WHY WORDPRESS?

Where do I start?!

I’ve been in this business in one capacity or another (and by “this business” I mean I.T.) for about a thousand years.

I’m oldschool.

I won’t bore you with stories of how excited I was about my fast, powerful new 386 in the early 90s, but anyway, suffice it to say, “we’ve come a long way, baby”.

Nowadays, it’s truly astonishing to me what GREAT VALUE I can offer my clientele by creating a WordPress website, starting with an AWESOME studiopress.com premium theme, and then customizing it to the point where it is exactly what the client wants.

I can offer this service for $400-$500 because I do it over and over again and I am FAST (now – LOL – not in the early days).

I do remember the heady days of the dot com bubble and it used to take a team of programmers/designers MONTHS of planning meetings, research, coding, thinking, troubleshooting, etc. etc., to come up with a really perfect relational database and a bulletproof CMS (content management system) back end.

This is what I can do for that very same $400!

The future is so bright, we have to wear shades, WordPress users!

I’m an evangelist – I’m here to help.

Use WordPress, learn it, get to know the plugins, tinker with it, and you will love it for its beautiful, intelligent self.

SELLING MUSIC ONLINE – PART 1

I was looking into some different ways to sell CDs and MP3 tracks online for a new client, my first musician website selling music online.
First of all, to my chagrin, I discovered that Apple iTunes controls the lion’s share of digitally downloaded music sales… 60-80+ percent, depending on whose information you want to believe.

I saw 85% somewhere, which just amazed me. It’s interesting that in this digital age with so many choices, there is a kind of a musical Walmart on the web.

But I digress.

I have lots of research to do on the various services that distribute to iTunes, but there are several, and it seems that if you are going to sell music online at all, you may as well get listed at iTunes.

My client came equipped with sage advice from other musicians about good services to use, and names that came up were TuneCore.com & CDBaby.com – which definitely distribute to iTunes and seem to have a great reputation all-round.

Here is an article at garagespin.com with 7 ways to sell your music on iTunes. It is unclear if there are only 7 ways or if 7 is just a magical number, and if you can’t figure out one method out of 7, then… perhaps you should hire someone.

Another useful article was at ehow.com – it corroborated what I had heard about tunecore.com – the author of the article says he doesn’t work for them but does recommend them as a way to sell your music at the iTunes store.

Another website/service which keeps coming up is cdbaby – another route to the iTunes store.

I’m definitely going to have to do a Part 2 of this article, when I get going on this project, but here is my pick so far, not having used any of them, and as far as I know, not having any access to the iTunes store:

AudioLife.com - I like their clear website, lots of videos to watch and pictures to click (as per DUMB IT DOWN, I do not like to read unless absolutely necessary).

Here is what I like about AudioLife.com:

free service, no upfront cost but they take a CHUNK OF COMMISSION (found more info here)

totally embeddable store – keep the traffic on your own website while shoppers browse CDs and tracks

sample clips player, so the shoppers can hear about 10-30 seconds of the track and decide whether or not to buy

OK, stay tuned for Part 2, where I do some testing!

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