So indie it hurts

The internet is positively exploding with ways to get to new music. Seems that everyone’s trying to build the next hot spot for discovering new bands that nobody’s heard of yet. While I think that most of them won’t catch on, I think it’s great that people are trying so many different approaches to this whole thing, and I’m doing my best to try and get Psycliq music up into all of them.

The Sixty One is a very slick music-player-community site that I’ve just run across. I’ve started to put Psycliq songs up there, but they’ve got a one-song daily upload limit so this could take a while. Ironically, somebody already bought a copy of Results Not Typical from there, even though only ten out of the seventeen tracks have been uploaded. I kinda feel bad for that person. So, person who bought that album, if you’re reading this, just drop me a line and I’ll make sure you get the rest of your music!

Noisetrade is an interesting experiment in letting people download free music but setting out a tip jar. They limit what you can put in there, so there’s not much to speak of and most folks seem to just come for the free downloads of the latest updates.

Grooveshark is a neat little indie radio station thing, similar in concept to Last.FM. I have no idea how to extract stats from that sucker though so I have no idea if anybody’s listening. If you are listening, thank you!

I’ve got a deal in the works with Magnatune to get onto their distribution service, which will make it so that movie studios and game companies can license Psycliq tracks for their stuff. That’d be kind of awesome. They even publish under Creative Commons, which is really cool. In a bit of an odd move, they didn’t want to carry a couple of tracks, but hey. More on that whole thing once it actually goes live, and I have no idea when that’d be. Update: The Mathemagician’s Riddle is up on Magnatune right now. Other albums will be up in the next few weeks sometime.

Then there are the few distribution places that I know of but haven’t managed to break into yet, including Pandora and FiXT Music. Those would be awesome channels and would open up a whole new world of listeners, but it seems that they’re pretty picky about what gets in the door. I’m sure there are many other places out there, too, so let me know if there’s anyplace that Psycliq ought to be and isn’t.

The main music site on Bandcamp remains the official home for Psycliq music and will be the first and sometimes only place to get certain songs, like the remixes and christmas albums. And CDBaby is still one of the best places to buy physical CDs, if you’re a curmudgeon like me and still like to own atoms.

Now is a really good time to be an independent musician. There’s so much you can accomplish without the structure of the record industry. There are listeners out there that small timers could have never reached before. Unfortunately, that means that everybody else is trying to do the same thing, leading to a world of noise like none other. At least a lot of this new noise is actually pretty good in its own right.