On Thursday, my band released its first record entitled The Blackwell Gate. It's chock-full of Web 2.0 goodness, so I'll skim through the details. Feel free to download/purchase/listen to it right here.1. Stream the whole album via muxtape or last.fm. Muxtape, is actually a service that allows users to create virtual "mixtapes," which they can share with friends, but the layout is so clean that I decided to use it to my advantage. Last.fm is a general social music website, but my favorite feature is the "scrobbling" (which keeps track of everything I listen to).
2. Going the Radiohead route, the album is available in two flavors. A digital download, made available on a name-your-own-price basis (anywhere between free and a lot of dollars), which is a little more limited (5 songs). Or on vinyl, with four bonus tracks (and for those slow to adopt record players, the record comes with free digital downloads of all 9 songs).
3. The code for the store is all based on an open source project developed by another musician: The Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. He wrote some code that handled everything above, and released the source via Google Code. I built a few things on top of his code, and what you get is www.theblackwellgate.com.
4. The album was produced entirely in my basement on my own equipment, and I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out. And if that isn't enough for your prosuming needs, our friend Kevin Bell produced a mockumentary of equal quality (in HD, no less) about the album and band.
Also up on iTunes, or on Ruckus, through the University. Available through more traditional means at Twist and Shout. < / shameless promotion >
2 comments:
Congrats. Thats sick dude. I like how you got it up on iTunes. Thats big. Thats tight that you made it all yourself. I want to know how to do that!
Wow - band sounds great. This is a really cool way to be able to promote yourself, you are the in class example of how myspace and other social network websites can be used as free promotion.
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