Five Minutes with…
Andrew Dubber is currently recording a series of 5 minute interviews with interesting people he meets on his travels. The 5th in the series is with Craig from Commercially Inviable - you can listen to it here
Now on Twitter…
Happy, happy joy. You can now follow Commercially Inviable Records on Twitter.
If you’d like to follow us, our ‘handle’ is @cominrecords
Nothing But The Tunes
No opinions. No tales of ‘where we were when we heard’. No grief, no anger and no jokes. No comment needed.
Listen to this…
(Feed viewers: This is the full 6 minute 07 second, 12″ promo version of “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” by the late Michael Jackson. View it HERE)
The World of Fox Competition
We are a small record label, operating on a tight budget and we’ve just been handed a marvellous record to release.
You are an internet savvy music lover and have probably found your way to this page because you are engaged in some form of social online activity. Welcome. Thanks for stopping by.
Now that you are here, we’d like you to join us in an experiment in grassroots, online music promotion. The experiment is also a competition, with over £400 worth of prizes up for grabs, and all you need to do to win it is come up with one, simple idea.
Here’s how it works…
We’ll provide you with 3 unique codes, each of which will enable a free, high-quality download of the next album release on the label, “Everything is for the Best” by World of Fox.
The first download code is for you, as a thank you from all of us at Commercially Inviable Records for agreeing to take part. The second code is for you to give away to a friend. We hope that both you and your friend enjoy the album.
The third code is for use in the competition…
We’re challenging you to come up with a clever, quirky and innovative way of giving away this code to your audience. The code can be given as a prize in a competition of your own, or as an incentive to subscribe to your feeds, or purchase items from you. The general idea is that you use this code to help grow your own audience reach in some small way, and in that way we all benefit. Once all the entries are in, our expert panel of judges will then look at all the individual entries and select the best mini-campaign as our winner.
THE JUDGES
Andrew Dubber is a Senior Lecturer in the Music Industries at Birmingham City University; a member of the Interactive Cultures research team and is the author of New Music Strategies.
Bruce is a strategic advisor, analyst and blogger focused on the music industry.
Capsule, the brains behind Supersonic Festival, are curators, promoters and fans of the finest music, revealing the otherwise indescribable connections between contemporary music and art, crafting extraordinary events for adventurous audiences.
Pete Ashton does Internet stuff and thinks about what it all means far too much. Sometimes people pay him for this. Which is odd.
Team Inviable & World of Fox
That’s us here at the label and Simon Fox, the man behind the album.
THE PRIZE
• £50 in cash
• Signed CD copy of “Everything For The Best”
• Signed Limited Edition Print of Album artwork by Ruth Green
• A selection of Commercially Inviable CDs and goodies
• Hand-made vinyl bag from Needles and Hooks (one of only 7 made)
RESOURCES
Here’s everything you need to complete your entry. If you need anything else, please feel free to ask. We’ll accommodate all requests for supporting material wherever possible and within reason.
ARTWORK (JPG)
PRESS RELEASE (Word Document)
4 TRACK SAMPLER (ZIP) or (RAR)
WEBKIT - Contains all of the above in one file - (ZIP) or (RAR)
HOW TO ENTER
Email info@cominrecords.com with your name, a brief description of yourself and your online activities and links to your own website. Shortly afterwards we’ll email you back with the download codes.
The competition runs from 28th May 2009 until 1st August 2009 and details of your entry must be posted online on or between these dates, and must remain online until at least 1st September 2009.
When you post details of your entry to your own site or blog, please include a link to this page to enable us to track entries, and for others to see yours. Additionally, and in the case of two separate ideas being the same (or very similar), the first entry posted and linking back here will be considered the original of the two.
The decision of the judges is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
Twitter: If you post anything regarding your activity to Twitter, or are running your campaign exclusively via Twitter, then please use the #foxprcomp hashtag so we can trace the activity.
Good luck!
Commercially In Bandcamp
Commercially Inviable artists Friends of the Stars, James Summerfield and World of Fox now have pages on Bandcamp.
You can listen to entire albums, download selected tracks and share with friends, all within the individual Bandcamp windows.
It’s what all the cool kids are doing, you know.
Hello Nice People of Fancy London
A big hello to all the nice folks we met last night at the “Make It Happen” event at the PRS Building. I hope the information I gave was of use some to you. It’s tricky to cram a primer on Internet Music into 90-odd minutes, but I think that Paul McInnes did a great job of moving through the topics and drawing input from each of us on the panel.
Some of you were kind enough to give me CDs to listen to and/or URLs to check out. I’ll endeavour to get round each of these in turn and let you know my thoughts via email.
If there are any specific questions that arose from the discussions then please feel free to post them here and maybe we can discuss them together. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I’ve generally got an opinion (be it right, wrong or otherwise!)
Thanks once again for the kindness and welcome, and the very best to all of you.
Craig
Adventures in Social Networking
As lovely looking, informative and generous as this site undoubtedly is, we are nevertheless aware of the need for the label to be more visible on the internet. A brief Google search of our label name returns less than staggering results and actually suggests users amend their search to “Commercially Invisible Records“, which isn’t exactly great.
We need a bigger digital footprint and towards this end we’ve embarked on a lackadaisical campaign to bring Commercially Inviable Records to the good, the bad and the ugly social networks to see what happens. There are many benefits to having a presence in such a variety of places, not least the fact that if there must be bullshit, then you should create your own.
On a very broad level, users of these sites should be able to easily find us, listen to the music of our artists and, if they like it, share this experience with their friends. Moreover, our various profile pages will provide those sufficiently interested with a route back here, where they can find more music and more information, also easily shareable with online buddies. Additionally, and for those so sufficiently interested that they wish to part with cash in exchange for musical artefacts, there will be links to popular places online that can make such transactions happen.
So far, so obvious…and, on paper at least, all very easy and beneficial. Since over 30% of the traffic we’ve received thus far has come from the links on our personal pages in fabulously hip internet places such as Twitter, it seems that taking Commercially Inviable to the social networking rodeo may be an approach worth pursuing. There are, however, in the short term at least, more immediate problems than there are potential benefits…
Beyond the glaringly obvious ones, identifying which sites we should be using and prioritising is something of a minefield and, as ever, we are indebted to Andrew Dubber for his advice on this matter. We’re starting with a reasonably small list and will grow it from there.
Setting up profiles on the various sites is also proving to be time-consuming and occasionally frustrating, but since we’re pretty much entering the same photos, music and information onto each one it’s really a case of understanding what each one does (or doesn’t) do and then jumping through the hoops provided.
The biggest problem, or perhaps question, is deciding how much of our meagre and precious time we should be dedicating to the individual communities we are joining. Is merely having a presence enough (we doubt it), or should we be actively growing our network on all fronts? Is throwing snowballs at virtual strangers on Facebook really a better use of our resources than, say, contacting radio and press on behalf of our artists and releases? Can these two things go hand-in-hand somehow?
All of this remains to be seen. We’ll post a partial list of links to our new, online second homes shortly. In the meantime, we’d welcome your suggestions, comments and recommendations on this subject.
