One of the music industry’s major labels, Sony BMG UK, has announced they’lll no longer accept demo CDs through the post. Instead, bands will have to utlilise Web 2.0 technologies through a parternship with blogging firm Six Apart; the guys behind Lifejournal, Typepad and Vox.

The way it works is this: bands are directed to two sites, columbiademos.co.uk and rcademos.co.uk, where they can sign up for Vox and be automatically added to Sony BMG’s A&R group, which is being monitored by the label. The theory is that bands upload songs, photos and information, and then try to build a buzz by signing people up as their friends or to post comments and feedback.

With musicians establishing a precedent now for successfully using social networking sites for self-promotion, it could be a good approach with Techscape pointing out

“˜”¦that it’s making bands come to Sony BMG, rather than the label’s scouts doing their own monitoring of existing sites like MySpace and Bebo (although I’m sure they’ll still be doing that).’

Another strength highlighted by Techscape was the use of an open platform, in the form of Vox, enabling users to also promote themselves to other labels, rather than being stuck in a proprietary Sony BMG site. It’s great to see a brand initiative like this which gets the “openness” of the blogosphere and hasn’t attempted a closed, corporate, format.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 9:50 am by Lewis Webb and is filed under Music, PR and Marcomms, Social Networking, User Generated Content, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.