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What Makes A Great Band T-Shirt?

One of the most disappointing and classically angst-y moments of my (Shane, of Swift.fm) youth was when my Mom stole my Cure “Lovesong” t-shirt and literally polished my Dad’s shoes with it.  Of course, it was in tatters beforehand, full of holes and pitstains from all the sweaty shows I’d gone to at Minneapolis’ First Avenue, but to this day I maintain she did it out of spite.  I miss that shirt to this day and like all good music nerds, I still buy t-shirts at shows.

I do this for two reasons: first, to directly support the artist, and second, because as Stuff White People Like tells us, as a white person I must like t-shirts.

This got me thinking about what actually makes a good band t-shirt.  I’ve got some good ones – from Jamie Lidell (which was actually artwork from Mudwig), Subtle, Choir of Young Believers, Trainwreck, Mastodon, Baronness and even a shirt that more or less launched a relationship.  Seriously, my hot pink t-shirt from a SexyPants concert was an ice breaker when I first met my girlfriend.

I’ve got some bad ones too – I think “concert tees” with a list of the 83 venues that whoever played are missing the point. I’ve got a Willie Nelson “Whiskey River 2006″ t-shirt that’s ill-fitting, terrible quality and scratchy.  I suppose if I were a Hells Angel or a trucker, I’d wear that more frequently, but for those of us who really pride ourselves on discovering artists and supporting them, I think an artist has to do something unique.  Fans want something “limited” or that feels special.

Our friend Sam Valenti IV of Ghostly International once put it well.  He said that the Ghostly customer is someone who’s considered and with a taste for quality and understatement.  He then said that Ghostly customers “aspire to wear a slightly nicer shirt.”  In that spirit, we got to thinking about what Swift.fm could do to create our first “band t-shirt”.  Anyone can slap a hastily-constructed logo on a Beefy Tee and give it away, but come on, we wanted to do something cooler than that.  So we drafted in our good buddy Jeremiah Wassom, an artist / illustrator / motion graphics designer here in San Francisco.  We think what he came up with is pretty kickass.  You can find out more about him at: http://freakinrad.com/ or http://twitter.com/jer_ohmy_ah/

So we think that a good band t-shirt needs a few qualities: it should inherently be “cool” (whatever your definition of that is), be quality, and above all else, be thought provoking.

What do you think?

Delete is Live

Have a little too much to drink night last night, and accidentally send out a long distance Celine Dion track to your ex-girlfriend? Accidentally upload your band’s new track a couple days too early and broke your label’s embargo?

Don’t worry, now by popular demand there’s a way for you to delete tracks from your Swift.fm profile (and coming super super soon, from your Twitter account too).

Step one: Make sure you are logged into Swift.fm.

Step two: Find the offending song.

Step three: Click on the area that shows the time since swifting (in the middle bottom-right area next to the ‘From Swift.fm’). Note: Just like you would to view an individual tweet on twitter.

Time since Swifting area

This will bring you to the individual song page.

This is the individual song page.

Step four: Click the ‘Delete this song’ button in the bottom right below the song.

Step five: Confirm deletion by clicking ‘ok’.

Confirm Deletion

Step six: PROFIT!

Holy Crap We’re Going to SXSW!

Well, we’ve done it.  Booked tickets and bought our Interactive pass.  Swift.fm is taking its second-ever field trip, to the weirds and wilds of Austin, TX for the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference.  In our quest to socialize music – making music as easy to pass through your networks as news – we’ve decided to wade into the overwhelming party / conference / jamboree that is SXSW.  Here’s hoping we don’t get tinnitus.

The bigger picture for us is facilitating music discovery.  For everyone physically at SXSW, it’s going to be impossible to see and do it all.  For music fans attending only digitally, it’s a bonanza of great music and gossip, and what better way to attend, reminisce, or save for later than to compile lists of the tracks you hear, socially?  Think of Swift.fm as a way to digitally divide and conquer the free-for-all that is SXSW.

We’re actively encouraging artists, labels, media outlets and fans to use the #sxsw tag when uploading tracks from SXSW to Swift.fm.  Not only does this categorize great music (pro tip: use any #tag you want to categorize music any which way, e.g. #hiphop or #radiohead), but it also will create a vibrant record of SXSW 2010, in real time, tweet-by-tweet.  What’s best is that anyone can to go http://www.swift.fm/channel/sxsw and listen to every last community-tagged song there, so the music gets extended past each of our users’ individual networks and out to everyone using Swift.fm.  Sweet.

If you’re going to be in Austin, we’d love to meet you.  Holler at us either by tweeting @swiftfm or drop us an email to info [at] swift.fm.

Happy Discovery,

Ed & the Swift.fm Team

Rock your Favorites

We are always thinking of ways to help you discover your next favorite jam at Swift.fm and today we are stoked to officially roll out a new feature that helps you find your friends favorites.

Starting today, whenever you view a users profile you can also click a link to view the songs they have favorited.

We did this for two reasons:

1. To give you even more insight into what your network thinks is amazing
2. To show you who is influencing your network of tastemakers

Now you can move through your network and beyond even more easily!

To view this list just go to any users profile and click the ‘UserNames Favorites’ link. If they dont have any favorites it will show up blank (lame!).

This new feature is launching today so if you have any favorited music you may be embarrassed about, be ready to explain yourself! It’s cool, we count Fine Young Cannibals and Barry Manilow among our guilty pleasures.  No judgement at Swift.fm.

Ed & the Swift.fm Team.

P.S. As always, if you have comments, thoughts, hopes, dreams etc. hit us up! We would love to know.

Spread Holiday Cheer With Your Fellow Man (and Woman) via Swift.fm! (warning: press release inside)

San Francisco, CA – December 7, 2009

Just in time for the holidays, the Twitter community has created a festive new user-generated Christmas music channel using Swift.fm’s tagging feature.

Swift.fm, the Twitter-based free music discovery engine, features an easy, open-platform feature that allows its users to tag their music uploads with #channels, which are then accessible by the entire Swift.fm userbase.  Users can tag any upload with any hash tag; popular channels generated thus far have included #dubstep, #soundtrack, #acoustic and #hiphop.

To get into the spirit of the holidays, Swift.fm users created the #Christmas channel just more than a week ago, and dozens of users have become technologically festive, posting holiday rarities from the likes of Wyton Marsalis and the Pogues to modern standards like Run-DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis” and Bing Crosby.

Swift.fm users can browse lists of user-generated channels at: http://www.swift.fm/channels/, and can listen to the up-to-the-minute Christmas list at http://www.swift.fm/channel/christmas/

Swift.fm’s user-generated channel listing gives music lovers a new method by which to discovery music; if a user is a fan of altcountry or choral music, they only need go to the respective #channel to discover what Swift’s userbase have posted. Furthermore, if a user finds a posted song they love, they can quickly start following that song’s poster via Twitter, giving them instant access to an entire new playlist of that person’s favorites.

Swift.fm is among the top user-generated resources on the internet for music, and the #Christmas channel is a fun way to see the power of the community’s interest.

###

To learn more about Swift.fm, visit http://swift.fm
To hear the recommended playlist of the Swift staff, visit http://swift.fm/swiftfm

Swift.fm has been designed from the ground up as fully DMCA-compliant, and as a service intended to encourage and facilitate discovery of independent and “underground” music.  To view Swift.fm’s Terms of Service, visit: http://www.swift.fm/terms/

Swift.fm is a property of Noitition, LLC and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

For media inquires, contact:

Shane Mahoney
Mahoney + Company
m: 415.497.5829
e: shane [at] mahoneyandcompany.net
t: @shane_mahoney

http://swift.fm/shane_mahoney

Easy Matters

Interesting thing happened today – about 9:30 AM ?uestlove sent out this tweet:

“b4 “Thriller” was #Thriller…”Starlight” was Starlight. http://www.zshare.net/audio/693201147c96f6ec/ (who’s ur ?uestorical daddy?)”

and about 20 minutes later sent out this tweet:

“damn NO LOVE?! http://bit.ly/5iRFfI #Thriller (dont act like yall get rare unheard demos on the regular and ish dayum!)”

Interesting. With 1.5 million followers the idea of getting ‘no love’ on almost anything is nearly zip. And with a tag to a special version of the #5 song of all time you’d expect a pretty awesome response. So what happened?

The link pointed to zhare.net, a popular posting site for files. I saw the tweet and spent about 5 minutes to get the file. At zshare you have to click the link to the file twice, wait 60 seconds and click again within a minute of time being up to get the file. Then you have to download it and install to listen. In short, it was a pain. No matter how much people love ?uestlove, 5 minutes of effort from a tweet is asking a lot.

So after I downloaded the file I posted it to Swift.FM. Frankly, the song is downright amazing. Thriller used to not even be about beasts and zombies?! Unreal!

Our twitter account has a good following (~700 people, nothing like ?uestlove’s million plus) and within a few minutes a bunch of people had already RT’ed the song. We are lucky that within our 700 we have a few power twitter users and about 3 minutes after our post our friend Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) RT’ed the song too.

And Boom!

Within about 20 minutes over 100 people had RT’ed it and over 1,000 had listened on Swift.FM. Over the past few hours many more have RT’ed and thousands more have checked it out. The chatter is still going.

So whats the difference? How did a tweet to 700 people receive a response far greater than one to well over a million?

One click.

On twitter, where users have a million things flying past them a day even asking for one click is a lot to ask. The further you put them from your content the less likely you are to make an impression. The less likely you are to get your message out.

If you are an independent artist, a major fan or anyone that loves music no matter how good your track is – get it as close to your followers as possible. Every click makes a difference.

Even the same content from smaller users can have a huge impression if people get to see it.

(BTW: The song is awesome. Check it out here.)

A World of Christmas music!

Happy Holidays!

We are huge fans of festive holiday music at Swift.FM… mainstream, obscure covers and anything in between! Using our new channel tool, a bunch of Swifters have been building out a Christmas channel so Twitter users from all over the world can share and discover great new holiday music to enjoy this season.  Here in America, we seem to hear the same “standards” year in, year out, but we’re curious to hear what our users in other parts of the world listen to.  So what’s up South Korea?  What’s up, Brazil?  What songs do you listen to over Christmas?

We’ve loved listening and contributing and think you’ll love listening and contributing to this evolving channel.  This Christmas, give the gift of music, and give the gift of music discovery to your friends!

Where can I listen?

http://swift.fm/channel/christmas

How can I participate?

Log in at http://Swift.fm with your twitter ID then upload, search or link to any track and tag it with #Christmas in the description. Not only will this send the track to all of your followers but will auto add it to the #Christmas channel. (It takes us about a minute to process each post, so just wait a second. It should come through!)

Spread the word!

The more people that contribute the better the channel will be. Have a great song? Swift it!

Ho ho ho, from the jolly elves at Swift.fm!

Tonights Lefsetz Letter

Tonight, Bob Lefsetz (cranky but awesome music industry blogger) almost exactly described Swift.FM in his famous (in-famous) Lefsetz Letter.

Key section:

Speaking of Twitter, people like to tweet about tracks.  Why not create a service easier than Blip, that allows people to hear what others tweet about?  I should be able to tweet about a track, and if you want to check it out, all you’ve got to do is click the link.  And I get the URL for the track from one central, easy to use database.  Plug the name into a Google-type search engine and you IMMEDIATELY get a bit.ly shortened url for someone to hear the entire thing.  This is better than radio promotion.  You’re getting people truly interested in the music checking it out right away.

Not only do we do all of the above, but we take all the tracks your friend share and turn them into a radio station made just for you by REAL PEOPLE not Robots!

And add favoriting, retweeting, channel creation and more.

You guys are a great community that drove such awesome users as @LindsayLohan and @Alyssa_Milano to us.

Any chance you could ping our pal @Lefsetz and help him see the light? We would be forever in your debt.

Love,

Your pals at Swift.FM