W♥M Updates (January 2009)

 01/02/2009 20:25:08  ♥ written by vu ()

For those wondering if I'd died and/or retired: no.  Just been relaxing and enjoying the days off with the various two-day Holidays we've been experiencing. I've been writing everyday for two years now and I guess it's taken some tolls on me. Part of my strategy for this year, 2009, is that I will be doing less reviews and probably more towards per my request, as I really cannot handle the overwhelming music submissions.

The weekly podcast will probably be less-than-weekly because of my schedule. I'm hoping to have on old friends in future shows, particularly Ryan who is still missing in action (although I did catch up with him recently when he was home for the holidays). Also, having said not-so-weekly, I did just wrapped up a recording session with Ceji. The podcast will be out this Sunday, but if you're already subscribed, you may get it in your feed sooner.

Among the music she's listening to, she highly recommended Little Dragon. When I found out that singer Yukimi Nagano was Swedish/Japanese, I immediately thought of Maia Hirasawa. Kudos for the bicycle bell on Little Dragon's song "Recommendation".

Also, just a quick shout-outs to some links/mention of W♥M in the blogs: KPerfetto thinks we're one of the places to discover new music. Yay!

We're also getting a ton of Twitter requests, thanks to Ariel and recently a post from Gulf Coast Bands:

As you can see, Twitter is a very powerful tool if taken advantage of and used correctly. It is in my opinion, that every band and musician should have a twitter for their fans to follow. It’s free and the possibilities are endless on who can spread the word about your work. Check out some links below to other people using twitter.

Music Bloggers & Podcasters & Zines
twitter.com/weheartmusic

I've been trying to follow you back. However, if you're over abusing your twitterness (like posting 30 messages in 30 minutes, you are so removed). I'm also not convince about twitter, right now that 140-character limit is ridiculous and if you follow over 20 people, it's completely and utterly useless.

So, I was snooping around the Facebook, I still don't really use the service so it was a shock to me that we have 76 fans - shocked that 76 people accidentally clicked on the 'become a fan' button. Anyway, I think you may have to be an admin to view the breakdowns, but between women vs men - the girls are winning with 62%. Our demographic is the sweetspot of 25-34 year olds (which I will be leaving this age group very soon as I'm a very old man).

We now see about 50/50 digital submissions vs physical CD/mailouts. At the rate it's going, I would hazard digital distribution will be more than 75% by the year's end. Which I'm fine with, but I still ♥ old compact discs.

Other trends I've started to notice is that more people I know are starting to drop their cable bills in favor of just watching television via the internet. I think this is great news, considering that I've been doing this for a while and dropping over-the-air altogether last year.

One service that I've been testing out is Playon. The program is still very beta, I've experiences freeze-ups and "data corruption". When you're watching a serial television show, that's upsetting as it's not like you can skip to the next episode. It's also cool to be able to watching hulu or netflix via my ps3, but it's lame that I have to have a computer to stream the media. I may think about purchasing something like a Roku box if/when it is able to stream hulu and other media sources.

So that's about it for now. Hope 2008 was good for you, and here's to 2009.