If you check your social stats more than a couple of times a day, you might be addicted to the internet, In fact, as music marketers some of you are contributing to the addiciton of others. Internet addiction was dubbed a "clinical disorder" in  1996 is a study for CyberPsychology and Behavior. Are You Contributing To Internet Addiction?  Are You Addicted? The survey stats in this infographic suggests that you (OK, we) might be:

via Sodahead

Guest post by former Warner Bros. Records digital exec Ethan Kaplan of Live Nation Labs. He blogs at Black Rim Glasses.

 A year ago I walked out of the Warner Bros. Records building, put a box in my car and drove home. I left with a collection of memories, but also a sense of unfinished business that I intended to keep in mind when I started my next venture.

When it started becoming apparent what my next venture would be, I sat down and started writing.

I proposed this question to myself:

Given a green pasture, how would I architect ...

Guest post by Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

It's true, what they say: Our digital lives are moving to the cloud. Whenever we fire up Facebook instead of a local email client, we're taking part in the shift from locally-run software to the networked app world.

However, some fairly major parts of those digital lives — our music, movies, and other activities — haven't truly moved to the cloud, at least when it comes to all of those smartphones and tablets we've been buying, and they likely won't for the foreseeable future.

The reason:

We are running out of ...

SXSW 2012 offers a variety of ways for folks in music and tech to interact, from panels to special events, despite the fact that the Interactive and Music festivals only crossover on March 13th.

SXSW Interactive events include Backplane's Managers Hack while both the Music Startup Village and Music Gear Expo take place during SXSW Music. Not surprisingly one of the strongest bridges between the two gatherings are tech-sponsored parties.

Backplane's Managers Hack

Backplane, the company behind Lady Gaga's LittleMonsters, is holding a hackathon on March 11 called the SXSW Managers Hack:

"Hackers will have 8 hours to ...

• Getting Blocked: A court has ordered that a Danish ISP has block Grooveshark (Music Ally), and the Pirate Bay may soon be blocked in the UK. (Guardian)
• Rdio has launched in Spain and Portugal.
• The Orchard has named Michael Black as SVP, Client and Sales Group. He was was a founding member of ADA and was most recently EVP, General Manager.

MORE:

• Pete Dodge has been appointed to the position of General Manager/VP of Kobalt Artist and Label Services. He was Managing Director of IODA UK and VP IODA International.
• Mastered for iTunes: Universal optimizes Madonna, ...

When Marketing music, the focus must begin and end in a single place: THE AUDIENCE.

On Music Think Tank, David Greenberg blogs about the importance of knowing your audience and connecting with them. Clubs, promoters, etc. will look to fill venues and seats so artists need some kind of way to build a fan list. How do you keep track of your fanbase?

“Your audience is your lifeline. Your fan list is gold.”

(Read On)

Regular Hypebot readers know how excited I get about Cash Music. It's hard to imagine anything closer to what this blog is about than a non-profit group building free tools that help musicians to market and sell music online.  That's exactly what Cash Music is; and for one of the first time's ever, they're asking for help via a Kickstarter campaign. 

Let me say upfront that they've already reached their initial Kickstarter goal. But that didn't stop me from just giving $100; and it shouldn't stop you from giving whatever you can.

ReverbNation, Topspin, Bandcamp and many others ...

"Forecast: The Evolution of the Digital Music Industry" is a free Midem sponsored research report from GigaOM Pro. David Card authored it with a focus on digital music sales and subscriptions; and discussion of Apple, as digital music incumbent, along with Spotify, Pandora, MOG, Rhapsody and Facebook as best-positioned for benefiting from disruption.

The report can be downloaded from GigaOM Pro for free. ( While we're on the subject of disruptive approachs, GigaOM Pro is an excellent example of disrupting industry research with a more affordable subscription model.)

Card considers the digital music market through use of ...

Self-service ticketing platform Eventbrite has just passed the 50 million ticket sale mark since launching in 2006.  Eventbrite's open, low-cost platform is often used for self-promoted shows and fan ticketing. The company's investors include Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, and Tenaya Capital.

In 2011, Eventbrite reported year over year doubling across key metrics. The number of events posted on Eventbrite doubled: from 222,353 posted in 2010 to 458,207 in 2011. And the number of tickets issued doubled as well: from 11,004,743 in 2010 to 20,798,509 in 2011.

With a second office in London, the company has accelerated European ...

It's difficult to sort out signal from noise in the uproar surrounding filesharing technologies. Even as a number of BitTorrent-related sites have begun to shut down voluntarily, a 5 year old academic project called Tribler may be about to take the lead in the battle over what can be shared via the Internet.

Described as "impossible to shut down," Tribler began at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and has also been developed at Harvard in Internet tv studies. Though quite legitimate uses are under exploration, a recent wave of publicity stemming from the MegaUpload shutdown has forced ...

     Bess Rogers on Earbits

It’s easy for bands to distribute their music, but hard to market it. They can pay to get their songs in the right places—iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify—but it’s unclear how to get them heard by the right people. Earbits, a Los Angeles-based startup, aspires to turn their radio service into an ad platform where bands can buy airtime and gain exposure for their songs and upcoming live performances.

While the web-music ...

As new social sites and services keep appearing, older ones keep updating. Though none of these four are music-specific, all have great potential for music marketing: Pinwheel is a new site that allows one to add notes and pics to locations, Cinemagram turns short iPhone videos into uniquely animated gifs handy for off-the-cuff promo purposes, YouTube unveils updates to its annotation feature, and Facebook is set to rollout Timeline for Pages.

Pinwheel Pins Notes & Pics to Places

Pinwheel is a new site that's "sending out invites in waves" and getting a lot of tech blog coverage at the ...

Guest post by Ian Rogers of Topspin.

On a panel at SF MusicTech on last week, I made reference to a fact we first published back in 2010: while the split between digital and physical sold on Topspin by number of units is 50/50, it's 75/25 physical/digital by total dollars. This demonstrates a lesson I first learned when I re-started the merchandise division of Grand Royal nearly fifteen years ago: there's more to the music business than just music and fans are happy to pay for valuable physical goods.

I used to think the Internet's impact on the music ...

Many DIY artists deal with the challenge of understanding the various aspects of the music industry. One of the more complex parts of the music industry is understanding contracts and copyrights. On Music Think Tank, Dan Turner provides a great review of copyright concepts.

“Under Federal law, copyright protection extends to “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression.”  Copyright protection does not extend to mere ideas or concepts.”

(Read On)

DigiTour is getting set for its second season, a five week tour of musical acts made popular on YouTube. DigiTour has been described by one of its cofounders, Meridith Valiando, as "bridging the gap between new media and traditional media." With seven headlining acts and eighteen shows in as many cities, DigiTour 2012 also gives YouTube stars the chance to build a bridge between their video presence and their live appearances.

DigiTour cofounder Meridith Valiando recently discussed the project and a bit of her own backstory that included work at Columbia Records, Spirit Music, and Capitol Records:

"I ...