HGMN and Earbits.com are excited to announce the Home Grown Music Channel. To hear all of your favorite HGMN bands just click on the "Listen to Home Grown Music" button from our homepage.
"Earbits is personalized streaming radio with cojones. No ads, no commercials, no subscriptions...just bad ass music and a slick website with plenty of things to keep you busy. Explore and connect with killer bands across a huge variety of genres. Check out their Facebook page, follow them on Twitter. Share songs with your friends. Skip as much as you want. Or, just listen like a lazy bum.
Earbits is a bunch of musicians, marketers and technologists who realized that there really is no effective way to market new music. We figure that building a radio platform designed to increase engagement between fans and bands is a slick idea. We think personalized radio is the future of music discovery and that it ought to be used to get fans fired up and out supporting new music.
Earbits is building a killer catalog of great music. All of it is hand curated by our team of self-proclaimed experts. We've got killer artists like Weezer, Talib Kweli, KRS-One, Alkaline Trio, and double Grammy winners like Arrested Development, Dave Samuels and Mads Tolling, and a bunch of others who you may or may not have heard before. But we know you'll love them, because we don't approve music that sucks.
You won't hear everybody you're used to because we only broadcast artists we work with directly. This lets us do cool stuff like coordinate album giveaways and run promotions for new releases. If you want regular radio with the same old music and all the rules, it's out there.
We're going to keep building stuff that makes you love our bands, while our bands sit back and enjoy making new fans without a bunch of work on their part. Basically, we're letting bands get back to making music while we figure out how to make them successful."
-Earbits.com
How to Spread Your Music Like A Virus
by Yotam Rosenbaum
EVP of Music and Artist Relations Earbits.com
In the digital age, most bands dream about getting their music to "go viral". In other words, they wish they could put their song online, go to bed, and wake up on the following day with thousands of new fans and followers.
The odds of getting your song to go viral are similar to winning the lottery. Thankfully, it's a little easier now that Facebook launched it's music integration with a dozen of music services, including Earbits.
How Does It Work?
Earbits doesn't require its listeners to register in order to listen to music. But in order to use all the functions of the site one has to register via Facebook. Facebook will ask for the user's permission to add Earbits to their FB timeline. Once approved, the listener's activity on Earbits is automatically updated to their Facebook profile. For example, when Joey listens to Earbits his friends can see on their Facebook ticker which song and station he is listening to and click to listen to the same song, or other song on the same station.Granted, not all of Joey's 753 friends, me included, are fans of Hard Rock. But some of them are. And a few of them will be curious enough to click to listen to what Joey is listening to.
The Kicker
That's not it. The viral effect doesn't stop there. Let's say that Mike, one of Joey's friends, decided to click to listen to the song Joey was listening to. Facebook asks permission from Mike to open Earbits and add it to his timeline. Once approved, Mike will be taken to the Earbits site and listen to the same song and, of course, as he is listening to the song an update appears on all of Mike's 1,340 friends ticker.
A portion of Mike's friends are fans of Hard Rock and they, too, click to listen to the song. As they listen, their friends are notified about it. And the viral cycle keeps growing and growing.
The Conclusion
Earbits is one of a handful of music services who are integrated with Facebook's new timeline feature. As a musician you may ask yourself why you should get your music on Earbits and not on Spotify? The answer is simple. The core business of Earbits is to help its bands monetize its audience. The tools we build help our bands sell their music and merch, advertise their upcoming shows, generate new fans, and a lot more. And, if a user likes your song on Earbits, they've still got to purchase it if they want to hear it again. We've recently launched our new artist dashboard, which includes an insight into songs performance stats as well.
Other online radio platforms use the music to sell ads and commercials for products that have nothing to do with music. Ads and commercials make the listening experience less enjoyable, and clearly don't benefit the bands.
Get Your Music On Earbits
If your music deserves to be on the radio, we want to hear it. Our submission process is super simple and takes about 10 seconds. http://www.earbits.com/submissions/earbits
We hope to hear from you, and look forward to spreading the word about your music.