MySpace is a sinking ship

When MySpace got big around 2005, a lot of bands decided to center their web presence around their MySpace profiles, and abandoned their own websites. It seemed like the best and easiest way to present your band. All the other bands you liked were there, the labels were there, the zines were there, and most importantly, your audience was there. Three years, and about a billion friend requests later the audience had enough and decided to leave. Continue reading

Hungarian punk rock bands we like

There’s a handful of local punk rock bands we dig, cos we have things in common. They play good music and fun to hang around with. Here’s the list:

Rotten Tomatoes: These guys play energetic melodic punk rock with influences like Rancid, the Misfits or Therapy? They sing both in Hungarian and English. (We prefer the English versions of their songs, they sound better.) They are booking gigs for foreign punk bands, (like we used to until we had enough) and they have the right punk rock attitude, which is quite rare down here. We have played with them 3 times already and we’re gonna play with them in October again. Continue reading

Death of the promo CD

The evolution of music formats has made CDs obsolete. One of the main reasons bands are still releasing CDs is that they need it for promotion. And that’s because the majority of reviewers and promoters still don’t accept submissions in digital format. Bandwidth is no longer a problem, you can download even albums encoded in high resolution formats within seconds. Sure, they don’t want to receive huge attachments in e-mail, but there’s the likes of yousendit.com as a solution for sending large files, or even slicker options, like the download code functionality on Bandcamp or Soundcloud, a service developed exactly for this purpose. Continue reading

Paid Downloads: DIY, Bandcamp and iTunes

This post could be useful for bands and people buying music online. We accept that the majority of Internet users is unable or not willing to pay for mp3 downloads, that’s why we offer free downloads as well. But why would anyone buy downloads then? Number one: paid downloads are better quality, number two: you support the band.

We’ve been experimenting with selling music online for a few years now, and out of the zillion online stores there was only 2 where we could actually sell stuff: Bandcamp and the iTunes store. But before I compare these, let me start with the best option: DIY. Continue reading