Speakerheart

The "New" Orleans

Well, they may not be "new" but they're bringing some fresh material to the table.

'70s pop band Orleans has found a new home right here at Speakerheart. You might remember their hits "Dance With Me" and "Still the One," but it's time to take a look at what they've been up to since the '80s.

With a career spanning three decades, these New Yorkers have had plenty of time to hone their skills and create some smooth tunes.

Visit their Speakerheart storefront at www.speakerheart.com/orleans to hear remakes of their old classics and hot new hits from recent releases.

Love comes for FREE

This Valentine's Day we've compiled a "mixed tape" of some of our favorite love songs from Speakerheart artists.

In the spirit of the Hallmark holiday, we've decided to give it away for FREE. That's right...you can have it for nothing!

Freelove is filled with the sweet sounds of Nathan Angelo, David Condos, Katie Herzig, Brooke Annibale and many more of your favorite indie artists.

It's our love offering to you.

Check it out at http://www.speakerheart.com/freelovedownload.

new artists keep coming in

It's incredible listening to all of the new music that is coming in daily.  Just yesterday Saja Butler loaded some tracks.  Check out "Woman" that she has loaded up.  She works out of Fort Collins, CO.

Luke Shirock is   Lukedot and has loaded two albums. Luke from Chicago has two albums, A and B. Check out "Bicycles" on the B album. 

New releases

Song Trust's Bring Him Home Santa hit the airwaves last night, with radio play on KMPS.  Their web site quickly surged in traffic and we saw immediate purchases from the Seattle area.  Capitol Records is distributing the song to radio and this is just the beginning. 

We are meeting with Justin Branam next week.  He was our first featured artist on our launch and he has recently moved to Nashville. 

Last night and this morning I loaded up some tracks from southern rock pioneer Stephen Wrench.  Stephen has worked with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Terry Nails, Molly Hatchett, Tommy Tutone and is getting some of the old stuff that has never been heard out on Speakerheart.  You can check it out under Bone Angels, Stephen Wrench, Rock Road and Stephen and Terry. 

We spoke with Kevin Chalfant of Clique Records last week and hope to have his music up soon.  We also spoke with Graham Kurzner at LuckiePierre who promptly loaded Buddy to the site.  I really enjoyed the Buddy album. 

All of our developers are in town this week as we charge toward our 1.5 release.  We are also working on integrating a better paypal solution.   We also put up our Christmas tree today so now we have flashing lights in the office. 

this week's Christophers and new web banners

We had a great Wednesday night at Christopher's.  Very eclectic group that included bluegrass, jazz and folk rock.  It was great to see the fans of all those bands and genres together in one room.   Check out Cheyenne Medders and  The Farewell Drifters. 

We had great calls this week with an indie label and an indie producer about some very interesting content opportunities.  Hopefully we will have those tracks announced and ingested right after Thanksgiving.

Check out David Pack's new myspace page that our Artist Services team redesigned for him.  You can also see a few of the personalized web banners that our team did for some artists.  Let us know if we can help you.

Got to run, my 1 year old is on the loose. 

Lee

It's Monday

It's Monday!

We are working through an issue on the listener side right now with Adobe.  We are noticing some browser problems while navigating from a search page to an artist storefront.  We have not had a ticket opened up on it but we are noticing the problem internally.   

We finally got some more flex talent on board, Justin joins us on Wednesday.  Cherie is working on the new bios page which should be up in the next week or so.

We had another fun evening on Wednesday.  Half the team was at Christopher's for our regular show and a few team members then headed over to the Stephen Marley show at Exit Inn where we sponsored the VIP Packages.   A couple of pics for ya.

Lee Pepper

Speakerheart

Back in Nashville

We made it back from a successful trip to LA.  David and I met with Nashville artist Cheyenne Medders for lunch yesterday.  We brainstormed on the service and future events in Nashville and Little Rock, AR. If you are in the Little Rock area, send us an email so we can hook up. Cheyenne had a great comment about Speakerheart helping create the "music middle class."  I thought that was insightful because it really speaks to the new music business models evolving.  Artists are looking for  opportunities to write, perform, sell and make a living first.  If they sell a million units great but what about the folks selling 5K, 10K, 50K.  Exciting opportunities continue to evolve as artists set their own prices (or like Radiohead let the fans set the price), control their own merchandising, own their publishing etc.

Here are some pics from the Nettwerk showcase.

Lee Pepper

Speakerheart

Digital Music Forum West and Nettwerk Showcase

We are rolling to Digital Music Forum West today.  David Wright will be a panel moderator.  Jozef and Brad left Monday for a series of meetings.  The conference should be stellar. 

Showcase will feature Nettwerk artist Sara Melson and Speakerheart fan Josh Doyle. Check them out.

We pushed the new homepage out this afternoon.  It's all wide open now.  We are going to keep it in beta mode while we monitor the app and infrastructure for a few days more.  Let us know if  you are having any issues.  If you are posting on Facebook be sure to turn on Advanced Walls within Facebook and post the shelves there.   Friendster, Facebook and MySpace all look good so far.  It takes a decent speed connection.

Lee Pepper

Speakerheart

Soft Launch of Listener and Storefronts

This morning we pulled the trigger on our Artist side.  Shelves, storefronts, artist's search etc. are all live.  We have not updated our storefront yet.   We will probably swap that in a few days.  We want to have a few days more for artists to use the app.  Listeners can access it but have to go through an artist's storefront or shelf.  They cannot hit it through speakerheart.com. 

Naked Without Us, Kink Ador visit and more

We started off the morning with a visit by Kink Ador's Sharon and John.  They put on a good show at Christopher's last Wednesday night and came by to check out our space and meet the team.  Check them out on myspace and sample Cowboys and Indians.

If you are down Franklin way feel free to shoot me an email and maybe we can give you the 10 cent tour.

The Naked Without Us show at Exit Inn was a blast.  Josh Johnson from HGTV Design Star fame stopped by and got his free Las Paletas popsicle courtesy of Speakerheart on the way in.  We gave away about 300 popsicles before heading into the show.  We had about 10 speakerheart folks working the show.  Jennifer and I had dinner prior to the show at Ombi with our close friends Nathan Holman and Eileen Finnan from People Magazine.  Hopefully Eileen picked up some good scoop and story leads.

 

We just sent out an email to the artists participating in the beta launch about our pending launch of their stores.  When we launch artist's stores, all albums that are published will be available live on the site for purchase.  Email us if you have any questions.   

Lee Pepper

Speakerheart