Plugola Inc.

Hifidelics for Musicians and Labels

Filed under musicians, site news

After we put the word out that we are looking for musicians to give our new site, Hifidelics a run in my last post, I started receiving a lot more questions than I expected. So I decided to break it all down for you, since these pages aren’t visible on the site yet. This may be a bit wordy, so if you just want the gist of it, or are not sure what Hifidelics is about, please see our pre-launch announcement first or you may get lost.

Also, we’re looking for musicians to participate in our private testing period. It should be just business as usual for artists for the most part, so please don’t let the ‘testing’ part scare you. If you would like to participate, please send us an email and include your basic concept and a link to your site, and we can take it from there. Labels are welcome, as well. Please send to: hifidelics@gmail.com

What Make Us Different?

Hifidelics utilizes crowdsourcing/funding as part of the process and experience. So far the million dollar question has been, what makes us different from other similar platforms?

• A Different Goal – Although there will be funding goals for each release, our aim isn’t so much to help artists raise funds, but to create and provide a high-quality product of value from the artist.
• Creating an Experience – Not only is our focus on creative, physical music releases, but to help artists create an experience for their fans. Imagine being able to follow along with your favorite artist as he/she creates their album with video updates, photo shoots, fresh news and having a voice in the decision-making about the release. Plus, studies and trends have shown that bands (or brands) that engage and connect with their audience on a regular basis are far more successful in this digital economy. Hifidelics will supply the tools for artists to create this experience for their fans, and artists will be expected to provide the experience.
• No Dirty Work – We want artists to focus on communication and the creative side of their release. So we will handle the business side of the release, this includes but not limited to: manufacturing, pricing, production, distribution, shipping, professional design, etc.

There are many other differences in flow, function and features; but the important ones I mentioned above.

What is the Process?

So what does it take for an artist to go from idea to funding to production? Well, first you should know we’re only striving for the very best music with the most interesting packaging concepts. To help ensure this, we have put a voting algorithm in place that release projects must go through before the funding (or ‘pre-production’) period.

• Step One – Artist presents their concept/project with an introduction video, copy and photos.
• Step Two – Artist recruits and encourages their fans to vote on new release project. A certain number of votes will determine interest level.
• Step Three – Once artists’ votes nears the amount needed, a representative will begin pricing materials and manufacturing costs to produce (500) units. These costs will ultimately determine the per unit pricing. There is no flat pricing on Hifidelics. It’s strictly on a per release/project basis.
• Step Four – Now artists are in ‘pre-production’ mode. Once the minimum pre-order goal is reached, production will begin. Pre-order pricing remains in place for fans and supporters until album is complete. This is all-or-nothing funding, meaning if a release doesn’t meet the minimum order requirement (or its funding goals), it will not be released.
• Step Five – Once manufacturing and production is complete, available albums (any remaining that weren’t pre-ordered) will raise in price slightly. All pre-orders will begin to go out.

* Note: All releases will be limited to only (500) copies.  From those, (450) copies will be made available through the site.  (25) free copies will be given to the artist and the remaining (25) will be used by Hifidelics for promotions and reviews.

What We’re Looking for in an Artist

Yes, there is a certain ‘something’ we are looking for from artists and the music they release. That ‘something’ is pretty tough to describe, but I believe it real boils-down to whether or not an artist’s fans would interested in this sort of a release. With that in mind, this is what we’re looking for in artists:

• Of course, artists must be willing to participate, as mentioned listed above (journal updates, etc.)
• All music must loosely fall into one of these three genres: Rock, Hiphop and Electronic.
• We’re not looking for just good music, we’re looking for something unique, daring and great.
• Artists must be in, at the very least, the planning stages of a new release, and have a concept in mind. (We will have a professional designer assist you)
• Must have songs prepared.  Artists are responsible for their own recordings (it’s not part of the funding).
• An online presence & self-promotion is a must.

Terms in a Nutshell

I’m not going to bore you with all the legal speak until the site and the artist/label is ready, but here are a few important terms artists and labels should know:

• Payment – There is a 60/40 split for album sales. Artists receive 60% of profits and (25) free copies of their album after production costs, but before operation and labor costs. In other words, once an album’s production and manufacturing costs are covered the artist is paid 60% of everything after that. The remaining 40% of sales goes to Hifidelics to cover a number of additional operation fees (ie: professional album design, promotion, processing fees, etc.)
• Label Partnerships – We are also very open to record label partnerships on releases. Although not much would change, as far as, the process and payment goes; Hifidelics can be very useful in that limited, collectors edition of an album (CD/Digital) already planned for release. It can also be useful in gaining traction on a label’s main release by using our service first. Of course any partnership will also include label’s branding, etc.
• Music Ownership – The artist/label will retain all their legal ownership rights for the music. However, in order to keep the release special, the format & packaging used through Hifidelics shall not be reproduced (by the artist, label or even ‘Hifidelics’).

Of course with all things new, there is some wiggle room and we’re always open to suggestions and constructive criticism. So if you notice something that you feel disqualifies you from using the service, please let us know and we can try to work with you.

Hopefully I remembered to cover everything. If you think of any other questions you may have, please let me know and I can add it.

Hifidelics Prepares for Private Launch

Filed under musicians, site news, updates

UPDATE – April 14th: After a slight delay we are back on track and should be launching (beta) within the next week or two. So I wanted to officially reinstate this announcement. Please have a look and feel free to contact us with any questions!  ~ Erik

It’s getting closer to the day we launch Hifidelics for a private beta launch; meaning the site will be invite only for a time period. What is HIFIDELICS exactly?

HIFIDELICS is a record store built on top of a crowd-sourcing platform designed to bring the world the freshest music in it’s most creative form. For the first time ever music fans can participate in and experience the release of the ultimate collector’s album from some of their favorite artists.

This means that artists can present their vinyl/physical release concept (vinyl only…for now) with video and photos. In turn, music fans can make suggestions and vote for what they would like in the release. This way artists can get honest feedback for an album their fans really want. Additionally, artists will keep their fans and supports updated on the process with photos, videos and blog posts. Members will also have the opportunity to pre-order this limited edition release. Once a predetermined financial goal has been met, or a certain number of units are pre-ordered, production of the album will begin.

Where we differ from other similar platforms is that, HIFIDELICS is solely focused on original, physical music releases designed by both the artists and their fans; resulting in a beautiful release that fans have a vested interest in.

What we mean by ‘similar platforms’ is that, yes, we do utilize what is best know as, ‘crowd-funding’; where funds are raised by supporters of the project before production. However, HIFIDELICS’ service is to provide a high-quality product. These releases will not be your typical record album. Here, artists can really let their creativity shine, not only through their music, but in the album’s presentation; or it’s packaging, if you will. Below I posted a few photo links to some examples of what we are aiming for:

Ultimately, the goal of HIFIDELICS is to marry the works of talented musicians and visual artists, along with the highest quality physical materials available, and the passion of dedicated music fans across the world.

This is where you come in. We are looking for bands/musicians with an upcoming release in mind, as well as, passionate music fans to be the first to test the waters. This will not make your participation any less important. There just may be a stumble or two along the way. Plus, we need to know what works for you and what does not. So if you’re passionate about music and records and willing to give HIFIDELICS an honest try (and hopefully provide us with some feedback) we will send you an invite to our private beta testing. Please visit the HIFIDELICS web site and enter the requested info to be put on our invite list. As soon as we are ready for you, we will send you a special invite code.

Most importantly, we want to work with musicians who have an idea and are planning a release. In theory, any artist can join, however there are a few things artists should know:

• All music must loosely fall into one of these three genres: Rock, Hiphop and Electronic.
• We’re not looking for good music, we’re looking for greatness; preferably something along the lines of groundbreaking.
• Artists must be in, at the very least, the planning stages of a new release, and have a concept in mind. We will have a professional designer assist you.
• Must have songs prepared.  Artists are responsible for their own recordings (it’s not part of the funding).
• Having a decent size following and/or mailing list will be very helpful. Keep in mind, each release must reach a financial goal before it goes into production.
• Artists must be regularly active online (social sites, forums, etc.)
• All releases will be in the quantity of 500 units, never to be released in this format again. Of course the music belongs to the artist, but to keep the album special it cannot be released in this manner again.
• Artists must be willing to keep their project page/journal updated with the process; including photos and videos. We’re committing to these projects and we expect the same type of commitment from artists.
• Yes, artists are paid for all this. There is a 60/40 split for album sales. Artists receive 60% of profits and (25) free copies of their album (for family, friends, etc.) after production costs, but before operation and labor costs. In other words, once this album’s production and manufacturing costs are covered the artist is paid 60% of everything after that. The remaining 40% of sales goes to Hifidelics to cover a number of additional operation fees (ie: professional album design, promotion, processing fees, etc.)

If this is you, or you know of an artist who would be perfect for this, we want to hear from you. Please send us an email and include your basic concept and a link to your site, and we can take it from there. Labels are welcome, as well. Please send to: hifidelics@gmail.com Please feel free to leave any questions in the comments, or send us an email.

Here are a couple more informative posts if you’re interested in learning more:
Hifidelics for Musicians and Labels
How to Prepare for Hifidelics

SEO Basics for Musicians – Part 2

Filed under marketing, musicians

After you have your meta info set up, as I explained in Part 1, you can begin working on optimizing the rest of your site.There is no specific order these steps need to be done, so I broke it down as a list of basic optimizing tips.

Search Engines LOVE Text:

I know what you’re thinking – No one wants to look at a page of text and some catchy graphics or Flash will make my site look much cooler. You would be absolutely right thinking that, however you will gain little-to-no attention from the search engines. That is not to say that you need an ugly, boring web site to get noticed by the SE’s; you just need to be creative, yet simple. One of the reasons blogs have become so popular is because of their influence with search engines. Not only do the SE’s love all that relevant text, but it is also a page that updates which tells SE spiders that it’s active. Of course YOU will have to update it, but blog technology couldn’t have made it simpler. Most blogging software also comes equipped with an RSS feed, as well. This is a good thing and is all automatic within the software. For search engines, RSS is readable by the spiders and basically breaks all the information down into categories and key words. It’s actually quite brilliant. I recently read that not many web users know what an RSS feed is or how it works. Please do yourself a favor a read up a bit on RSS feeds. Not only are they extremely handy as a web surfer, but they can also help you significantly in your optimization efforts.

If you haven’t done so already you will want at least one of your site’s major pages filled with text (and pics, vids, etc.), preferably updating regularly (ie: a blog). It’s important that this page is also well designed, because this will be the page where you will want to point your links. Your best bet is, this be either your home page or blog.

Link Popularity is Important:

In a nutshell, ‘link popularity’ is a gauge of how many relevant web sites are linking to yours. So, if you have 100 sports web sites linking to your jazz ensemble’s site, it probably will not do you much good, as far as search engine ranking goes. However, if you have 100 jazz related web sites linking to you – that’s HUGE! To the SE’s, this is an indication that you are important. The more relevant linking web sites, the higher you rank in your subject matter/key words. It’s no easy feat to get others linking to you (no, you’re not alone), especially when you’re just starting out. Here are a few tips of what you can do to increase your chances:

• Link Exchanges – You and similar artists can each put a link pointing to the other on your site(s). This may seem like a traffic leak, but it is a fact that this method WILL increase relevant traffic over time; not to mention increase link popularity. Be careful with this method, though. It can easily turn into a big ugly mess on your site, most commonly referred to as a, banner or link farm. This will drive visitors away if you over do it.
• Make It Easy – If you want people to link to you, don’t make them work for it. Perhaps you can provide them with an easy-to-find snippet of code where they could easily embed your banner/link into their own page. Be sure to host any banners on your own server.

• Ask Your Fans/Friends – A lot of people have their own personal site these days. They just might like you enough to give you a link, but keep it simple (see above).

Header, Anchor and Content Tags

These are like little extras that will help boost your rankings. As I mentioned in Part 1, you do not want to take advantage with keyword stuffing. Search engines are not dumb and you will be penalized for shady tactics. So just be honest and you will reap the rewards.

Header Tags are a small piece of code within the site’s html/css that communicates to the browser and SE spiders of a text heading; kind of like the name of your article, page, etc. Search engines actually pay more attention to your header text more than the rest of your text, and <h1> headers are considered the most important in most cases. So word your headings carefully. Again, don’t over do it with headings. You’re already ahead of the pack knowing their significance.

Anchor Tags are small bit of words that appear when you hover your mouse over a text link. You can see an example by hover over any of the links in this post. When you’re linking to relevant pages/sites, you can also increase your keyword frequency by including anchor tags. The code would look something like this:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com” title=”ANCHOR TAG TEXT HERE”></a>

Content Tags aren’t so much new, but they are becoming increasingly important as major search engines are focusing on digital content, as opposed to text. Personally, I don’t know a lot about how this aspect works. I’ve only been tinkering with it the last several months, but it does seem to work to some extent. The only program I know of where this is possible is Photoshop and obviously that is for your photos (not videos, music). You can open the ‘file info’ on your photos and you can easily add keywords and descriptions there. I’m sure there are plenty of programs and software out there to add keywords to your other content.

I can not guarantee your site will reach number one in search engine ranking, or even on the first page. However, I have several number one Google listings and many front page rankings for popular keywords just by using these methods and what I explained in Part 1. I have been refining this for many years and what I CAN guarantee is that you will be way ahead of most of your competition just by following these relatively simple steps.

Copy Cats

Filed under business, trends

Today I learned of two relatively new direct-to-fan music marketing & discovery web sites claiming to be the first to allow fans to redistribute/resell artists content while earning a commission. Apparently they didn’t do their research very well. That has been PLUGOLA’s key feature since we launched in 2008.  I’m a bit reluctant in calling them out, as I don’t want to start anything. One of these sites is almost exactly like PLUGOLA in it’s features, which tells me we were their blueprint; I can plainly see in the other site where a lot of ideas were borrowed. I have nothing against some healthy competition, but let’s get the facts straight.

Does that make us official now that we have copy cats?

Creativity in Music Releases

Filed under marketing, technology, trends

One of the things I have always loved about purchasing music, before digital took over, was the creativity that was put into some artists’ releases. As a teenager in the 80′s I was lucky enough to attend a high school that had a record store right next door. On the days new shipments came in, I would be over there right after school trying to be the first to get my hands on the latest gems. Sometimes I would really search for the rare/collectors stuff – numbered or limited pressings, colored vinyl, special packaging; you name it. I wasn’t the only one either. Most of my hardcore music loving friends did the same thing. Sadly, once I began driving I started purchasing more cassettes since having cassette player in your car was the norm. At the time I didn’t realize what I was been giving up. I still sought out records and rare releases, but not to the same extent. It wasn’t until I was a bit older that I realized cassettes really had no personality. Then CD’s started replacing cassettes and they didn’t have any personality either. There were a few instances of hidden tracks on CDs, but the thrill of going to the “record” store (no more records available, though) to pick up new music was wearing off. Mail order and eventually the Internet made purchasing music simpler taking even more personality out of the experience. It has gotten to the point where we don’t even really own the music we purchase any longer. I think I speak for many when I say, buying music is getting really boring.

I would like to see the creativity be brought back into records/music releases again. I’m not suggesting to do away with digital music, as we all know how convenient it is for many reasons, but releases need to be about more than just the music. While the traditional album has become a thing of the past, for the most part, it doesn’t have to be completely dead. There are still people out there who much rather acquire a special release to own and put on display, than just be content with downloading digital copies. I want to be excited about the music I fork my hard-earned cash over for. Take Moldover’s ‘Awesome Edition’ CD as a more recent example. It’s such a cool and clever release concept that Moldover could be banging on pots & pans throughout the whole CD and I would still be interested in obtaining it.

Metal CD casing by a band called, BulBul

Artists at all levels need to be able to release these sort of albums; not so much for the masses, but for those of us who are willing to put up the money for something special with personality and value.  New technology allows fans to connect with their favorite artists on a much more personal level these days. So why shouldn’t music fans have some sort of voice in what an artist releases for them to support? As they say, “Give them what they want.” And great music packaged in a piece of art work that I contributed to on some level is something I want!  That’s where we started dreaming-up ‘Hifidelics‘. We want to help artists release these creative albums by giving them the platform to present their concept, obtain honest feedback from fans, get it produced and ultimately to their fans. We would like artists to really think outside the box and release something that represents them and the music they’re presenting. ‘Hifidelics‘ will begin with releasing vinyl albums/EPs since vinyl has a lot of wiggle room in the creativity department, but if all goes well we will be entering the realm of other creative music formats.

If you’re an artist reading this, start thinking of how you would like to release your next album, because we want to work with you. If you’re a music fan reading this, what kind of releases would you like to see from your favorite artists? If you would like to keep up-to-date with Hifidelics’ progress, invites and whatnot; please follow us on Twitter or join our mailing list HERE.

Here are a few more examples of creativity in music releases:

Public Image Ltd’s ‘Metal Box’
In ’79 John Lydon & PIL released their 12″ record album in a 16mm film canister

Floppy Disks as CD covers
Probably not the first band to do this, but they’re on the right path

10 Mind-Blowing Easter Eggs Hidden in Famous Albums
The music & packaging isn’t the only place to be creative.

C60 Redux brings touch back to digital music
Not so much a ‘release’, but an innovation in making digital music physical again

$10,000 In 48 Hours (Without A Label)
Band offers lifetime access to their music thru custom, limited edition USB drives

Kutiman’s ‘Thru You’ project on YouTube
Not a physical release, but a very clever release all the same

More creative packaging
A bunch more of creative physical releases