Our Favorite little merch table tool, Square just got a big upgrade. If you don't know, Square is a credit card processing system that allows you to accept card payments on iOS (iPhone, iPad, iTouch) and android devices for a flat 2.75% fee. Now the company has just launched the Square Register App for iPad which brings a full Point of Sale system into the palm of your hand.

Some of the features include inventory managment, product photos, email receipts for cash sales, add notes to emails and more.

For musicians, this means that keeping track of all the items you sold is going to be much easier, your getting an email address with every sale, and best of all... If you run out of something but a fan wants it, just have them place the order for shipment later! This could also work well for pre-orders of CD's as well as digital download links. There is a ton of possibilities to play with here and we would love to hear what you think you could do with the app at your merch table. Leave a comment on our Facebook Page and let us know!

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In an industry where everyone is trying to get to the top, you need something that sets you apart from the herd. In the world of house music, Josh and Matt David have just that. The brothers’ group, Breakdown, is innovative in both their musical approach and their persona. The duo believes in fun, above all else, and strives to imbue their tracks with the same sense of entertainment with which they approach life.

"The best thing about working with your brother is that you've already had all the serious fights when you were nine,”

The initial meeting of the minds came about because Josh showed up with information about a contest he—despite his songwriting inexperience—wanted to enter. The contest, Bass Phenomenon Remix Contest, resulted in the pair’s first track, a Krafty Kuts remix, and a surprise win. Suddenly the brothers realized there might actually be something to their one-off experiment and Breakdown was born.

Since then Breakdown has been writing and remixing as many tracks as they can, honing their skills and capturing the attention of both other artists and promoters. Breakdown has had multiple charting-topping tracks on Beatport’s Electro House Chart and has played major festivals like Electric Daisy Carnival and Monster Massive, as well as clubs around the country. Their tracks have been played by DJs like David Axwell, Benny Benassi, Wolfgang Gartner, Laidback Luke and Dada Life.

The duo’s remix of Nas and Damian Marley’s “As We Enter” attracted significant attention, and word got back to Matt and Josh that the likes of David Guetta and will.i.am have been playing their original track “Pet Monster.” In December, Breakdown released a remix of Daft Punk’s “Derezzed,” which was written for the Tron: Legacy original score. The remix garnered over 20,000 plays in the first four days and grew from there. Disney licensed the track to use in promotion for the film and even slotted it into an official trailer for Tron: Legacy.

On top of all this Matt and Josh are in the process of forming their new record label, The Party, to feature their latest releases along with the tunes of fellow producers they believe in. As their project and audience grows, it’s become clear that Breakdown stands out from their peers, not just for their innovative dance music, but also because of the brothers’ approachable, funny personalities and jokester attitudes. Everything about the group seems ready for world domination.

“I think we’re in a good position,” Josh says. “We’ve fine-tuned our sound to get it how we want it to sound. We’re versatile, as well, though. If we hear something that inspires us we can go in the studio and smash it out. We’re very go with the flow when it comes to music. If we don’t like a track within the first 25 minutes we trash it and never look at it again. We just go with what we like and keep moving forward. That’s what we want to do with Breakdown, move forward.”
 

Go to their website www.breakdowntheparty.com to stay connected and find out when their next shows are.

QR Codes

What the heck is a QR Code anyways?
A QR Code is a specific two-dimensional barcode, readable by dedicated QR barcode scanners and camera phones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data. It has most commonly been used as a mobile marketing tool where users can grab content using an app on their smartphone.

So What?
To all advertisers, be it a business or a band, this means you have the opportunity to actively and instantly engage with potential customer or fan on what would otherwise be a passive promotion (poster or flyer)

Yeah I've seen those around but how do I use them?
There are tons of QR code reader apps out there for pretty much any camera phone, and usually free. My personal favorite is the i-nigma Reader app. I use it on my iPhone to scan codes off street adverts, on the computer, and TV. You would be surprised how well these apps can read codes from different surfaces. You can scan a small code that pops up on a youtube video or a giant 20' x 20' code on the side of a billboard instantly.

Where can I use this thing?
At EM we are starting to use them A LOT! It is on our business card; We use them for our client's promotional materials; When we roll out a street marketing campaign for a band, we use the code on posters, flyers, stickers- anything that is going to be in public view. What we put on the code is dependent on what we are promoting. If it's a show, we put in the RSVP or pre-sale info, if it is an album it may be an order link or a music video.

Where QR codes get really interesting is when it links to mobile micro-sites. That is a web page that is designed to be mobile friendly and shows a streamlined amount of data. Within the micro-site a fan can stream songs, watch videos, sign up for your email list, and even buy content- all while standing on a street corner waiting for for the stoplight to change.

Using these codes is blowing up in a big way in the music industry. Most recently, Jimmy Fallon held up an LP sized QR code rather then a CD while he introduced the rap group Odd Future as they began to play on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. When viewers grab the code, it opens a web browser on the phone and plays a music video of "Yonkers". You can watch the video below and try it yourself, or check out the site directly at www.oddfuture.com.

With this boom in popularity, there is access to many websites where you can create your own. Additionally, there are even web apps that allow you to easily manage and track QR code Campaigns. I will breifly highlight 3 versions below and expand on them in a future blog.

BeQRious Tracker
This easy to use platform provides an easy way to create a lot of codes and get analytics about who scanned it (location, phone type, email, etc). It costs $19 per month and would be more beneficial to a business or ad firm rather than an independent artist. However, if you are running multiple campaigns a month, it might be a good option.

VPX QR
As a free PHP application, it allows you to create your own codes and setup a simple mobile micro-site with multiple pages. It is fairly basic but requires you or your developer to install and set it up on your server. If you are savvy with web coding, this is a great way to get your own private system setup.

ShareSquare
An awesome system built for musicians with the purpose of acting like a mobile EPK. You build out your own "ShareSquare" with videos, bio, photos, and the option to trade an email for a free download. Viewers can also like and share your Facebook. They gather analytics and make the whole process really easy. If your goal is to do general promotion of your band at say, SXSW, handing people business cards with the QR code would be a really effective and inexpensive way to get the job done. It is free through a small banner ad on the bottom of the browser. There are options of applying for premium sponsorship to get subsidized or free collateral for your band, revenue share from ad clicks, free stuff from the sponsor, posting on behalf of the sponsor, sponsored mp3 downloads or sponsored email blasts to your fans.

QR codes will really step up your marketing efforts and allow you to interact with your fans in an otherwise passive situation. If you are interested in learning more about how to implement QR Codes into your marketing plan, contact us at info@eternitemedia.com or 1-866-878-3110.

We took a lot of time in selecting a data center that fit with our business principles, and at the end of that journey we decided on a Portland, Oregon based facility which uses environmentally conscious operational practices. 100% of the energy used in by the data facility is generated at PGE’s Biglow Canyon Wind Farm. This means your websites will be hosted on greener servers powered by renewable energy!

The facility has all the security and stability bells and whistles that you would expect from a data center and quad redundant bandwidth so your site will have superior uptime on secure connection. We provide solid bandwidth for the traffic and storage your site will need and will not “oversell” your chunk of our server. That means that rather then calling a plan “unlimited”, we look at the requirements of your site and build you a hosting plan that is a good fit for you.

Our Managed Hosting Plan starts at $20 a month or $200 a year which provides plenty of bandwidth and storage space for the majority of our clients. Our hosting is available to anyone, and signing up is as easy as talking to your project manager, or emailing us at info@eternitemedia.com. We will take a look at your needs and build a quote based off that.

Connie Lim’s steadily growing fan-base has dubbed her music to be “retrotronica”, a style that has been personally defined by Lim to be “old-school songwriting backed by electronica sentiment.” Inspired by current artists – namely Imogen Heap, Feist, and Bjork – Lim has been developing her sound for the past two years in the depths of Los Angeles, CA after graduating from UC Berkeley.

After the victorious release of “The Hunted” at Hotel Cafe, Lim is being noted by the music industry, as she has already made her “way to [AMP]‘s shortlist of talents to watch for the second half of 2010. Connie is one of the most brilliant emerging vocalists out there.” -AmpArtists.com. While Audrey Magazine calls Lim’s music “a breath of fresh air in this time of “Bieber Fever” and autotune”, her music continues to be noted by the media, including NBC LA, KPCRadio.com, and popular blogs like a-tunes.net, 8asians.com, and ChannelApa.com.

According to Flavorpill.com, The Hunted unfolds her musings on the fluidity of relationship and social structures through the momentum of moody strings, lush piano and electronic textures…an intimate and unselfconscious performer [whose] songs will literally bloom in front of you.” As she says herself, “We are all the hunted, or the underdog, in some way or another. I sing for that side within each of us.”