 |
August 18th, 2010
Connie Lim, rising LA native singer/songwriter collaborates with LA’s best musicians and artists, creating The Hunted, an album that calls attention to current global issues with hope and vulnerability. Lim packed Hotel Café and Hotel Utah to maximum capacity, and continues onward.
Connie Lim’s steadily growing fan-base has dubbed her music to be “retrotronica”, a style that has been personally defined by Lim to be “old-school songwriting backed by electronica sentiment.” Inspired by current artists – namely Imogen Heap, Feist, and Bjork – Lim has been developing her sound for the past two years in the depths of Los Angeles, CA after graduating from UC Berkeley.
After the victorious release of “The Hunted” at Hotel Cafe, Lim is being noted by the music industry, as she has already made her “way to [AMP]‘s shortlist of talents to watch for the second half of 2010. Connie is one of the most brilliant emerging vocalists out there.” -AmpArtists.com. While Audrey Magazine calls Lim’s music “a breath of fresh air in this time of “Bieber Fever” and autotune”, her music continues to be noted by the media, including NBC LA, KPCRadio.com, and popular blogs like a-tunes.net, 8asians.com, and ChannelApa.com.
According to Flavorpill.com, The Hunted unfolds her musings on the fluidity of relationship and social structures through the momentum of moody strings, lush piano and electronic textures…an intimate and unselfconscious performer [whose] songs will literally bloom in front of you.” As she says herself, “We are all the hunted, or the underdog, in some way or another. I sing for that side within each of us.”
Her new EP “The Hunted” is out now on iTunes, Amazong MP3, CD Baby and more!
Take 10 minutes to get to know Connie and her new album, the writing process, what she loves about performing and how she’s connecting with her fans during our interview.
Stay connected with Connie online to get tour updates, enter special contests and see eclusive content
www.connielimmusic.com
Facebook • Myspace • Twitter • YouTube
Tags: 8asians.com, AmpArtists.com, Artist Spotlight, Audrey Magazine, bjork, channelapa.com, connie lim, eternite media, feist, flaborpill.com, Hotel Cafe, imogen heap, kpc radio, NBC LA, retrotronica, The Hunted
Posted in Spotlight | No Comments »
August 18th, 2010
Digital Distribution
The Extended Service Package is Eternite Media’s Digital Distribution service. Our Project Managers work directly with our clients to deliver a full service digital distribution experience in a mostly self service industry.
What’s Included
Distribution: Your release will be available for purchase with key digital retailers such as iTunes, AmazonMP3, eMusic, Napster, Rhapsody, Spotify and more.
UPC: We can issue you a UPC barcode for your digital release that can also be included on your physical release’s packaging.
ISRC Codes: If you don’t already have them, we will provide you with an ISRC code for each song in your release. These codes will be used to track sales information on your digital and physical release.
Gracenote: Your physical release will be entered into the Gracenote (formally CDDB) database for enhanced album information when your disc is opened in many popular media players such as iTunes.
All Music: We will send a copy of your physical release to the online music encyclopedia, All Music (www.allmusic.com). Many fans, labels, and reporters use All Music as an information source for an artist and their releases. Some media players (Such As Windows Media Player) use this database rather then Gracenote to pull album information.
Soundscan: We will register your physical release with the sales tracking and reporting company, Nielsen Soundscan. Many major labels, marketing groups, and music charting companies use this information on a daily basis. You can contact Nielsen to purchase a report of your physical sales to use as part of your marketing.
How It Works
- Your Project manager gathers all the meta-data and audio required for your release.
- Our engineers intake, encode and upload your release to our digital retailers. If we are manufacturing a physical release we will also submit your release to Gracenote, SoundScan, and All Music. Approximately 4-8 weeks later your release we be live in each of our retailer’s stores.
- At the end of each business quarter, our retailers calculate your net sales and send payment to us. We collect payment from all the retailers and pay you!
What It Costs
We charge a $49 setup fee per release, which covers our time and costs in the delivery process. We keep 5% of your net earnings (royalties), which covers the costs of processing your payments. That’s it. You will never pay any annual or hidden fees!
When You Get Paid
We pay you 45-50 days after a quarter has closed. Due to the volume of payments we make, we require this time to reconcile the data and then distribute the payments to our clients.
Quarter Schedule
Q1: January – March (Payment in May)
Q2: April – June (Payment in August)
Q3: July – September (Payment in November)
Q4: October – December (Payment in February)
Is This An Exclusive Deal?
Nope! We simply ask that the releases you send to us are not re-distributed by you or any of our competitors to our digital retailers and that you do not contact the retailers directly as this will cause you a big headache. Typically the release will be taken down and you will have to choose a single distributor for your release.
For more information or to sign up for our distribution services, please contact your project manager or contact us at info@eternitemedia.com
Tags: 7digital, allmusic, amazonmp3, audio jelly, Digital Distribution, distribution, djdownload.com, djtunes.com, emusic, eternite media, Extended Service Package, Gracenote, ISRC Codes, iTunes, jamvana, juno download, limewire, mixed up music, napster, nielsen, rhapsody, rv, Soundscan, spotify, trackitdown, UPC
Posted in Announcements, Digital Distribution | No Comments »
May 28th, 2010
What is your brand and what is branding? In the case of what I will be talking about today, your brand is your band, act, music or business and all elements that go along with it such as designs, costumes, websites, social networks, merchandise, albums, etc that make you marketable as a product to the public. Branding is the process of unifying all of those elements in a way that will give your fans a consistent image of what and who you are. Your core brand is your bands logo and overall identity that lets your fans know who you are and should always stay the same. For example, the band KISS and their tours, albums and merch may have had branding themes but the basic KISS brand still shows through in their logo and costumes, which is recognizable. That is not to say that it would be inappropriate to change colors, or even tweak your logo a bit from release to release but especially while you are building your fan base it would be a good idea to keep the logo and any unique identity (like KISS and their costumes) the same. That said, your branding elements may and should change to fit the relevance of your project, and keep your fans interested in coming back to your sites and your shows. Remember that we live in a time where we are bombarded by stimulation all day every day and that means your fans need to remember you and not get bored. Keep each album release fresh and with proper presentation. Match your gigs and tours to follow the theme of your latest release. Consistency throughout the life of your “product” is important so that your fans are conditioned to think of you when they see a trigger.
In this post I want to give you a quick outline of a good workflow in creating your brand. If you are managing your project yourself, this should give you a good guideline to stay sane while putting it all together. How we do our project management is just a starting point, so use it as a guideline and not hard rules.
Here’s the flow…
Conception
In the conception phase you should think about what the ultimate goal is. If it is an album or something creative based, it may be appropriate to get the bulk of the recording done so you get an idea of what the theme of the album is going to be. Basically, don’t paint the baby room pink before you know if your having a girl. If you are launching a tour, is it in support of an already released album? If it’s a general promotion or for an event like SXSW, what are we hoping for as the end result? It’s a good idea to sit down with your band, group or yourself and outline all of your concepts and goals. Write everything down, no ideas are wrong and by the end of the meeting funnel everything down into your overall concept.
Building Blocks To An Action Plan
At this point, it is time to get your action plan together. What outlets are you wanting to target like social networks and web, physical promo at events, etc). Work through all the items you will need to fulfill the concept section by section. Are you doing web promotion? If so, on what websites and what creative work will be needed (web banners, bios and press releases, etc)? What design work needs to be done on for physical promotion, and how are you going to do the promotion (street team or yourself)? For tour branding, will you need backdrops, banners, costumes? What is your layout for the merch table? For your products, what are you manufacturing (USB, CD, DVD, Merch) and what design and development needs to be done to complete them? Break down all of these into blocks and create a road map for completion in your action plan. This will help you to determine who you need to bring in to complete all the tasks and help you to stay on schedule throughout the process.
Find The Team
Once you have your action plan ready, then you can find the team to bring it to completion. You may need graphic designers, web monkeys, manufacturers, PR/marketing reps, street teams, and so on. A lot of times a band will do these these functions themselves. That is cool, but remember the importance of staying focused on what your good at and let the pros handle the rest. Picking your team is potentially the most important part of the whole process. If you are going to have anything manufactured it is really important that the people heading up your design work know how to follow the manufacturers specs for production (that sounds really basic, but 9 times out of 10 we kick back artwork because a designer did not follow directions). It would be a good idea to make sure that everyone meets before the project starts so they can discuss any needs and can spare the introductions when its time to get work done.
Set The Timeline
You have assembled the team so now you can put out the action plan to all parties and look at what the reality of production is going to be to accomplish the goal. Obviously you may have a deadline at the very beginning (a tour date, an event, etc) but if at all possible it will be much better to allow your team to give you their opinions on turnaround times for each item, look at what can be done simultaneously, add a little padding and set your date. Remember that for projects that require marketing like a CD release or tour, it is best to have at least 60-90 days just to promote the finished product. That is not to say that you have to finish everything and then have an additional 60-90 days. You can prioritize the creative that will need to be finished to start marketing first and then task your team to finish up the creative work needed to manufacture and finish up the project.
Creative Production
Now it’s time to hit the ground running. Your team is on board, you have your deadline and now you need to begin the creative aspects of your project. Creative production involves designing of the digital and physical promotional material, writing of content, bios and press releases, and development of your social networks, blogs, website. This is also the time that you will be creating any mock-ups and designs for your album release and/or merchandise. Remember to prioritize your creative to fit the timeline you set so you are ready for marketing and manufacturing. This is also a good time for your recording mixing and mastering to be wrapping up.
Marketing/PR
Depending on your goals, you may have decided to offer a pre-sale on an album or need to start promoting your tour. With that in mind, you will want to start marketing as early as possible, and it never hurts to create your own hype during conception. Once your creative team has put together the elements you need to get started, your marketing team (or you) can take over in promoting your project. If you are doing a CD release, your PR person may need pre-release CD’s in which case you would need that physical production done at this point. You can use this time to handle your physical production, which we will talk about next. If you are doing pre-sales, you can use the marketing phase to gauge how much quantity you need to produce.
Physical production
While you are plugging away at the marketing, your design team should be finishing up everything the manufacturers will need to begin production. This also means that all your audio or video needs to be ready to go to manufacturing as well. This phase is pretty self explanatory, CD’s will start pressing, shirts start printing, and USB drives start loading. Once they are all ready you will need to stage all of your pre-sales to ship on launch day or be ready to walk out the door on tour day.
Launch/Release
The final stage is your launch day! You have worked your butt off up to this point and if all went as planned you are on time, under budget and you have a killer product.
Branding is an important part any band. Hopefully this post gives you a good starting point on how to tackle it on your next release or tour. In future posts we will explore the details of branding, including tools to help you run your brand, examples of good and bad branding, and taking your brand to the next level with fan interactive branding like iPhone apps and private social networks.
Tags: Branding, CDs, DVDs, Fan Marketing, Graphic Design, Logo Design, marketing, merch, Music Marketing, PR, promoting yourself, Release Management, retail manufacturing, social media, USB Flash Drives, Web Design, website
Posted in Branding, People Love CDs | No Comments »
May 28th, 2010
FREE 1,000 Business Cards With Any Order!
We would like to hook you up with some sweet premium business cards when you do business with us this weekend. No matter how much you spend, we will print 1000 full color offset printed business cards on thick 16pt recycled stock and sexy matte AQ2 coating just for you.
(offer ends May 31)
Tags: Branding, Business Cards, Graphic Design, iTunes, Logo Design, USB Flash Drives, Web Design
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
|
|
|
