JPF Home Page Forums International Chapter Message Boards Canada Chapter Message Board Toronto Chapter - Something to Think About

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,

We're thinking of having everyone use the boards to sign up for the upcoming Roadtrip stop this summer. That should get 40 or more folks to come here and post. Once they do, many will stick around.

Thanks for keeping it updated! You don't need a newsletter until you have an active group. Posting here is just fine.

Brian

Val,

We're thinking of having everyone use the boards to sign up for the upcoming Roadtrip stop this summer. That should get 40 or more folks to come here and post. Once they do, many will stick around.

Thanks for keeping it updated! You don't need a newsletter until you have an active group. Posting here is just fine.

Brian

Hi Val:
This sounds real good! I do children's CDs and I usually send out a whole CD to the 50 or so radio stations (North America only) who have chilren's programming. It would sure be easier and more cost efficient to have them download the songs they want instead of sending them an actual CD. But finding out whether they'd prefer this might be a little time consuming for me. I'm in between CDs right now, but I'll consider it for the next one.

Something else I wanted to look into is receiving royalties for the radio play that I am getting. I receive SOCAN cheques for my 1st CD, but I haven't received anything for my 2nd CD yet. I have checked some of the playlists for some stations and have discovered that they are playing some of the material from my 2nd CD.
Should I be contacting SOCAN to let them know which stations are playing my material, or would they be bothered enough to even look into it?