With the whole debate raging about Qtrax and the place of FREE music online. We have 2 problems.

Snippets are usually not enough to whet peoples appetites for sales.

Full length tracks will be copied and spread on p2p.

What is the solution ?

Are snippets of 1.35mins enough ? I know that when i'm i'm on Juno.co.uk buying dance music I am usually content with 1.30min samples. How do you find it ?


But my main question is this. Is it time for a new releases website or even a forthcoming releases website with releases information supplied by labels and snippets or full tracks available on this site, even if they are gleaned from Youtube ?

It makes sense to me. What do you think.

How many new releases are there each week now?

I think it's a great idea except... the whole "release date" concept is out of date.
These days it's just new tracks becoming available and hopefully building and building by word of mouth.
So a site putting up any new tracks, getting voted on and if they don't hit a certain level they are dropped but if they keep building they stay on is brillant.

Start it KZ!

Like that a lot KZ.
The time is correct with todays news.

And how do you prevent it being rigged?

Hi JK I have thought about it, watch this space. Still tweaking how I would get the actual release information from artists and labels etc.

One other thing and this is a major problem with a lot of small labels and artists. Getting actual release dates is a nightmare with it taking ages to get into iTunes and not having a firm release date prior to promoting the release. Has anyone had this problem ?

But yeah I think I am going to give it a go. Watch this space.

Great Idea - go for it !

Ah but READ MY LIPS KZ... release dates are dead and gone.
Why bother with the dates?
If something is new and wants to be heard - stick it on. If it picks up enough support, leave it on. Let it build. I'm still building my 2007 Xmas release ("released" last August) - Riding A Reindeer. It might be a hit at Xmas 2008 if it keeps growing.

Don't call it a NEW RELEASES website but a NEW RECORDINGS one.

As for hyping - who cares? If they wanna hype it, let them. Could be a lot of effort for no reason if it's a flop - or worth doing if it has really got legs.

I looked into doing something like this around 2000/2001 and one of the biggest problems was the shear amount of new releases. Even breaking it down by genre didn't help. These days with everyone, their Mum and their Mum's dogs mate Geoff being able to release the problem is going to be multiplied by 1000 and 99.9999999% of that stuff is going to be liquid shite.

And no JK, don't let them hype. There's other sites that suffer badly from that, the "charts" are always topped with the biggest turds, put there by gangs of friends continually clicking and leaving raving comments under various pseudo

We`ve had to give up on release dates here as well.
Today is another classic example of why, new product from two acts from us both out on Napster today and not on I-Tunes.
The only way to continue similarly, is to use a "Launch Date". It would have been nice to coincide a new single with a London gig tommorrow but I didn`t risk publicising this.
I will use the idea for a further release though.

I don`t think we should forget that the public does not know we go through this problem, lets face it, I don`t think the bands do either.

Today is another classic example of why, new product from two acts from us both out on Napster today and not on I-Tunes.Publicise that on the launch date people can get it from Napster only because I-Tunes are too slow. If they start missing out on the sales maybe they'll try a bit harder?

The again, maybe not.

Yeah, trouble is, it would confuse the customer and I-Tunes probably would not be too bothered.
Customers really only want one downloading system on their mobile devices and computers, probably largely as a result that, thats what the download companies want them to have.

I must praise the little mentioned E-Music, they are remarkably efficient. They uploaded and released a single in 4 working days for us.

I must praise the little mentioned E-Music, they are remarkably efficient. They uploaded and released a single in 4 working days for us. Why do you think it takes so long (seriously, 4 days seems a long while to move some files around digitally)?

I think in the current new issue list from E Music there were about 500 new uploads, so they didnt do bad assuming they did them all at one go.

and how is this new website going to pay? The days of start-up dot com funding are well over !!

Even Dotmusic (with their massive business support) could not make it pay and closed down eventually.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned with the issue of ad sponsored music is the fact that on certain keywords Google is tremendous value with advertisers spending hundreds per keyword search. Try advertising on Imeem through Google you have to pay a lot for clicks in certain prominent parts of the website.

This new website can only grow through word of mouth and limited ad spend until traffic stabilises.

As someone on a webmaster forum said, you advertise on a site with more traffic than you until your site grows sufficiently so that others spend on your site.

DJKZ wrote:

As someone on a webmaster forum said, you advertise on a site with more traffic than you until your site grows sufficiently so that others spend on your site.

Don't you think that every other website has worked that out?

So ... who is funding this advertising (until your site grows) - and who will be funding thereafter?