indilean

indilean is going strong! Every day more and more independent artists are adding their song lyrics to the site and fans are interacting with comments and song meaning interpretations. Awesome…

Over the past week I’ve invested time and resources into improving the bands directory page and subsequent listings pages to make the site even better. These changes help visitors navigate through the different artists on the site by name. I’d like to thank the band Ape Fight for their input on these improvements and their patience as I put it all into place.

As always, I’m stoked to see new bands sharing their works here with the community and I welcome any other input that might improve the site for everyone.

[Update 3/16/2010] Just saw Circa perform live in San Antonio at a sold out show at the White Rabbit. They confirmed the song Frozen Creek will be on their new album Blue Sky Noise, Anthony also explained that the song is about the house where they wrote the album. Other confirmed songs for Blue Sky Noise include Get Out and Strange Terrain which has a new sound to it and will be the first song on the album.

[Update 3/11/2010] Circa Survive just sent out a notice that they’ve launched a new website. Official communication follows:

Hey creatures,

Love,
Circa

Today Circa Survive announced a street date and title for their highly anticipated upcoming third full length album. It’s called Blue Sky Noise and it hits shelves April 20th 2010. Circa recently signed with Atlantic Records when their terms ended at Equal Vision Records. They’ve kept ties with Esao Andrews who did the album artwork for previous covers and that’s great news (see album cover for Blue SKy Noise below). Anyone who preorders the album (or one of their special bundles which include a vinyl, shirt and messenger bag) gets the digital version a week early on April 13th as well as an immediate download of Get Out.

One other song expected to be on Blue Sky Noise has also been released a bit early via YouTube recordings from live Circa Survive performances. That song, Frozen Creek, has yet to be confirmed but is not available on any of the other two full length albums or their EP. Great luck to Circa Survive as they hit the road for a short tour in March and then pick up with Coheed & Cambria in April. I’ll be catching a performance in San Antonio on March 16th, say hi if you’re going to be there too.

I do a lot of listening and surfing on my Mac laptops and recently discovered two tips I’d like to share. The first one has to do with lowering volume and the second has to do with monitor brightness.

1. When I’m listening to music I use Sony earbuds which can be pretty loud for some songs, I’m usually at the lowest bar on the volume meter but sometimes that’s just not low enough. I discovered that if you go all the way down to zero on the volume bar using the keyboard volume buttons and then hit the mute button it brings you half a step up to a lower level not reachable by using the volume buttons alone.
2. I bought a MacBook Air second hand recently and started to worry when the screen brightness began changing (seemingly randomly) as I used it in certain environments. Don’t worry if this is happening to you too, it’s not defective… turns out that’s a feature built into the new OS to reduce eye strain. The problem is, the brightness changes so much and so quickly that it can be distracting at times. I didn’t really like the feature and found out you can go into System Preferences > Displays and then uncheck “Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes” to turn the feature off.

Hope this helps someone, if you have any tips about using a Mac feel free to share below.

I recently put this video tutorial and guide together to help generate ideas for how new bands can promote online. Several of the ideas came directly from friends who are in bands, others aren’t so intuitive and could really give you an advantage, check it out!

10 Steps for Promoting Your Band Online

1. Get a website, use BandZoogle, Bombplates, or WordPress if you’re more advanced
2. Sign up for Twitter, try to get your name and vanity URL, connect to Twitterfeed
3. Get a MySpace… register your vanity URL, post updates and ping your Twitterfeed
4. Register for TheSixtyone, Uvumi, & PureVolume post some songs & Art
5. Post your lyrics here at indilean so people can find you & comment, link your songs to your website or MySpace
6. Play small local gigs, go for Battle of the Bands and consider the Van’s Warped Tour Battle of the Bands contest. Encourage friends to film and post online with a link to your site and your band name in the description (URL’s highlight automatically in YouTube if you use http:// at the beginning)
7. Film a music video or some of your live shows and put them on YouTube, ping Twitter, share them on Facebook (videos automatically embed if you use the link URL from YouTube)
8. Share your music with friends who are making snowboarding, skiing, biking, sports videos. This will expose a new audience to your music and help them avoid copyright infringement since your music is label free
9. When you get bigger and have a full set sign up for Sonicbids so organizations and parties can find and book you for gigs. Post availability for gigs on Craigslist and look for parties that might need music.
10. Update your website blog regularly with short stories and summaries of what’s going on with the band and where you’ve been, the stories will help you get exposure in new locations, also consider playing a charity event at a hospital or local vet center (depending on your band) this will help get you gigs later and spread the word

So yesterday thesixtyone (one of my favorite music sites) relaunched with a completely new design. I’ve waited a day to try out the new features and given some honest attention and thought to the layout before writing anything down, and here’s my impression. Is it awesome? Yes, in some ways. It brings vibrant visuals and innovative layout features along with a splash of screensaver. When I leveled and heard the Mario “one up” music I have to admit I was pretty stoked. Do I prefer it? Well… I’m not really sure yet, it sometimes feels frustrating and almost stifling when I want to have a high level perspective or navigate to new areas. I’m pretty visual so there are moments where I feel the complete focus on the band/song that are playing limits the possibility of navigating and finding new stuff. I think in many ways it will just take some time to figure out. One thing I definitely miss is being able to skip around in songs… like to listen to lyrics! I’ve been using thesixtyone since the time when you could reskin the interface using fluorescent colors so I’m sure I’ll make it now but the change is definitely massive.

The great news here is that you can actually go back to the old design by using the URL http://old.thesixtyone.com/ though it doesn’t seem to support logging in. I actually found a new song I liked while navigating with the old interface and then used search in the new layout to try to play it and it didn’t work? Is this a bug?? Maybe the new design doesn’t allow certain things or has blocked search+play in response to people trying to game the system by hearting new songs as soon as they come out. Possibly there was some concern with the ability to seek out and repeat songs on thesixtyone where other sites like Lala only let you play a song once or twice before it limits your listening to only part of the song. I don’t know, this is all really just speculation and thesixtyone has been able to do a lot and have a much less limiting system than some other sites because they are opt in and feature many label free indie musicians. You may have also noticed they are including a lyrics section on the site now for each song and that’s great to see!

My favorite part about the old design was that I could visually figure out where I was and actively enjoy and seek out songs I liked more easily. That said, the founders have always been pursuing this “video game” approach and I think the focus of the new system on existing songs, hiding some of the navigational elements, will enhance their ability to guide listeners and refine the ranking system. The playlist approach makes sense too though I kind of liked having a long list of favorites that was more like an overlord playlist or collection. The new version is cool looking because it’s more like a jukebox but that’s just it, there is a lot of focus on the one song that is playing and it’s harder to explore in some ways. Many of the features are still in the system if you dig deep but I feel like you have to know what they are in order to use them properly, again, this change of environment does make it more of a game and does give more control to the underlying music democracy system.

On a side note rant, I’ve been waiting for the sixtyone to put out a mobile app so I could enjoy it in more locations and share it more easily, maybe it could be implemented in an on/off sort of way so that people who prefer browsing or using a list interface could use the web layout and then switch to the jukebox style when they are just vegging out (which used to be a screensaver/slideshow type feature before the change). I’m guessing the new layout takes more bandwidth, let’s hope they put out a mobile version at some point and that it has its own awesome innovative interface. In any case, James and Sam continue to rock my world with the site and I’m stoked with what they’ve done. Below I’ve put up a couple shots from the old sixtyone and the new for one of my favorite bands, Go Periscope so you can see how it has changed.

TheSixtyone Old Design:

TheSixtyone New Design: