The growing number of social-networking sites aimed at bringing aspiring musicians and loyal music fans together,  gives way to greater control of an artist’s career, while entertaining music lovers everywhere.

Encouraging the emerging artist to connect with fans, and promoting music is the purpose of sites such as Ourstage.com . Among its many partners,  Ourstage has joined with MTV for the Emerging Artist Program.  Sonicbids.com brings the artist and promoter together, and is a place where any band from any genre anywhere in the world, can come to find and connect with any type of music promoter, licensor or broadcaster — easily, effectively, and quickly.

As technology advances at such a rapid pace, so goes the advancement of innovative ways to meet the challenges of music promotion and the business of making music.  Unlike the new frontiers of days ago big band Radio, and major labels, this new wave of Music Business done better sets out community guidelines that its independent members must agree to:

“We like to think we’re in this together, meaning we provide the platform to showcase your talent, but we need artists’ help too.  Keep your profile updated, keep uploading into our channels, make friends, recruit fans—help us help you.”
Ourstage Community Values

When the “help them to help you” gets overwhelming, there are professionals like Pro Soul Alliance to assist artists while allowing them to keep in control of their career.

There seems to be no end to the resistance major record labels have to the changes in the way people want to listen to and consume music.

Today was a classic example, as Warner music refused to come to an agreement with YouTube in how they should be compensated for the streaming of their videos, pulling all their videos from the service. This is despite Universal Music already earning tens of millions from YouTube.

Do artists signed to Warner know how much money they are losing from being banned from the most popular source for music videos in the world? Do they know MTV doesn’t play music videos much anymore? Probably not, and they have no choice anyway as long as they are under contract with Warner.
Just another example of how traditional music industry doesn’t get the potential of new ways of earning income, and building an audience.

Our attitude is that it’s career suicide to turn down any potential way of earning income in the new music business just because you don’t feel it is enough. Especially if that income is likely to increase in the future, and will help bring in new fans, and encourage fans to promote you, something that is huge on YouTube.

What do you think?