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Busy entrepreneurs need to stay on top of all the latest startup information, but who has the time? Here's a look at what went on around blogosphere and in the news last week, in case you missed it. - Buzzsonic

Do you want to learn how to use Web 2.0 Social Media to become a millionaire overnight? How would you like to increase your Twitter followers by eleventy-billion in 3.68 seconds? Do you want to use Twitter to make a gazillion dollars through affiliate marketing and multi-level marketing schemes? Do you use the term "Twitter Coach" to describe yourself? - Buzzsonic

We know that actors and athletes have taken to Twitter to raise their social media profile, connect with fans, and promote their various projects. Another trend we’re noticing is that the creative types behind the big name blockbusters, indie flicks, and TV hits, have also begun to find a following on TwitterTwitterTwitter. - Buzzsonic

Songwriters get royalties but not recording artists. Bills now being considered should pay performers fairly, protect against abuses by powerful industry players and promote the availability of music. - Buzzsonic

Although most of the entertainment industry has embraced the Internet, the music category has struggled to adapt its current business model to take advantage of the Net. Every major entertainment medium from movies to games to books has been impacted significantly by the rise of the Internet. Most have settled into the digital realm quite well, making adjustments not only to the ways they advertise and promote, but also to their distribution, market research and sales. It’s clear that the entertainment industry sees a bright future for itself among the ones and zeros, except in one category – music. - Buzzsonic

UK-based ad-funded music service We7 is launching officially today, emerging from its beta period with a high-profile Big Listen marketing campaign. Although the company still offers ad-funded downloads, its emphasis has shifted towards streaming, with deals with all four major labels and various independents, and a catalogue expected to be nudging four million tracks by the end of this year. - Buzzsonic

The expression of community has changed considerably since the emergence of social media technologies, but its basic foundation — the notion of individuals exchanging information, ideas, and opinions — remains firmly intact. Today, one of the most widely-used tools in developing these types of exchanges online is WordPress (WordPress), the popular blogging and publishing platform. Part of its appeal is the ease with which users can build advanced functionality into their sites with plugins. If you’re interested in building a community around your site, there are plenty of third-party add-ons that can help create one. - Buzzsonic

Whether you’re a freelance PR, a company PR, a band, a label or a manager, you follow the same route to getting the music you care about listened to by tastemakers. As I mentioned in the introduction to this piece, you have to get the record to the top of a mountain of other records for it to have a hope in hell of reaching the CD tray. - Buzzsonic

If you love Twitter, you'll love TweetBeep! Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates! You can even keep track of who's tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like bit.ly or tinyurl.com). Now, how cool is that?! - Buzzsonic

I was trying to search my iTunes library for all the music I owned on the Merge Records label when it hit me: Record-label data isn't listed in iTunes, which means I was up the creek. There was no easy way I could look at a song or album and know who put it out. I found this depressing. For any given song in my iTunes library, I could tell you the bit rate, the release date, the number of times I played it and the last time I skipped over it, but not the label that put it out. It's practically criminal. - Buzzsonic

More Twitter apps, mashups and plugins than you can shake your greasy stick at! If you have twitter addiction (or a twittion) then this site is for you, Twitdom – The Twitter Application Database. - Buzzsonic

The Sociable Plugin is something we at BlogPlay.com offer to bloggers. With this easy-to-install plugin, your readers will be able to share your posts with the rest of the world. Whether they are on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, BlinkList, or any other social network/sharing site, the Sociable Plugin will allow your blog to be connected to the social media stream, making your content known to the world. - Buzzsonic

We provide cost-effective, high quality services to the music and film industry, the public and many other UK market sectors. These include CD Duplication, DVD Duplication, CD Replication, DVD Replication, Audio Mastering, Graphic Design, Tape to Disc Conversion, Artwork Editing, Custom-Printed CD-R and much more. - Buzzsonic

There are a number of plugins available for twitter today, but out of them honestly only a few makes sense. Here’s a list of the best twitter plugins for wordpress. - Buzzsonic

Principle 1: Ten of the best movies in the world that you can only watch 10 minutes of. OR Principle 2: One really good movie that you can watch from start to finish. The answer to the above example is most likely the latter. When it comes to work and most things in life, I have noticed that many people apply Principle 1. They attempt to do so many things at the same time, and the result is a poor effort spread amongst all of these things. Simply put, they are “a jack of all trades but a master of none.” - Buzzsonic

I am a broken robot and don't know why. Yet what most profoundly perplexes me is whether or not I,Robot-toy myself, am the one that's broken or if it’s the system itself that's actually broken. If the correct connotation is that the system is broken, how to we determine if it was broken before I came into the world or if, due to the behaviors that I developed in my digital youth and carried into adulthood, I'm a part of the generation responsible for breaking it? - Buzzsonic

That’s Seth Godin on permission marketing. Read it and weep. Because it tells you all those nineties marketing tricks are history. You’ve got to earn your audience. By gaining their trust, by not abusing them, by giving them something they’re interested in. The reason I e-mail this post most is because every single day I receive multiple unsolicited e-mails. Worse, it’s oftentimes people putting me on their mailing lists. Forcing me to hit "unsubscribe" to get off. Even worse, most lists don’t include an unsubscribe button. You e-mail the perpetrator again and again, but you still get the e-mail. - Buzzsonic

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention. - Buzzsonic

Did you know Twitter only lets you see your most recent 3,200 tweets? Take control of your Twitter account and make it permanent. Get started as soon as you can so you don't lose any tweets! - Buzzsonic

March 31 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. teenagers, a bellwether customer for the record industry, bought 19 percent less music last year and instead turned to free alternatives like Pandora.com and MySpace.com, according to NPD Group Inc. Consumers ages 13 to 17 spent 13 percent less on music downloads last year, while compact disc purchases tumbled 26 percent, according to a survey by the Port Washington, New York- based researcher. The decline coincided with a 24 percent drop in overall entertainment spending by teens, NPD said. - Buzzsonic

Nick Fitzsimons points us to a blog post by journalist/musician Rhodri Marsden complaining about everyone who keeps telling the music industry it needs to "find a new business model." According to Marsden, the people who say this do so without ever suggesting what that alternative business model might be. That is totally wrong, of course. It may be true of some, but plenty of us have spent years and years not just the explaining how such new business models work, but showing example after example after example after example of it working in practice. So, I'm sorry, but I find it rather silly to claim that such business models don't exist or that those of us who "smugly" claim the industry needs to find a new business model never suggest any. - Buzzsonic

Can you say stuck in the past? According to the news, the new U2 album has been downloaded illegally over 400,000 times since it was released. While this isn’t a number to sneeze at, it reminds me of the mulletheads that put hood scoops and air blowers over their carbureted engines in the early 1980s. When the rest of the world switched over to fuel injection, the mullet-powered Camaro became a thing of the past. - Buzzsonic

The island, a rainy outpost in the Irish Sea, is promoting an offbeat remedy for digital piracy, which the music labels blame for billions of dollars in lost sales. Instead of fighting file-sharing, the local government wants to embrace it — and it is trying to enlist a skeptical music industry’s help. Under a proposal announced this month, the 80,000 people who live on the Isle of Man would be able to download unlimited amounts of music — perhaps even from notorious peer-to-peer pirate sites. To make this possible, broadband subscribers would pay a nominal fee of as little as £1, or $1.38, a month to their Internet service providers. - Buzzsonic

Veteran singer-songwriter Jill Sobule got fed up with business as usual three years ago, and on a new song she pinpoints the moment. “I'm here at a meeting,” she sings in a voice perched between exasperation and resignation. “Trying to impress someone at a dying record company.” She describes the jaded talent scout, the air of condescension thick in the room, the sense of creeping frustration. Then comes the I’m-not-gonna-take-it-anymore payoff line: “I got nothing to prove!” Sobule did more than just write a song about her dissatisfaction, however. She did something about it. - Buzzsonic

We've written a few times about Jill Sobule's business model experiment last year, where she was able to get fans to pre-finance her album, by offering tiered levels of support that all provided something extra (usually something scarce) that created a real reason to buy. Back at MidemNet, Sobule talked about the success of the experiment, but now, as that album is getting close to actually being released - Buzzsonic

t’s been a while since someone in the music business impressed me. Finally, somebody has impressed me so much that it inspired me to launch my long-overdue company website and marketing blog. This is the story of how one woman and 700,000 (and climbing) followers on Twitter are creating the new music business model. During the past ten years we’ve seen dramatic shifts in the music business. - Buzzsonic

Marketers love Facebook. With 350 million+ users, a self-promoting and natural way to have people promote your product, and a very active audience full of close friends and family, what’s not to like? If you had any doubt, just go on over to their stats page and see for yourself why it is something you want as part of your marketing strategy. - Buzzsonic

Twitter is buzzing and here is a collection of top 10 twitter tools, plugins, widgets and scripts to integrate with your wordpress blog. These Twitter tools are easy to implement and you can get them running in minutes in your wordpress blogs. - Buzzsonic

Thanks to St. John’s University and the progressive vision of Associate AD, Mark Fratto, your Twitter feed can now be considered a legitimate media outlet for covering college basketball, or any sport for that matter. This is only the beginning. - Buzzsonic

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has grown to create what most people would call a social media revolution. By the very nature of the short messages it hosts, Twitter is a wonderful marketing and promotion tool that no serious blogger can ignore. In this article, we have compiled 15 most useful Twitter plug-ins, hacks and tips for WordPress to help you get the most out of Twitter in your WordPress blog. - Buzzsonic