With over 20 million users, StumbleUpon.com is not only a very cool site to browse the internet more effectively, it is a great tool to get exposure for your music. Here is how StumbleUpon define themselves:

“StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click  Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of over 15 million other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like () automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.”

Once you install the StumbleUpon toolbar to your web browser, everytime you click on this “Stumble!” button, something new will come up. And the more you rate the sites StumbleUpon recommended, the more likely StumbleUpon will find the sites that fit your interests. So from now on, you won’t need to worry if you can’t think of new ideas to post on your Facebook, Twitter or blog. Simply set your preferences in StumbleUpon and start stumbling based on your taste in music or anything else, and you’ll have endless ideas to share with your fans.

Not only StumbleUpon is a great tool to find sharable content, it can also help YOU get discovered. You can submit your music, video, streaming tracks, blog post or anything else, then you get potential of thousands of people stumble across your content.
(on some browsers, the toolbar doesn’t allow you to submit content though, so you’ll be best off using a browser that allows you to install the full toolbar such as Firefox and Chrome)

Some users reported that hourse after stumbling her friend’s newly released music, the tracks got thousands of views. However, there is an art to using Stumbleupon effectively for music promotion. Stumbleupon works best when a page is shared that many others would want to share with their friends or contacts online. If you submit too many links from your own, or the same website, you could get blacklisted, or your account could be suspended. And those who want to promote their own websites may find it hard to keep track of who had linked to or shared their pages.

Let us know if you need any assistance using Stumbleupon as well as other important tools to promote your music.

In our last blog we posted Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails‘ thoughts on the illegal downloading of music.

There are countless articles and comments on this topic, probably millions.
Here is one of the most recent from Forbes, by a young author that effectively captures some of the complicated and mostly misunderstood issues surrounding this debate:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/02/03/you-will-never-kill-piracy-and-piracy-will-never-kill-you

It’s great that these kinds of articles are coming out now sharing more detailed information and truth, it’s just sad that it took over 5 years for the media to start talking about this and investigating.
We feel it is important to reveal that the fundamental ideas behind this issue and the often overlooked REAL reasons behind it were first brought to light in Andrew Dubber in a blog written over 4 years ago called, “Should I Be Worried About Piracy?“, part of the 20 things you must know about music online eBook.

The overall conclusion of this article and those experts who really understand what is going on is that ‘piracy’ is common because entertainment companies refuse to give consumers what they want, or do business fairly or honestly.
If companies who create film, music, and TV provided consumers what they wanted, the way the want it for a fair price, then there would not only be very little piracy, but those companies would make far more income than they ever can now. But they won’t, even after over 10 years of fighting and losing over and over.
So people continue to pursue what they want the way they want it, and that happens to be in a way that prevents money from going to the content creators at their own choice, which they call ‘piracy’.

Though users in Europe have been reaping the benefits of Spotify since 2008, music lovers in the United States got their first taste for the first time a few days ago, when it officially became available in the U.S..
Created in Sweden, At first glance, Spotify must appear like yet another overtyped streaming music service, but upon further investigation users will find that it could very well be the future of the music industry.

It’s not that Spotify is unique, it just blends some of the best features of several competing streaming media services. Like Google Music, it uploads music you own to a cloud library, and like Qrocity allows you to stream full albums and songs from a database of millions of songs to a wide range of devices. Like Amazon Cloud Player, you can even access it from a wide variety of devices, including your PC, Mac, tablet, or smartphone. But most important of all, it’s like Pandora in that it’s free, subsidized by ads.

Basically, it’s the ultimate way to get, discover, and listen to music.

The foundation of the service is the computer software player, an iTunes like portal that is attractive, powerful and flexible. The interface feels good, presenting songs in an organized list, with a side bar that displays your library and playlists, playback controls and artwork.

When you first start the software, all you’ll encounter is the music you already have localized on your computer, but there is a much larger cloud library that you can explore…

Unlike digital marketplaces like iTunes or Zune, however, Spotify doesn’t present the cloud database as a storefront, but relies on search, an listing of most popular songs and albums, and social interaction amongst users for new music discovery.
The Top Lists present 100 of the most popular songs and albums on the service, which can be filtered by locale (U.S., U.K., Spain, etc.), and a New Releases panel shows off the newest additions.

But what really drives the service is social interaction and search. Spotify integrates with Facebook, which allows users to find friends who use the service, and share public playlists with each other. It also allows users to copy direct links to their custom playlists, which can be shared publicly (to users who sign up for Spotify)

Browsing custom playlists from friends is a great way to find out their tastes, but using the search tool to dig into the larger database is the best way to expand your library.
Spotify has built a library of over 15 million songs, with 10,000 new tracks added every day. Currently the site’s foremost publishing partners include Sony Music, Universal, EMI, Warner Music, and many others.
In searching for music on Spotify, we’ve found most or all of the tracks we’ve been looking for, with only a few limited instances where we couldn’t.
The biggest names in music? They’re there too. Most have their entire catalog available.

Adding songs to your personal library is as simple as dragging them to a playlist, and there’s no limit.
Once you’ve built a large library, you can take it on the go using the Spotify mobile app for iPhone, iPod touch, Android smartphones and tablets, Windows Phone 7, and WebOS.

Of the various versions of the app we tried, all had surprisingly speedy high-fidelity playback, even over 3G. Browsing music using the mobile UI was also pretty intuitive, though obviously browsing thousands of songs is preferable on your desktop or laptop.
The one catch, however, is that only users who pay a monthly subscription fee will be able to stream their complete music library on their mobile device. While the app will allow free users to browse the Spotify library, only premium users will be allowed to play tracks, and flag songs to be cached for offline playback.

The fee for unhindered access is actually pretty reasonable, however, at $9.99 a month, which grants you unlimited offline mode playback on both your PC or your mobile device, as well as higher audio quality and the ability to remove ads.
Of course, nobody likes paying monthly subscription fees, but the beautify of Spotify is that the core service of unlimited access to the larger streaming library is free, so if you decide you don’t want or need a premium account, you don’t lose any tracks you’ve organized. For six months, the free version of the service will offer unlimited playback, but after that it will limit users to 10 hours of playback and only 5 plays per song each month.

For those who don’t care about mobile access and offline functionality, but loathe ads and want unlimited access, there’s a separate option called Spotify Unlimited that costs $4.99 a month and eliminates ads.
If you’re cheap like us, however, you’ll want to stick with the ad-subsidized version. The ads really aren’t that bad. Over the span of two hours, music playback is usually interrupted around twice, and the ads are less than a minute. They were actually not annoying at all. The audio ads either advertised functions of Spotify or played a sample of a song available.
There were also banner ads built into the player, but we hardly noticed them.

What does all this mean for the music business and the future of music?
If you used Spotify, we think you would know the answer, basically it fulfills the need of the music lover that has existed ever since the release of a $18.99 CD with one good song on it. It’s quite simply, the legal solution to music piracy.
Music fans want their music when they want it where they want it without restrictions and limitations, or a hard drive of files that gets filled up and won’t fit on your phone iPod…
And best of all, the music creators all get paid!

If your a music fan, get on Spotify now (let us know if you can’t because you don’t have an invite, or your in a different country, we can help…)
if your a music creator, contact us if you want help getting your music on Spotify.

Recently we posted some statistics for social networking in China that showed some staggering numbers demanding musicians not overlook the potential of these resources.

Let’s look at some of the top sites used in China for social networking.

China’s Twitter equivalent, Sina got smart after the first 2 Twitter knock offs got shut down and automatically censors ‘micro blogs’. It has now outdone Twitter only 6 momths after launching with over a million users.

Youku.com is China’s leading Internet video website with 30 million unique viewers a day, and 200 million a month according to Nielsen and iResearch. (That’s right, per day!)
Striving to be more than just a Chinese youtube clone, Youku also features professionally produced content.
Check out Pro Soul artist Elika Mahony on youku.

The largest Internet service portal is Tencent, with 1 billion accounts (485 million active users). In 2009, its revenues surpassed $1.5 billion, 90% of which came from digital goods and games and 10% from ads. Tencent is the most important Internet company in China and the third largest in world, after Google and Microsoft. Tencent’s social network Qzone has 310 million users. Their IM service, QQ, has 50 million concurrent users. China’s answer to Facebook, Renren has 200 million users, 55 million of whom are mobile. Another popular social network, Kaixin001 has 75 million users. The numbers are overwhelming for some marketers – a scale that is hard to imagine.

Another interesting statistic is that 40% of Chinese Web users are creators, compared with 21% of Americans, this is far too great of a market to ignore, marketers and corporations are finding creative ways to circumvent any restrictions when it comes to music marketing.

According to Forbes’ Russell Flannery ~ China Wealth, Aug. 10 2010 article Hard Pickin’ Into China’s Growing Music Industry, Mr. Flannery acknowledges that “China is a growing yet difficult market for the music industry.” He references Abigail Washburn a 30-year-old Nashville folk singer and banjo player, who’s toured with Steve Martin’s bluegrass band and enjoyed successful albums and tours on her own. With some success in the US, the artist now calls China home, and has felt the music industry in China to be welcoming but challenging at times. But she says that “In some ways, it feels like Beijing and Shanghai are ahead of the States, because they’ve actually skipped over CDs and record labels. They just do direct to consumer sales (artist to fans), which is where it needs to go in the U.S.”

Flannery’s interview with Abigail Washburn, supports the 176 million Chinese connecting via social networking system (SNS) with their “real” friends and online networks is where consumers talk about products, services and music.
These interactive online message boards are the heart of social media in China, representing a vibrant online market.

In future, Pro Soul plan on exploring more about how these social networking resources can be used effectively for promoting music virally, a significantly different approach to how it is done in the west.
We also plan to look at the part mobile phones play in this, a huge part of social culture in Asia.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter may not work, but that doesn’t mean that social networking isn’t huge in China!

According to Sam Flemming of See i See, China’s first social media blog, “Everything that happens in the West is happening on steroids in China.” Chinese social networking statistics show:

• 384 million Internet users in China, 75% of whom are under 34
• 221 million bloggers,
• 222 million creators of online video,
• 272 million instant messaging users,
• 265 million online gamers
• 321 million users who download music

These numbers ring true and gave us a sense of the magnitude of social networking in China, clear proofs of Sam Flemming’s statement that “Everything that happens in the West is happening on steroids in China.”

The key is how to use these amazing new markets effectively for music? You can bet Pro Soul is researching this and will report our findings.

In our Part 2 post about social networking and the music business in China, we’ll look at some specific sites, and what it’s like doing business in China with music.

“There are plenty of millionaires who would pay millions to hang a Van Gogh painting on the wall, but hardly one that would have ever had the crazy nut over for dinner. I feel like the big companies are like that with musicians. They’ll say, “We love music! It’s all about the music!” — but if a musician shows up at the door, they call security.

The disconnect between the music, as a final product, and the musician, as a person going through an ongoing creative process is the most broken aspect of the music business…”

- Derek Sivers, founder of CDbaby.com, largest independent retailer of CD’s