owngig.com

We’ve not updated this blog for a while  as we’ve been hard at work on a new version of the site, which we can now bring you. We’ve been amazed with the response we’ve had up till now. Fans of loads of bands have found us and started promoting their favourite acts. Word of mouth is incredibly important to us and for the bands on our site so we’d like to reward fans for their promotional work.

From now on, the two fans that do the most to promote a gig will get in for free. To elaborate, we’re now offering a suite of tools for fans to share gigs on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and via email. This promotion will earn points – and those with the highest number of points will receive a free ticket to the gig they helped promote. For a full rundown of the offer, take a look at our FAQ.

For artists we’re offering a whole new suite of tools to improve the work of planning gigs and communicating with fans. Our new artist accounts – which you can sign up for here, offer you a buzz tracker to find who’s talking about you online and track the amount of buzz you’re building. We also now offer a single page where all of your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace updates can appear – giving fans a single view of all your activity. Finally you can track fan promotions – to see how much they’ve been spreading the word about you and use this to measure demand and help plan future concerts.

Now although this is all live now, it’s so new that you may find a few things that don’t work how they should.

Please bare with us and if you find anything odd, then please let us know – either in the blog comments or here. Rest assured our crack team of developers will be working though the site to stomp on any remaining bugs. Moreover if there’s anything not currently on site that you’d like to see in the future we’d like to hear that too. As always if you have any comments, get in touch, and keep bidding and spreading the words – there are points to gained now.

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As befits the end of any year these days, everyone has to make lists and best ofs… not least because with much stuff to choose from, it helps us catch up of anything we missed. However there’s no reading in these summaries – firstly there is this very clever video mix of the year’s cleverest pop videos into an hour long mix. Even more condensed is DJ Earworm’s State of Pop 2009 that condenses the top 25 single in America into just five minutes.

Looking forward into 2010, here’s the first video of the year to take our fancy – and it’s not even finished yet – but that’s when you come in. Similar to the fan based Star Wars remake – where fans made 15 seconds of the film, Brooklyn artists, C-Mon & Kypski are asking fans to donate one from for there new video. They’re up to over 5000, but they still need some more to complete the project. Join up here.

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.

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As a site, Owngig is of course, powered by you the people. Without you we’d be nothing, and so people coming together in the service of music is always of interest to us. This is why we love the campaign on Facebook to get Rage Against The Machine to be the Christmas number one – and stop the X Factor winner being the predictable choice. The group has over half a million members – join up if you haven’t already, but make sure you get the single.

Knitwear hasn’t up till now featured too prominently in pop. OK, there’s been the odd crooner with dodgy taste in knitwear but that aside it’s been pretty bare. Looking to make up for this is a rather cute video featuring over 700 pieces of knitwear to make the world’s first wool based cartoon. Check it out here…

Finally, this is one of the best pieces of promotion we’ve ever seen for a musician and what’s more it cost nothing. One enterprising musician ran alongside a Google Street View car to get photographed playing as it went along the road – something he managed several times on the same street. Check the shots out here. Definitely Owngig approved.

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Tonight in Britain is Children in Need – a famous annual telethon on behalf of good causes. This years has used a technique close to Owngig’s heart – crowdsourcing. Chartjackers aims to create a number one hit solely by using YouTube and the users of the site.

As they say, “The lyrics of the song are made up of YouTube comments, compiled into a song by another YouTuber. The lyrics were released and then YouTubers wrote a melody for the lyrics, and we picked our favourite. We held YouTube auditions via video response to pick the band, found the producer of the song through YouTube, and the music video is made up of literal interpretations of the lyrics, clapping and singing along, by YouTubers!” View the video here.

Also close to Owngig’s heart is, of course, live music, so naturally we loved the tour by Ash, which went round the UK in alphabetical order. There was a mild bit of (understandable) cheating – Exeter for X for example but the tour, done to celebrate the band’s plan to release 26 similarly themed alphabetical singles in a year is a great move.

Finally, it wouldn’t be an Owngig newsletter without something a bit sillier. Welcome to the world of manualism. This isn’t as rude as it sounds – it’s the art of making music with your hands. Perhaps this video explains it better – as well as being odd it’s also awesome. Sweet Child ‘o’ Mine, done with hands.

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Are you just starting out in the world of music? Have no idea how many people like you or would be interested in seeing you live? Keep an eye on Owngig because we’ll be looking to roll out some interesting new developments soon. In the mean time if you have any feedback on what you’d like to see, get in touch here.

This week on the web we’ve been loving…

Ever wanted to be in a music video? Well, assuming you like John Mayer you can be. By using the webcam on your computer, this nifty piece of technical wizardry means that it’s possible to be in the background of the action in his latest video. This is known as augmented reality – which John describes in this video.

On a more historical nature, we found this article from German magazine Der Spiegel fascinating. The article (in English) details one Klaus Quirini who was in 1959 the world’s first DJ. How things have changed and how things were then is very interesting and worth a read, particularly if you’ve ever been clubbing.

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We’ve had lots of bids for small acts on Owngig since we’ve started and we’re thinking we should do more to support small acts. We already have some promotional tools and we can offer intelligence as well about where gigs are but if you’re starting your career and are interested in using our service, what would you like to see from us? Let us know here.

This week on the web we’ve been loving…

Did you grow up with Dr. Seuss? Green Eggs and Ham? One Fish, Two Fish? Well hopefully some of you out there know what we’re talking about, which is why liked this hip hop version of Fox in Socks. The book, which is basically one long tongue twister is rendered into rap flawlessly by the slightly nerdy duo in this YouTube clip.

Kanye West is never far from the news and certainly seems to have been making himself unpopular with his controversial intervention at American music awards the VMAs. Well, as is often the case, these things have a habit of spreading and KanyeGate is detailed to Kanye telling more or less everyone you can think of that, yes, they can finish but X had the best Y of all time. An endearingly crazy labour of love.

Finally, and tangentially related to the previous link, one of the most popular viral videos this week has been possibly Beyonce’s youngest fan getting his groove on. Given that over ten years ago, one of the web’s first viral hits was a dancing baby, it’s interesting to see how these things change (while staying the same).

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As you probably guessed by the site we’re running we love music, so when a study came out this week saying that listening to music makes you happy, well that made us… happy. Now you have an answer when someone tells you listening to The Cure makes you miserable.

We also, of course, love technology and autotune has been featured in this newsletter before. Probably some of your favourite acts whether you like it or not use it and one artist, T-Pain has become associated with it. Well he now has his own autotune app on the iPhone so you too can sound like a very tuneful robot. Check out this video here and you can download it here

Finally, away from the mainstream, there’s a lot of strangeness out there in music, which is why we loved this little collection of very, very odd music collection. Bare in mind some of these images are NSFW though.

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London radio station XFM has been holding a competition, challenging artists to see how many acts they can fit into a ten minute window. Smashing the record this week was Akira The Don, UK rapper and producer with 210 tracks in the ten minute window. See how many you can recognise here… and be prepared to give up the next ten minutes of your life because once this starts it’s somewhat mesmerising.

In a similar vein, this Lego stop motion tribute to the 80s is difficult to stop watching when you start. Then again, 80s + Lego + animation + electro + video games = how could this not be awesome?

Finally Owngig would like to give a shout out and promotion (not that he needs it) to a former work colleague, Lee Washington who produced a nice little video as part of his work as a design student, detailing both his frustration and a solution to that most prosaic of problems, tangled iPod headphones. The video, which has been picked up by top gadget blog Gizmodo, trend site PSFK and has so far had over 131,000 views. Add a few more from Owngig.com here.

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This week we’ve been working behind the scenes on our new Polish version of the site to launch soon. We’ll be announcing full details of this next week but if you have any Polish friends, let them know – and gigs in Gdańsk, Kraków or Warsaw with their favourite artists could be coming soon.

This week on the web we’ve been loving…

OK, so they’re not going to win any awards for sound fidelity but these tiny iPod speakers in the shape of an 80s boombox will certainly win points for cuteness. Following on from the iPod dock that was similarly retro styled, this mini version is just too much. Buy here .

Some of you will have seen the small space invader tiles in various cities around the world, done by French artist, Invader. Well we liked this project that takes famous album sleeves and tiles them. Try to guess them all here …

Finally a link that’s being doing the rounds this week to a musician I think it’s safe to say won’t be doing an Owngig any time soon, this singer is more an exercise on how long you can stand to listen to his song. I got 49 seconds in before I could stand no more. See how you do here and if you make it all the way to the end then your aversion to pain is impressive.

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Gigs, we love ‘em. That’s pretty obvious really, considering what Owngig is about. So we were impressed with these amazing gig posters. We did notice most of them were American. You’re lucky over there to have stuff like this advertising your favourite band.

We’re surprised we haven’t seen any bids for UK band Raygun yet. Then again, although this band has been over the internet this week, the publicity they’ve got hasn’t been exactly favourable thanks to a rather risible YouTube clip that’s been going viral for all the wrong reasons. It’s as if they though Spinal Tap was career guidance, the band profile contains some classic lines – such as

“We might have mojitos at 11am in the morning! I mean, what the hell, man? It’s, like, fun. We want people to have fun.” See the full horror here.

Finally, some science. The Owngig newsletter isn’t about to get the Bunsen burners out but we just wanted to share this rather clever crowd demonstration from 80s vocal man Bobby McFerrin. In proving people have an innate sense of musical scale, he gently messes with their minds. Watch it here to see what we’re on about.

Seen anything interesting on the web? Drop us a line.