiness, and you can become an entirely new demographic — the Nerdster. Or so says direct marketing guru Lauren Bell for DMNews, who much to my surprise reviewed the most recent CDM + Etsy + Make “Handmade Music night in Brooklyn”:

Last night, on the not-so-anonymous urging of a PR company that represents Make magazine, I went to “Handmade Music” at Etsy Labs in downtown Brooklyn…

On handmade music night, super-nerds, artists, and the edgy, in-the-know, 20-something crowd converge on the Etsy labs, drawn by promises of newly-invented instruments, techno music, and free pizza…

Although it seemed a bit exclusive (the hipster-to-non ratio was rather high), I thought it was an interesting and entertaining way to spread brand awareness.

Make magazine targets nerds and hipsters..does that make them nerdsters?

Brand awareness — uh, sure! I won’t even touch “in-the-know”, “edgy”, and “hipster” (uh … yeah … that sure describes me, at least), but nerdster is a word I can get behind. Even if we’re probably not actually playing “techno” music. And Lauren, it’s not exclusive; do come back. (I’ll make sure CDM’s own, massive PR department follows up with her.)

In addition to direct marketing mag coverage, the most recent event attracted the attention of a site that largely does video podcasts about football fans. (Hey, you can solder a new MIDI controller during ad breaks.) Bre Pettis, the vodcasting superstar from Make, shows how he turned an electronics kit into a soundmaker, a quite-fun project:

Click To Play

Via realfans.tv — the guy there was really a nice dude, too; hope to see him back.

Next NYC event 9/27: Mark your calendars: we’re doing another Handmade Music event on September 27 in Brooklyn. If you’ve got a project, even a small one, we’d love to see it. Drop me a line.

And we really are working on a way of showing projects off virtually from around the world. If you’d like to chat about ideas for that, drop me a line. Otherwise, stay tuned.

Ed.: Social networking, online sites (this being one of them), Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace … sometimes it seems like all the connections are being done online. Naturally, the Web’s real power is when you can meet all those virtual personalities you’ve gotten to know offline. Far better than getting demo CDs in the mail or listening to someone’s tracks on MySpace: meeting them at a party over a drink and getting their music from them directly.

Such is the genius of Chicago’s Demo Swap. Co-organizer Liz has this wrap-up of what July’s party was like. Non-Chicagoans (heck, fellow New Yorkians), clearly this is a model to be replicated elsewhere. A huge thanks to all of the CDMers who showed up. It was fantastic to meet you, and I hope to see you again soon — ideally with more leisure time to hang out! (I’m in Chicagoland regularly.) I was especially impressed by Karl, who was in Chicago from Austria and was embarking on a cross-country drive across the entire length of Route 66 the following morning. Why is that foreigners appreciate America better than most Americans do?

Here’s how the demo swap went; read closely for some nice music tips and perhaps insight into how to get a demo swap going in your neck of the woods. -PK

Having done a Demo Swap for Modsquare a while back, we decided that Ramp Chicago’s 2^nd Tuesdays at Sonotheque residency would be a great venue to host the 2007 resurrection of the networking event. On Tuesday the 17^th of July, having plugged-in and sound-checked our guest live PA artists, Protman and Bounte, the crowd started filtering in just as the doors opened at 9pm, and we slapped name badges on them and encouraged them to mingle and swap their demos.Emulsion DJd a downtempo / ambient / electro set while the crowd started to get to know each other and get their drink on, while I schmoozed with the crowd, collecting demos and handling some last minute line level issues that popped up at the last minute. As I was checking said levels in the booth, Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music and his girlfriend arrived and we started introducing them around to the patrons, which would continue to be a non-stop process, as more and more people would come up to me and ask “which one is Peter Kirn?” Thankfully he was wearing a striped shirt which made my task a bit easier.

Bounte took the stage (which usually means the two satellite tables we set up in front of the booth) and entertained the crowd with his particular style of downtempo-meets-electro pop / credible, instrumental hip hop, completely off of his laptop, mostly undeterred by curious fans who wanted to ask him about his process, software, and upcoming releases.

Protman followed up with his signature “wireless set” (photo at the beginning) which means using a wireless Xbox 360 Wireless Controller to trigger clips in Ableton Live 6 via his custom-coded PD (Pure Data) interface. As I was making the rounds with our email sign up sheet, I noticed that about a third of the interested people were confused as to why Protman was wandering around with an Xbox controller, and
where the sound was coming from. Another third told me that he was “absolutely
mindblowing” or a similar adjective, and the final third wanted to know who was DJing now (Answer: No one. Protman was playing his set with an Xbox controller. Yes, really.).

Along the way I collected a serious amount of demo discs and I find it rather inspiring that we have such a dedicated range of talent here in Chicago (mostly, as we had a few non-natives make an appearance such as Karl (CDM member from Austria).

People from the CDM community that I’ve chatted with on Tuesday include Josh Schnable, Michael Una, Nathan Koch and Karl Petermichl. Check out the post on my blog, where I give an overview of the more notable demos I received. At the end of the night, I had to excuse myself from networking so I could DJ the rest of the night, which I posted on my blog. And I was inspired enough to do a remix myself of one of the demos I received. Overall, the night was a success and I’m confident another one will be in the works. Here’s some more photos from the night.

Previously:

How To Create a Successful Demo Disc: Tips and Resources

A demo is short for “demonstration,” and its purpose is to show others what you can do, musically. In the past, a band with major-label aspirations would scrape together a bit of cash for a few hours in a studio and crank out a few copies of their best songs on a tape or a record and then send it off to various A&R departments, hoping for a record deal and a contract with a fat advance. These days, technology has made the concept of a demo and its applications somewhat different, but we’ll always need to share what we’re capable of with others.

If you’re in Chicago this Tuesday… During my time at Modsquare a few years back, I organized a Demo Swap at a club in Chicago, where guests would get in free if they showed up with a stack of 10 or more or their demos on CDR. Not only did I discover talented local acts who I featured on our free online compilations, I met artists that I would later book at events, and learned that fellow attendees who had met at the night ended up collaborating on projects. Since I had so many people asking me to do another one, we’ve reincarnated the night at Ramp Chicago. So if you’re close to Chicago, show up at Sonotheque on Tuesday, July 17, 2007 at 9pm with a stack of demos or promotional material, get in for a reduced cover, and start meeting your fellow musicians and industry types (Peter Kirn of CDM will be there!). Read more about it here: Demo Swap July 17 at Ramp Chicago.

Where’s it going?

Figure out your intentions with the demo. Is it to get signed to a label? To book gigs? To find like-minded potential collaborators? To get work scoring a film? Similarly, determine the audience. Is it the A & R people at a label? The talent buyer at a club? Other musicians? Each of these requires a different approach.

Getting signed

If you’re trying to get signed to a record label you have to take into consideration the sort of label. Most thriving independent labels focus on staying within a particular niche or “sound,” especially in the fields of electronic music and indie labels. If those are the types of labels you are hoping to release with you should make a demo that will fit within those niches.

First, find out if unsolicited demos are accepted at the labels you’re considering. You don’t want to waste time and money on something that won’t even be listened to. Then make sure you’ll fit there. Don’t submit psychedelic folk to a minimal techno label and dark drum and bass likely won’t fly at an indie-emo label in the Midwest. While you don’t need to bend your style to fit in with a particular label, you should look at the rest of their releases and consider whether or not you think you would fit alongside the other artists. With my own label, subVariant, I focused on IDM and melodic, glitchy 4/4 tracks, and I was always surprised (and a little annoyed) when I would get trance, folk, and hip-hop demos.

Include a short bio along with a brief description of what you sound like, and feel free to name-drop musicians you’ve played with or acts that you’re similar to. Faced with an unfamiliar situation (you, the unknown artist), humans look for a familiar point of entry, and more well-known names will help them get to know you better.

If you create wildly divergent styles of music, perhaps you should consider setting up one or a few side projects so that you can package your sound appropriately to each label. This also depends on the label type. Some are far more eclectic and open to different styles while others have a laser-sharp focus on one particular sub-genre.

After about a month or so, drop a note via email and pleasantly ask what they think of your demo. If you don’t hear anything back, or you get a “no,” suck it up and move on to the next label. Or, if you think their criticism was constructive, go back and rework your songs and have a fresh demo made.

And if you’ve only got one or two labels in mind that you’re absolutely in love with, make a jaw-dropping first impression by sending your demo overnight via FedEx, DHL, or UPS (or if it’s a PO box, then USPS Express) in the States or the international equivalent. Telefon Tel Aviv did this and got booked to Hefty records.

Getting booked

If you are trying to book a gig at a club or other event, it’s best to provide a short (20 or 30 minutes, tops) overview of what you do live, either as a live PA or a DJ set. An actual live recording would be best, and if you can hear an exuberant crowd reacting to your music, even better! You’re trying to convince the talent buyer that crowds love you when you play out, and that you’ve got a solid act. Myself, I’ve got links to differently-themed DJ mixes on my website and as CDRs that are appropriate for different types of gigs (ie: 4/4 mix, IDM / chill mix). Make sure you include a one-sheet with an overview of who you are, why you’re interesting, and what you sound like.

For more on this, check out my other article, Getting Booked: Ten basic tips for getting live electronic music gigs.

Getting a partner

If you’re looking for potential collaborators, create a short demo showcasing the kind of tracks you would like to work on with someone else. Make notes on the kind of things you’re hoping to get help with for each track. So if , say, you’re trying to find a vocalist, but have no idea of the melody or lyrics, just put up the instrumental track with a note that says something to that effect. But if you’ve got the melody and lyrics down but just need someone to perform it, you can sing it yourself and mention that the current vocals are just one interpretation. Here’s a list of online places where you can find like-minded musicians:

• Splice Music http://www.splicemusic.com
• Kompoz http://www.kompoz.com/compose-collaborate/home.music
• EM411 http://www.em411.com

Getting jobs

If you’re looking for commercial work, then you should present a spectrum of the sort of thing you’re capable of, be it emotive washes of sound, or rocking party music. If you’ve previously scored a film, include a three or four-minute clip of the tune (provided you have permission to do so) and briefly describe the scene it was used in. You should also include a one-sheet and bio that present your unique talents as a musician and suggests that you’ll be professional and easy to work with. Testimonials from happy former clients are also a great idea.

The demo itself

Don’t waste money on getting your demo professionally mastered or mixed, especially if you’re sending it to record labels. Try to find a set of flat response speakers or a friend’s professional studio monitors and try to mix it so it sounds pretty much the same on any sound system. Remember to keep a non-hard-limited or non-compressed version of your demo somewhere so that when the time comes, a professional audio engineer has “room” to work their magic.

For all types of demos, keep it simple & short. Put your best track first, followed by two or three in descending order of perceived strength. While an album may have a real winner at the end to leave a positive impression, often times people who are pressed for time will stop at the first or second track, and skip through perceived “filler.” Make sure you grab them with the first song, and keep them hooked with the ones that follow. Unless you’re submitting to an ambient / noise or abstract label, leave off the tracks that have five minutes of building sound or slowly extinguishing outros, or make edited versions of those songs.

Plan on having it in multiple formats to accommodate the preferences of the recipients. Chocolate Industries only accepts CDR demos, but Archipel accepts links to online tracks but not as email attachments. At the night I help book, Ramp Chicago, we ask that any local act who wants to be booked show up at one of our nights and hand us a demo. This gives us a chance to meet in person as well shows us that the act is serious about wanting to play and will make the effort to come see what we do. Here’s a list of formats your demo can be in:

• CDR / DVD-R (here’s some nice packaging)
• Online, zipped or archived as one file
• Online, separate files to download
• Online, streaming
• On a 16 MB flash drive
• On a 16 MB SD card
• On a social networking site like Myspace
• A business card, flier or postcard with a link to a URL where people can grab your stuff (here’s a printer)

No matter what the medium, always make sure your contact info is on the disk, card, or page where your files are. And don’t just put it on a sleeve with a blank CDR inside, since the two pieces will invariably become separated.

For all demo applications except for commercial work, don’t waste time and money by creating elaborate artwork for your demo. A record label will come up with its own artwork and concept (sometimes with your input, sometimes not), a talent buyer isn’t interested in the underlying themes of your music, and a potential collaborator is focusing on the music.

One thing you can do is to make the packaging of the disk or the postcard with the URL stand out in a singular way so that it will be easy for you to follow up later and reference your demo in a stack on the recipient’s desk. For instance, you could glue a sheet of bubble wrap on the back of your business card if you make pop music, make a CD case out of purple satin if you make lounge-y tracks, or (as one demo I received) create your business card in the shape of an flash memory stick from a Play Station Portable.

Success with your demo

Having a polished demo (or multiple versions thereof), while important, is just one of the steps in achieving success with your music. Networking can help you get a personal recommendation to the head honcho of a record label—start asking your friends and contacts if they know anyone at the label you’re considering and ask for an introduction. Checking out events and clubs in your city and introducing yourself to the talent buyers will be the first step to getting booked for local gigs. Taking advantage of the opportunities provided by social networking tools and online communities will help you find other musicians with whom to create stellar tracks you couldn’t do on your own. Being professional, doing excellent work, and going the extra mile for your clients will thrill them and they’ll refer you without you needing to ask for it. Your demo will change over time to reflect your current work, but keeping a professional attitude and commitment to your music will always help you get where you want to go. Good luck!

Do you have a favorite medium for demo creation? Is there one social networking site that you consider superior to others? Do you have any success stories with creating a demo that you’d like to share? Let’s hear it!

So far, though, I haven’t been blown away by any of the widgets. Often, an overcrowded market is an indicator that no one technology quite has it right yet. There’s also the small matter of getting enough volume in music track sales to make any money. Percentage isn’t the problem: a fan buying a $1 track versus a $20 concert ticket is the issue. On the other hand, I’d personally be thrilled to get the instant satisfaction of buying a track in the same spot I’m playing it.

But, I’m curious: is anyone out there using these things? Even if not, what would you want the widget to do to make it worth your while? Custom embeddable music players are a good idea; I just wonder what the killer app would look like. (Pictured: Barenaked Ladies on Hooka.com. BNL is, like CDM, one of PC World’s favorite music sites. Happily, no one throws raw macaroni and cheese at me when I appear live.)