Bands need fans. Fans need bands.

The reality is that many bands are worried about how to source the budget for their next album, Fanraiser is changing this. Fanraiser allows bands to create this budget with the help of their fans. How it works is that fans buy their favorite bands’ album before it is recorded, providing the band with the funds it needs to realize its next big dream – a brand new album and it’s funded by their fans.

This means that fans are becoming investors, with a portion of the sales profit being returned to each Fanraiser. Fanraisers also receive various other benefits like credit in the album, concert tickets, merchandise, a concert at their house, and many additional perks.

The current participating artists are Catlike Thieves and Tidal Waves. Catlike Thieves’ campaign runs until the end of March with 244 albums left to sell. Tidal Waves’ campaign, on the other hand, needs to sell 483 more albums by 30 April 2012 so that the band can meet its budget.

Fanraiser is administered by Southern Pulse with album purchases being processed by Ticketbreak and album distribution being taken care of by Sony Music.

Please go to www.fanraiser.co.za and join the campaign.

Well we’re way into the swing of the year – if you’re still trying to deny the existence of 2012, pour yourself another martini and accept it and take a look at these cool things:

- Free Music: there’s been a spate of really good ones over on our Free Music Monday column recently. Have you downloaded them all yet?

- Solar-powered stuff: my iPhone is all greenly geeked out and I’m loving it.

- The Phantom of The Opera: I caught the South African version in Joburg last night and love the show as much as I always have. Such a great (albeit totally twisted) love story.

- Sporting a Greenpeace Africa blog badge on our site. Want one? Grab one of a variety here.

- Giveaways: we’re running a totally cool band merch giveaway this month that ends on the 29th. Get your entry in!

And this Ron Pope song. Just listen to it:

We had a chat with the band about the upcoming trip:

A THOUSAND GUITARS: Are you going to be taking your recently found pink tutus to Ellen Degeneres’ doorstep while you’re in LA?

LONEHILL ESTATE: We wouldn’t leave home without them, it’s the dress code in Hollywood.

These are Lonehill Estate’s tutus, btw.

LE: If we can afford a flaming guitar tat, no doubt! But right now the most we can hope for is a severe sunburn from Venice Beach.

Daansing all the way down the Sunset Strip…?

LE: Definitely, we’re going with open minds and our egos firmly in check. LA is legendary for being the Mecca of young musicians from all over the world trying to crack the big time. At Musexpo we’ll be surrounded by the who’s who of the industry, so although we’ll be looking for opportunities, we’ll also be expanding our knowledge and skills on the business side of music.

LE: Tutus, and we also hope we’re different from the rest of the bands we’re performing with.

LE: We’ve got an album coming out which we’ll be promoting and our show has always been really important to us, so you can be sure we’ll be upping our performance. Check us out on Facebook for gig details.

Read our 2011 interview with Lonehill Estate.

Yay, it’s Monday!

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Ok, that’s blatantly not true. But yay, I have new, free music for you!

Not My Dog – Raging Girl

Wave Sleep Wave – Hey… What?

Billboard Lights – Faith Why You Always Running

The Jealous Sound – Promise Of The West

Nikka Costa – 4 Track Daytrotter Session

The Pretty Blue Guns – Mockingbird

I write about a variety of social networks that are worth knowing about for indie artists trying to spread the word but I remain a serious advocate of putting blogging at the center of one’s online music marketing. Blogs offers a number of benefits especially as a feature on your website or even as your main site. Though such advice may seem counterintuitive as action shifts to social networks, please consider why I make such a claim rather than dismissing it outright.

My own history of blogging goes back almost 10 years and began with a hip hop blog called Hip Hop Logic. The earliest version of that site is gone but it introduced me to other hip hop bloggers and laid the groundwork for launching ProHipHop in late 2004 which I ran as a solo operation until selling it last year. I’ve also experimented with a number of other less prominent blogs that helped expand my understanding of what can be accomplished with blogging.

Things have changed quite a bit over the last 10 years and it’s a lot more difficult to raise a blog to a prominent position. But blogging offers a number of benefits especially when used as part of an otherwise mostly static website. For example, search engines tend to prefer sites that have regularly updated content and posting on a blog allows you a quick way to update on a regular basis whether or not the rest of the site is changing.

Blogs also offer a way to generate content that can be distributed to multiple social media outlets. For example, you can post on your blog and then use a variety of tools to autopost the headline and link to networks or you can say something a bit more unique along with the link back. So a blog can easily become the center of your extended web presence.

In addition to sending content out to one’s networks, a blog can be used to centralize activity done elsewhere. So when you post a video on YouTube or photos on Instagram, you can then embed them on your blog. Or if you have a great exchange on Twitter, you can feature the tweets in a blog post.

You can use your blog’s feed to power a variety of services from mobile websites to email newsletters to content syndication to other sites. Folks can subscribe to your feed in a newsreader. And, if your feed is hosted offsite, it becomes another extension of your web presence.

Blogs also offer an easy way to set up and design a site with most blogging systems offering off-the-shelf solutions. Given that music services, such as direct to fan sales, usually offer widgets and other ways of integrating their service with your site, a blog can also be your homebase on the web. You control it, search engines can search it and your archives can remain available indefinitely.

Plus, one of the great things about blogging as a form of marketing is that web pirates and folks who overaggregate other people’s content are helping you do your job.

These are some of the most basic arguments for putting a blog at the center of your online marketing.

What’s your argument for or against such a perspective?

A recent NASA study completed in New York City at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) found that fourteen key air pollution control measures could not only help to curb climate change, but could improve agricultural yields and cut up to 4.7 million premature deaths worldwide if implemented. The fourteen measures were picked because of their ability to reduce either black carbon or methane globally. To further shed light on their findings, NASA has organized the data into an interactive online tool that visualizes the health, agriculture and climate stabilizing benefits.

The paper, authored by Drew Shindell of GISS, says that implementing these measures could slow the Earth’s mean global warming by .9 ºF by 2050, and increase crop yields by 135 million metric tons per season. Though black carbon and methane are not the main global warming molecule — of course carbon dioxide takes that prize — they are influential, and moreover, disappear from the atmosphere more quickly than CO2.The measures to be taken include capturing emissions from coal fired power plants as well as in gas, oil and landfill facilities, reducing leaks in long-distance pipelines, updating wastewater treatment plants, aerating rice paddies, filtering emissions from diesel vehicles, limiting high-emission vehicles, upgrading cooking stoves to burn cleaner fuel, and banning agricultural burning.

These methods and more would have a huge impact on lowering both black carbon and methane emissions worldwide. Because the two pollutants circulate out of the atmosphere quickly, implementing these controls would lead to immediate climate, health and agricultural gains. Black carbon is known to cause or worsen respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and is densest in the south Asian countries of India, Bangladesh and Nepal where most the premature deaths would be averted. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that leads to ground level ozone which causes smog and an increased thermal effect. Reducing methane, and therefore ozone, would have a huge positive agricultural effect on Iran, Pakistan and Jordan in the middle east.

In addition to the health and agricultural benefits, the south Asian region and the Sahel region in Africa would see beneficial changes to their precipitation patterns — possibly helping to eliminate disastrous droughts. Shindell also noted that added benefits like these, will make any measures taken more attractive to a wider audience.

“Protecting public health and food supplies may take precedence over avoiding climate change in most countries, but knowing that these measures also mitigate climate change may help motivate policies to put them into practice,” Shindell said.

To explore the multitude of benefits visit the online tool here.

+ NASA

+ Visit the online tool

And then it happens. There’s a moment of silence. It’s subtle. It’s acoustic. And it begins, “I get up in the evening, and I ain’t got nothing to say…”

Why does a Bruce Springsteen song tear me away from the intricacies of my navel when nearly ten years of SA songwriting couldn’t? It’s not just because acoustic “Dancing In The Dark” is a true work of art. (Thanks, Amy McDonald, for restarting that pop craze.)

It’s because of what I call the Born To Run Syndrome. (Oh god, it just occurred to me that I sound like that “Born from a Boombox” douchebag from Step Up 3. Oh well.)

Formulated one night when I got drunk (yes, really), I flopped into my sister’s car after a frustrated night of being part of my family and loudly, and mostly coherently, proclaimed “I’m like Bruce, I’m Born To Run!”

But then I wondered where drunken shmucks like myself got this urge to run. No one ever sat me down and told me that “riding out tonight to case the promised land” was something I should try and do. But yet it’s totally one of my life goals. No one offered to guard my dreams and visions if I wrapped my legs round these velvet rims. No one goddamn warned me that dancing in the dark would at once feel like I was dancing just for me and that I’d never be dancing alone.

You see – different wiring. (Never mind the debate that Bruce is a goddamn magician for the magical music he makes.) I’ve got the Born To Run Syndrome and I’ve got it bad, baby.

- Thoughts of “Bad Medicine” started crowding in round about here but that’s a New Jersey for a different time. -

Are you Born To Run? What songs haunt your dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned out chevrolets?

But I’ll support you anyway.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

These are two of my favourite shmaltzy love songs:

Ron Pope – Wherever You Go:

Jason Mraz – I Won’t Give Up:

It irks me more than somewhat to put Die Antwoord on here. But every now and then, I have to bow to what y’all might want, so let it begin this week’s downloads:

Die Antwoord – I Fink U Freeky

Jim Neversink – All Apaches To The Snow

Hellogoodbye – 4 track Daytrotter session

The Sick-Leaves – All These Foolish Things (I’ve Said)

Good Old War – Calling Me Names

Catlike Thieves – Maybe Baby

Lily And The Parlour Tricks – The Good One

Now that you’ve got it free, do you actually like the new music from Die Antwoord?