Allows bands to send mass text messages to their fans. Their service helps bands promote, market and maintain a relationship with their fan base via text messages. Bands can send album release dates, ticket offers, and trivia questions to their fans, but more importantly can send wallpapers and ringtones. Fans and bands can also use this service to send camera photos and text messages to a displace screen in-venue. A further description of their service is explained in this PDF.

A free service that allows your fans to post pictures of live shows that they take on their mobile phone and post them immediately on the radar website for comment. This could be a great way to promote the feeling of seeing your band live, and a great way for your fans to connect to each other.

For a fee, AirSpun offers radio airplay opportunities and viral music promotion for indie bands. AirSpun’s mission is to democratize the hitmaking process worldwide and create a way for new music to get on the radio as a legal and fair alternative to payola.

Guy Kawaski best summarizes how this works: Bands browse sixty-second airtime slots on radio stations by genre and city. After booking their slot (at prices ranging from $12 to $200), they download sixty-second audio templates to create “Artist Showcase” spots that are downloaded by the radio stations for broadcast airplay. Bands also get an online referral page linking to wherever their music is sold online. Each spot features a brief announcement of the song and band name, followed by about forty-five seconds of the showcased song, and an Airspun end-tag asking listeners to visit the Airspun.com site to find the featured artist and vote or provide feedback on the music.

Band Promote, for a fee, will help get your songs licensed to non-online distribution vehicles like a movie or TV show. Certainly great if you want to make some money, and get valuable publicity. To utilize the services of Band Promote send them a CD, photo, bio, and a $10 fee. If anyone has any experience they would like to share from Band Promote.

Jambase provides a list of local live music shows. For a fee they will send email blasts of your upcoming shows to their email database; they also sell advertising space on their website at varying price points.

At the very least this expense can be helpful for band branding, since every Jambase user in the area you select will at least read your band’s name before deleting the email! In truth this is probably best used initially as just this – a tool to show people in your area that you are serious about making it as a live band in your area. Whether it will have a $300 affect for one particular show is highly debatable, but a few Jambase email blasts now and again for a cool show is definitely important part of any live band’s long term marketing plan.

For different yearly fees (based on the number of songs uploaded), artists can have their music professionally screened by members of Indie-Music’s staff and considered for their website’s monthly choice awards, charts, radio, CD reviews, editor’s picks and annual top songs. The higher the music scores, the greater its exposure. A free service is also available for one uploaded song with no screening or internal promotion efforts.

The Want2BeDiscovered website and free service offers artists to promote their music video, a photo gallery, bio, several links and up to 10 songs. They are also one of very few sites to encourage live webstream users to embed their webstreams in their profiles. This means you can live stream your performances on your profile page for new fans to watch you perform. Want2BeDiscovered also offers opportunities to get booked on live performances. Please be sure to post any comments you have about this service here.

Eventful is a leading events website which enables its community of users to discover, promote, share and create events. The internet obviously provides numberous places to list your band’s event, and this is one of them.

Several websites can be found on the web that provide some materials that you can read off-line. One to note is Music Biz Academy, where you can order some materials discussion making money on the Internet with original music.

Fuzz is building a platform for people to create, share and discover music. Fuzz’s goal is to be a one stop shot for artists to promote, stream, sell music, and connect with fans. They also allow artists to track and analyze sales, fan demographics and the success of marketing campaigns.

TuneCore helps musicians get their music or videos to other distribution vehicles, online and in the real world. TuneCore believes that all artists should have affordable access to all channels of music distribution, get all of the money generated from the sale of their music, and all without giving up any of their master recording ownership, copyrights, merchandise rights, live performance income, public performance royalties or any other rights or money.

In essence they are taking charge of one major role a label would have - distribution - but at much reduced cost, both in dollars and rights. Instead of charging a percentage of each song or album downloaded, a la iTunes or CDBaby, TuneCore charges a yearly $20 storage fee and then a rather reasonable per song or per album fee.

Nimbit offers a variety of solutions to help band’s effectively and efficiently sell online, and manage their web content. They offer a personal, account dashboard functions as a centralized hub from which you can organize and track your sales and distribution, manage fan email lists, as well as post news, photos and calendar info, from anywhere Internet access is available.

They offer a free service which includes assistance with artist-upload MP3s, sales and marketing (including online ticket sales and email list management), and functionality to split up payments to your team and generate detailed sales reports. Additional services can be purchased for from $5 a month for extras like credit card purchases of CDs to $24 a month for their full service that includes web site and band blog management. To add comments on experiences with this service click here.

For a yearly and/or per use fee, Sonicbids connects musicians and festival promoters (among other industry types) looking to hire or use new music. Click here to see user comments on the success and value of using Sonicbids (please try and provide further comments for the benefit of all V11 readers!).

The process of finding locations to perform at in unfamiliar markets is a grueling one, so OnlineGigs.com automates the booking and promotional process for bands, artists, booking agents, record companies and music managers through their online tools. Sounds great!No more performance contracts, web updates or tour itineraries. No more press releases or fan reminders. Onlinegigs will do it all for you, from finding the right live music venue to automatically reminding your fans about upcoming performances right on their cell phones.

The National Association of Record Industry Professionals (NARIP) was started a few years ago by an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles named Tess Taylor. They set upon panel discussions mostly in the LA area (but also in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Phoenix, New York and London) on issues related to the changing music industry and band management issues. Recently they began to offer downloaded MP3 versions of these panel discussions. Discussions can be downloaded for purchase from their website.

Radio Paradise will accept music from independent artists. They will review submitted CDs send to the address below, but prefer that they get sent your best two songs and upload them to their Listener Review Channel

Here is what they say:

We currently have a huge backlog of CDs for reviewing. The chances are very good that if you send us a CD it will be at least a couple of months before we even open the package, and after that it could sit around for as much as a year. Our time is limited, and we get a lot of CDs.

A much better solution is to pick the two best songs from your CD and upload them to our Listener Review Channel. We will give them a quick listen, and if we think they might be suitable for RP we’ll add them to the LRC stream to gather feedback from listeners. The two song per artist limit is strictly enforced. Uploading more than two songs will result in an automatic rejection. After those two songs have completed the review process, then you can upload more.

Their upload review process can take anywhere from 6 hours to 6 months.

Imeem allows fans and artists to discover new music by sharing their playlists with friends. Users can also share videos, and photos. Bands and DJs can use this site to promote music or videos. The site offers stat tracking services to see who is reviewing, downloading and sharing your content. If used right, possibly the new way to share “mix tapes” and debate music. Perhaps gaining credibility on this site will help indie artists get their music out there. Time will tell.

The goal of Indie911 is to combine the community and networking of MySpace with the digital sale opportunities and exposure of iTunes. They provide tools and services to artists, labels and publishers so the site can function as a sales platform for artists and other content owners.

Last.fm creates radio stations based on a user’s personal tastes, using both new and established music. They tap “the wisdom of the crowds” by reviewing the music library on a user’s own computer to make personalized music recommendations. The site also connects users who share similar tastes and provides custom radio streams. To become a part of the site’s “new” music stream, an independent artist just needs to upload their music on the site and provide some basic information. Their goal is to provide equal access to their system to all musicians. forum discussion on their website of what to do to help get your music heard when you are a new user. Have any comments on your ability to get your music heard on this site?

Live365 allows users to both create their own internet radio stations and search other stations by genre or key words. Musicians can submit to specific Live365 radio stations, start their own stations for $75, or guarantee their songs get onto Live365 playlists by paying $200 a song.

Pandora has technology that analyzes aspects of a user’s favorite song to
search for similar song types in their database. All music must be pre-approved to be added to their database, so this may not be a useful site to promote your music – yet.

Aside from having a cool name, Purevolume plays the top 100 downloaded purevolume songs on their internet radio station.

Songbird is a mixture of a music player and web browser. Built on top of the open-source Mozilla code base, this desktop application lets you manage your local music.

Slacker delivers personal radio customized for every listener’s tastes, based on how users rate songs while they listen to them on Slacker’s radio player. The music is accessible at home via the computer or on the go through Slacker’s portable player. V11 is currently trying to obtain information how indie bands can best try to get their music into Slacker’s music library.

SomaFM is commercial-free radio supported entirely by listeners, with a focus on getting unsigned artists and independent music heard. If you think your music would fit nicely on one of their channels, you can send them a CD.

Garageband, now owned by iLike, allows listeners to review songs. Songs are broken out by categories on the site.

Stickam is a live streaming video site and provides a tool for indie artists who want the potential to reach stadium-sized crowds right from their living rooms, studios, rehearsal spaces, local clubs, or pretty much anywhere else. It’s easy to broadcast live to the entire world. All a band needs is a Webcam (or miniDV cam with Firewire connections) and access to the Internet. Artists like Underoath, Street Drum Corps, I Am Ghost, The Mae Shi, Everclear and many others have used Stickam to stream live shows, broadcast live recording sessions from their studios, hold online listening parties, and more, all while fans simultaneously chat with the band or themselves.

With Kyte, any band can easily deliver exclusive, behind-the-scenes content across websites, blogs, social networks and mobile phones. This multimedia content can be broadcast either from a mobile phone or PC. The embedded Kyte Player encourages fans to virally spread your Kyte Channel across leading social networks and websites. Click for more info or get started now and create your free Kyte Channel.

Studionow helps musicians create quality video content through their web-based, virtual community of freelance video/movie editors and directors available 24/7 to provide Hollywood-class filmmaking expertise and editing services to their customers.

StreamerNet is focused on the monetization of live and On Demand video presentations and enables its clients to deliver live or on-demand events from within an ecommerce V*Ticket environment using a uniquely designed Content Distribution Portal. They also allow businesses and entertainment venues to deliver audio and/or video presentations within a custom design environment which provides for wrap-around sidebar advertising and adjunct sales opportunities as part of the viewing experience.

Indieloo serves as an integrator and aggregator of digital media entertainment content for online, on-time and anytime distribution of audio and video events distributed in the form of real-time pay-per-view live shows or as post-event streaming and download of OnDemand replays. They do not charge set up fees. Indieloo processes the selected offerings that are delivered to them and the performer/promoter sets the price. The content providers make the decision regarding whether they want the offer to be a downloadable file or otherwise delivered as an online streaming presentation only (non-downloadable).