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This week’s Owngig newsletter is intense…

Every Thursday we send out an email newsletter to Owngig registered users. Here’s this week’s content. If you’d like to recieve these, register on site and these will be delivered every Thursday to your inbox without fail.

This week on Owngig

We’ve seen a lot of bids this week for artists as diverse as Tom Waits and Airhead (early 90s British indie band). Offsite we also joined the likes of Stephen Fry, Philip Schofield and Britney Spears by launching our own Twitter channel.

If you haven’t heard of Twitter yet, it’s basically blogging for those with no time – as you can only put 140 characters into each of your messages. This does make it a simple and effective way to communicate and there’s lots of interesting folks on it to follow. For a beginners guide, look here

…and if all of this is old news to you and you’re already tweeting away your every move, feel free to find (and follow) us here…

This week on the web we’ve been loving…

The rise, fall and rise again of The Boxer Rebellion is a story we’ve been watching with interest – as again it shows how the music business is changing and opening up new opportunities for bands and fans.

For those of you not filled in, The Boxer Rebellion are a UK band who on the cusp of fame were dropped by their record label in 2005– just two weeks after it had been released. Undeterred and with loyal fans behind them they kept touring and self-funded their second album, Union, this month.

Despite the lack of record label promotion and as a virtual release it doesn’t even qualify for the official charts, it nevertheless got to #4 in the iTunes download chart. Congratulations to them and if you’re interested in seeing them, remember you can bid for them here at no cost.

In other news, among many other people, we’re pleased to announce that we think we’ve found 2009’s first internet movie star (no not, Stains the dog), but instead, Mark Gormley who definitely is breaking new ground in the world of music videos (!) Take a look at Without You – which at the time of writing this had over 200,000 views on YouTube. As the voiceover beforehand says, it’s very, very intense

Seen anything interesting on the web?

Drop us a line. Also if you have any questions about Owngig.com, let us know. You can get in touch here.

Find us on MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and now, Twitter

The Beastie Boys (plus Marvin Gaye and Radiohead) as you’ve never heard them before in this week’s newsletter

Every Thursday we send out an email newsletter to Owngig registered users. Here’s this week’s content. If you’d like to recieve these, register on site and these will be delivered every Thursday to your inbox without fail.

This week on Owngig…

If you haven’t been on site recently (and if not, why not!), then check out our new recommendations feature. Every artist page now displays related bids from other users – so you can see what your fellow fans also like. We hope this will give you more ideas for gigs you’d like to see.

You can also now add pictures to artist profiles and we’ve seen the galleries fill up with fan submissions, so join in and add your own.

Finally, we’re pleased to announce our first Owngig with over 500 bids. Congratulations to fans of Tokio Hotel who have now pushed their favourite band over the 500 bids marker. If you’re a fan and you haven’t already bid, click here to do so – we hope to have some exciting news to impart to fans very soon.

This week on the web we’ve been loving…

When Microsoft’s experimental labs launched Songsmith – a program that automatically generates backing tracks for your vocals, who would’ve thought that the web would’ve so enthusiastically used (and abused it). The somewhat cheesy nature of what Songsmith spits out as backing has provided some rather comedic gems. You’ll see what we mean on the below links…

Beastie Boys vs. Songsmith

Marin Gaye vs. Songsmith

Radiohead vs. Songsmith

More practically, we were impressed with FeedRevolution – a useful site that solves a simple need – finding out when your favourite bands release new material. Simply put the band you like into the box, supply your email (or last.fm profile name) and the site emails you when they release new material. You can also receive an RSS feed of new releases if you’re that way inclined.

Seen anything interesting on the web? Drop us a line.
Also if you have any questions about Owngig.com, let us know. You can get in touch here.

Find us on MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and shortly, Twitter.

It can’t have escaped your attention that the music industry is changing rapidly – we’re part of that change, and research released by Musically and Forrester further underlines how quickly it’s changing. Firstly, Forrester’s research predicts that by 2013, 57% of music consumed will be done so digitally. How will fans be consuming their music – well, 46% want to get their music from their ISPs? Given the speed of change, it’s clear that every aspect is up for renewal and we intend to be part of the future.

We know it’s cold out there and probably many of you are skint, so we thought we’d give you sometime to be cheerful by showing you another great use of technology to bring you the music you love – Hype Machine’s Zeitgeist 2008.

The popular mp3 blog aggregator has joined together with Musebin, Imeem, Flickr, Bluga and Amazon.com to bring you a guide to the 50 most blogged albums, songs and artists of 2008. What makes it neat is not only that if provides a list but that all those data services provide a variety of services -  aggregating and summarises blog posts, provides album art automatically and most impressively of all provides full streaming of each album for the ultimate try before you buy.

Check it out – maybe some of the albums you’ve seen in the other glut of lists will feature. Feel free to bid for them in Owngig if you like what you hear