Great Tool For Independent Musicians
By Rob Safuto on Aug 28, 2008 in Social Media | Tags: Music , opentape , Tools
A new piece of web software called Opentape looks to be a great tool for independent musicians who want to showcase and sell their music. Opentape provides a very simple mechanism for a musician to provide streaming or downloadable samples of their music on the web.A demo of a site built using Opentape can be found at http://opentape.fm/mixtape/.
Warning! Although the instructions for setting up Opentape are very simple you need to be just a bit web savvy to implement the software on your site. If I have time this coming weekend I’ll do a short screencast that shows what looks to be a very simple setup process.
When you check out the demo you will see that the resulting site is very basic since the current version of this software allows for minimal branding. You can change the color of the header and customize the text at the top of the page. If you’re looking for something more have no fear. A few intrepid souls have already jumped in to assist with hacks and add-ons to extend the system.
Brandon Partridge has created an add on (image at left) that allows users to add links to music stores, videos, events and lyrics. More add ons, enhancements and hacks can be discovered on the Opentape forum.
Many people seem to be using Opentape to host mixes with music from major label, or otherwise famous, recording artists. I think the independent and unknown musicians are the ones who can really benefit from software like this.
If you are a musician and this sort of thing interests you, also check out the Brad Sucks digital download store (BSDDS). BSDDS is free software that allows you to create a digital download store with storage on Amazon S3 and payments via PayPal.
Update: I’ve set up a sample track mix with songs from pal Brother Love’s latest cd at http://mix.musicbuggy.com/brotherlove.
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