Keeping Up With the Music Business, One Byte at a Time - Part 2
by Storm Gloor

In the last e-zine we reviewed several useful e-mail newsletters, blogs, and other sources for keeping up with the ever-evolving music business. Subscribing to all of them, though, could easily flood one’s inbox. There might also be repetition of news stories among the various sources. Moreover, it might become difficult to file and organize all of the information, especially if you’d like to easily access it later. Now we’ll review a couple of tools that might help acquire and manage your music business news, or any other web information for that matter, more easily.

You may be averse to joining multiple mailing lists or receiving an overwhelming number of information feeds in the first place. Or perhaps you would prefer to only receive news on certain subjects within the industry (digital music, the RIAA, or a particular record label, for instance). There’s still no need to manually search for the news. You can have an e-mail service do the search and deliver the results to you, based on your preferences. Though other providers may offer similar services, Google’s G-mail service includes perhaps the best tool for automated delivery of news or mentions of specific topics of interest to you.

At your home page on the net’s most popular search service, Google Alerts is an optional tool you’ll find by first going to the inbox in your G-mail account (which, of course, you’d have to establish in order to use this tool). In the list of additional options in the upper left-hand corner, click the drop-down “more” keyword. Then click on, of all things, “even more”. The first item on the list of plenty of other options should be “Alerts”. Clicking on that option takes you to the right place.

When you create a Google Alert, you’ll be creating an automated search result that will be delivered to you as an e-mail. It will include anything found on the Internet since the last alert that includes your search term(s) anywhere within it. In the “Create A Google Alert” field, you can type in what specific keyword(s) you want to have it search for regularly. Would you like to know whenever your favorite artist is mentioned in an article or comment somewhere? You’d simply enter their name in the field. The more specific you can be with the term(s) you’re searching for the better. For example, choosing “digital” would be too vague, and would generate more found articles than you’ll possibly need or want.

Next, through use of drop-down menus, you’re able to choose the type of search, i.e., what types of sources you’d want to have searched. For instance, do you want blogs searched for your keywords? Choosing “Comprehensive” instructs it to search pretty much everything, including news articles, blogs, videos, etc. Or you can select just one of those sources.

After you’ve identified the keywords and the sources, you’d select how often you’d want the system to search and generate the e-mail that will list all of the found sources. You could receive a summary once a day, once a week, or (if it’s not a very common topic) as it happens. Avoid the last option if the search term is mentioned often, or you’re asking for a large influx of e-mails. Finally, you can choose to have the alert sent to your Google Reader, an RSS-based service, instead of as an automated e-mail.

So based on the schedule you’ve chosen, you’ll receive one comprehensive e-mail that will include all mentions of your search term(s) within the parameters you’ve prescribed. The “sender” of the e-mail will be “Google Alerts”, with the search term in the subject line. Related articles will even be combined by sub-topic. For instance, if “DRM” was your search topic, closely related news stories mentioning the topic will be combined. But a “see all stories on this topic” link below it takes you to a list of the specific articles, with links to them, in case you’d like to see what each posting source (Billboard.com, the Wall Street Journal Online, etc.) had to say about the story.

Whether you’re browsing through the various online articles generated by your Google Alerts or reading through the news items from one of the sources from part one of this article, you’ll likely stumble upon something of interest regarding the music business that you’d like to access at another time. Maybe you’d like to refer to that article, opinion, or factoid later, in a term paper, upcoming lecture, or research project. In the old days finding a helpful resource in a magazine or journal meant a trip to the copy machine and then to an overflowing, disorganized filing cabinet. These days storing a helpful resource found online means the click of a mouse and a visit to a virtually limitless, personal storage area in cyberspace, accessible from anywhere with any internet connection.

For example, del.icio.us (why they didn’t use the plain and simple “delicious” word, without the intermingling periods, beats me) is a social bookmarking service one can access at www.delicious.com. Signing up under a unique username and setting up a secure password gives you the ability to “tag” and store any website or webpage by URL in your online “filing cabinet”, so to speak. In fact, you’ve probably seen at the end of many online articles several options for such bookmarking, including Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Facebook. Most of the time these links are labeled and/or represented by small icons. One of the most common is a white, blue, black, and grey square that identifies del.icio.us.

Clicking on that icon takes you to the website, where you can log in to your personal page. Then you can “tag” the article with keywords you designate. For example, you could type in “Myspace”, “socialnetworks”, and “termpaper”, leaving a space between each word, if it’s an article about Myspace and you’ll be writing a paper about it later.

To simplify the choice of tags, many online articles these days already contain suggested keywords, and del.icio.us will display those as options. You can save some typing by clicking on any of its suggestions. In fact, del.icio.us will, as you type, attempt to identify what you are entering, based on your previous tags, so you can let it finish the typing, so to speak. When you log into your del.icio.us account months later, you’ll be able to click on the word “termpaper” in your list of tags and find all of the articles you’ve identified as sources. That particular article about Myspace will be one of them, but it will also be found in your “socialnetworking” tags. It’s like filing one document in three different file folders at once. For those of you who like to surf the net from your phone, the service will generally work just the same from that device.

Not every article has a del.icio.us icon at the end of it. Moreover, having to type in your username and password every time could be a hassle. So del.icio.us allows you to install its toolbar option, in which case there will be an “add to del.icio.us” button added to your browser toolbar (for either Mac or PC), making it even easier to add any website or article to your online collection. Though del.icio.us, for security purposes, will ask you every two weeks or so to verify your username and password, with this application installed you’ll have to do this much less often. The toolbar, like the del.icio.us service, is entirely free (at least at this time).

So wherever you go, whether your hard drive crashes, you get a new computer, or lose your laptop, your reference sources are still out on the net, safe and secure. In fact, you can even share them with others if you’d like. Much like a social network, other del.icio.us users can, depending on how you set your preferences, access your tags as well. A professor could offer his or her students, assuming they also have a del.icio.us account, access to all of the articles they’ve tagged as “musicmarketingclass” items, as an example. They could even be “fed” the professor’s tagged links through RSS. For instance, one of my students utilizes that option so that whenever I tag an article the URL and tag will be sent to them as well. Particluar tags can be set to not feed or even be accessible to others, so no one should feel that their life is an open book when using this technology.
By the way, if you’re interested in accessing, following, or receiving a feed of my tagged articles, most all of them relating to the music business, I’m “stormwriting” out in del.icio.us space.

There are many, many, options when managing your account and your music news, or any news for that matter, with the del.icio.us service. One downside, though, is that there’s no guarantee that tagged links will always stay active. Some news providers de-activate or archive their online articles at some point. And since del.icio.us is simply pointing to a URL, it can’t maintain the availability of the content. So in some cases trying to access the article months or years later may prove fruitless.

However, there are other services and/or programs, like Evernote (www.evernote.com), that allow you to cut-and-paste the text of an article, grab photos, etc. and store them for future reference without the hassle of their not being available later. Many of these programs are not free of charge, however.
Plenty of other automated music business news sources exist in cyberspace, and there are certainly other means of gathering and managing web information.

What I’ve mentioned here are merely some low-cost or free options for creating order out of the chaos of music business news these days. Use of them would be especially helpful if you need the ability to retrieve the information quickly and easily for efficient research or instruction. You may have some suggestions as to some other tools you are finding useful, or possibly some questions. If so, feel free to e-mail me at storm.gloor@cudenver.edu.