Jed Carlson takes a look at his very own ReverbnNation’s “Fan Funnel” and a closer look into their“Band Equity” score via Music Think Tank. A very adult and business oriented tool that takes marketing principals many bands don’t think about (how to build and nurture your email lists, track conversion data) and offer it in a user-friendly way.

Last.Fm is now offering royalties to Indy bands for streaming content. While it’s probably won’t make you a zillionare, it’s still nice to know you are being compensated for streaming your work. Many similar opportunities will pop up over the next few years for independent artists to reap their own streaming radio royalties, and one day they might all add up to bring an additional revenue stream to your work.

Next Monday iLike will officially announce additions to their toolset, offering new methods to increase your band’s awareness over multiple social networks. I’ve been using iLike in recent months and think it has a lot of neat tools to help syndicate information (here’s hoping they’ll allow RSS imports in the new update!)

A wonderful post from Bob Leftsetz:

Why press releases don’t work and Why owning your domain is important.

I love reading a post from Bob that mentions things I’m actually doing right now with acts. He’s totally right with why traditional press releases just aren’t going to cut it anymore. You can’t just write a single PR and blast it to everyone under the sun. Anyone who actively checks their email inbox knows that any email that’s clearly not a personal conversation 99.9% of the time goes right into the trash can.

If you really want to reach someone, you’d got to reach out to them and BE REAL. You can’t just spam an assload of random music blogs, online radio stations, industry insiders, and radio station DJ’s the same email. They don’t care about you. You are one in a million others doing the same thing.

You have to do the leg work, and figure out how to approach them. You have to contact them on a human level, and create a reason for them to listen to you.

Music bloggers? Give them an incentive that will make whatever blog post they might write about you BENEFIT that blog and it’s readers (exclusive tracks? interview?); with DJ’s, they have to have a real story about you, something that really makes you stand out say WOW I’ll give these guys a listen. Industry insiders - how can you help them in their business interests (i.e. who are YOUR connections?)

These are just basic ideas on how you have to approach the media in giving a shit about you. Hell, don’t even plug the new album at first. Just create the relationship and nurture it, until they WANT to know about your new project and will give you the time of day.

And just to comment about why having your own website is so integral, just remember this: do you want MySpace to own your career, or any other network for that matter? Do you have the actual email addresses of every one of your MySpace friends?

No, you don’t. Everyone thinks this game is about pretty pictures and music videos and all that shit. Those things are important, but not as important as making sure you can reach every single person who sees those pictures and watches the videos or hears your songs. MySpace enabled it for you, but without them you’ve got nothing. They own your interface to really contact them.

You can get your own site up and running with your own domain for a few bucks a month (no hosting company affiliate code here). You’ll have to do some research to get a decent one, but web publishing is getting easier everyday. You could learn how to set up a wordpress site (free cms & blogging software), grab free FTP software (or a FF plug-in), Teach yourself the Famous Five Minute Install, Grab a Free Theme, and you’re up and running.

It’ll take some time to make it super-great, but at least you’ve got a start. Find some web-savvy friends to help you out, and you’ll be ten steps ahead of the next band then just relying on MySpace to get your information out.

Oh, BTW, I mentioned earlier the ReverbNation fan funnel. They just so happen to have free email & fan management tools in addition to awesome streaming audio widgets (which, BTW, have a much better sound quality then MySpace’s player!) which you can copy and paste into any webpage (like the one you just built).

Take a look for yourself.