Well, it seems only to people who are members of this chapter read this board, Terry and Russ. I've been asked to post something, so here I am.

In lieu of a newsletter, which no one submitted any items for, I wanted to tell people about a concept sweeping the radio world, Digital Media Distribution Services. Here in Canada, this is handled by www.musicrypt.com. I attended The Big Schooze last week and heard the owner of the company, Joe Wood, speak about his company. The way it works is, you submit your song to musicrypt and they then digitize it and send it to all the radio stations you give them. There is a $97.00 setup fee and then it costs $2.95 per song per station. In otherwords, 10 stations would cost you $29.50. It's supposed to be cheaper to do it this way than sending a hardcopy and you are guaranteed that the radio stations will receive it (or can't say that they didn't). What they do about it, is another story. Same old, same old for indies.

So, I thought to myself, if musicrypt can do this, why not me. I have a lot of server space and can easily upload a couple of wav files for a station to download. I thought I'd do a little research, so I called CBC Radio. They don't use the service. Then I called CHUM FM and they do. The music guy told me it's actually a bit of a pain because they have to do a bunch of stuff before they can download the music into their computer. I asked him if he would like it if an artist sent him to a webpage where he could download a plain wav file right into his computer and he said he would prefer it.

This means that an indie doing it on their own might be able to make it easier for the stations. When I organize what I'm doing with my new CD, Eastern Skies, this is how I will submit to stations. My last CD, I mailed out 33 hardcopies. Next time, it will be online all the way.

Val