Rachel Joel is the latest addition to our Artist Roster

Rachel Joel

Rachel Joel has joined us and brings a wealth of experience in the music industry and is also a voice coach with her own clientele of potential singers. We were able to do some work on her profile quickly and were pleased to see her appear in our local chart as well.

While here in sunny Dartford, positive vibes are emanating every day to offset any political shenanigans and our team are buzzing! Lots of time in the studio to lay down more tracks, out in the park with the sunshine to create music videos and hunched over our pc's trying to write more songs. Every day is bringing something new and now Gino has been talking with some online Radio Stations with a view to making jingles for them.

Three Gateway Artists in the Local Top Ten

Andrea has now uploaded more songs and is still working on more which will be uploaded to Reverbnation shortly. She has also been working with Desmond on some joint projects and their first video has also been uploaded. The battle between them for #1 in their local chart is still in full flow, but nobody's ego is being crushed and they continue to work together. We will be publishing the new Myspace music profiles for Andrea and Desmond within the week and hopefully this will give them another online outlet to reach more people in the music industry.

The Solar-Isis team with John and Richard have greeted the return of Sandra to add an extra dimension to their instrumentals and work continues on new vocals, but their summer tour of the Costa del Sol may yet get in the way of anything being uploaded before then. They have surged upwards to briefly hit local #1 on reverbnation for a day, dropping to #4 and are now climbing again. We hope to see them back at #1 in the next few days. Solar-Isis' Myspace profile has achieved #5 on the daily dance chart in the last week and they continue to hover around the top 30, much as they have done for the past month.

So onwards and upwards. If you wish to collaborate with any of our artists or indeed join us to help your own marketing, then feel free to drop us a line if you are serious about your music. Here's to another exciting quarter as we enter the summer.
 
Gateway Music wish you all the best of luck with your own music aspirations.

Early days on Reverbnation

Reverbnation is a web service for musicians which allows them to upload, stream, download, play and sell their music online. The site runs an active Music Chart for all genres that is updated daily and provides other tools for fan links and a fully optimizable profile page. It is ranked in the top 4,000 of all websites for internet traffic by Alexa.com, which ranks traffic flow throughout the worldwibe web. Reverbnation is probably the best tool for new musicians on the internet.

Going onto a new web service always takes a while to get used to the system, what tools are available and how it all works. Reverbnation was no different, but we were very impressed with the facilities available and didn't lose any time working our artist profiles and creating a label profile for Gateway Music. John created Solar-Isis and gathered a few friends to work on some club/dance music, his favoured style as he had been a DJ in Germany many years before. Reverbnation is a virtual online music community. If you 'fan' a musician, in most cases they will come back and 'fan' you in return. However, there is a limit of 1,000 artists you can add yourself as a fan too, but that wasn't going to concern us immediately.

Desmond Lewis

Within twenty-four hours, Solar-Isis has risen over 18,000 places in the global chart and were in the local top 100 in two days. John had been working with Andrea and Desmond too and within a week they were all in the top 10 of their respective local charts. Everybody was delighted with the results, but John knew that the hard work was about to begin as the majority of the band equity score had to be taken from the previous two weeks plays, visits and other activity. By the beginning of March, Andrea and Desmond were fighting it our for Number 1 in their local Dartford R&B chart. Meanwhile Solar-Isis were closing in on their own top spot after featuring at #1 in the Hot Chart climbing an incredible 18,364 places the day after they launched their online profile. It's all starting to look very promising!

Maybe, just maybe, the guesswork from last month was a lucky shot! Want to know how we did it? All in good time, more later!

Visit us at Reverbnation

Reverbnation - Finding our feet and creating a cunning plan!

You know how it is, you find a new game on the internet and everybody who has been there before you, knows what to do and kicks your butt time after time. Some people will help you a little bit, but they are not going to tell a newbie their trade secrets about how they got where they are in the game until they either get to know you better or you join a guild or a clan. And, even then most people will hold back on what sets them apart from the rest.

Now imagine a new game called, 'How to get to local Number One on Reverbnation'. This time there is no clan or guild to help you. Other artists may be friendly but they are out for themselves too and really want you to buy their music or get noticed by Simon Cowell and not have to bother with all this online marketing ever again, nothing more and nothing less. How wrong they are, but never mind, thats another story for another time.
However, there is a trade to be made here, such as 'become a fan of mine, and I will become a fan of yours' and this is how most people start to find their feet. The downside is, it takes a long time to create contacts and make these reciprocal arrangments stand. Also, if you post this to your profile, it looks like you are begging for help! You're going to get nowhere. People like to associate with success, so you have to boost your own ego and sell yourself hard, nobody else is going to do it for you. With over 830,000 musicians trying to force their way to the top of the pile, or perhaps I should say mountain; little old me begging for a fan here and there is not going anwhere.

Every single artist on Reverbnation has the same tools to climb this virtual mountain, some of them are already mainstream global artists and the majority of these are not sitting pretty at the summit of this online music community. The secret dear reader, is in the numbers!

How many song plays? How many fans? How many profile visits? How many other artists are reccomending you? The list of numbers this site generates is endless. Everything is recorded and counts towards your BES (Band Equity Score) and Reverbnation are not going to tell you how they calculate this, so you have to guess.

I just hope that I have guessed correctly, more next time!

Gateway Music - Where it all started

High Street, Dartford, Kent

We began with jam sessions at Dingo Jacks Guitar Shop in Dartford, Kent; with lots of beer flowing and a group of musicians just letting the notes flow as much as the drink. We made some great music and it got better the more we drank. It was fun for a while, but obviously we couldn't do that all day, every day (apart from upsetting our neighbouring business') it was starting to become too much of a habit. Fun, though it was!

Gino Cinganelli recorded some local bands, made up CD's for them and put them for sale in the guitar shop. He sold a few and became well known for making available the music of local bands. This has to lead somewhere, but 'Where?' was the critical question. What to do? How to do it? And can we make any money doing what we love doing?

Gino found a site called Reverbnation which allowed artists to promote their music, sell their songs and collaborate with other musicians around the world. It was a good first step and provided an outlet for the ambitions of his first recording artists, Andrea Moore and Desmond Lewis who had been playing around with 'Singsnap' and other music sites. However, it was difficult to push them into the upper end of their local chart, let alone sell any songs online. Gino himself reworked some music with the local bands and put together a collection of music from those musicians who were kind enough to give their time to an online project and Dingo Jacks support bands become another profile in their own right, with Gino himself adding his own interpretation of the Doctor Who theme. It was all good practice for what was to come.

Gino eventually discussed his ideas with an old friend of his called, John Sandow and explained how Reverbnation worked. He asked if John's marketing skills could be put to any use on this site as sitting at number 35 or lower in the local charts was really not much of an incentive for Andrea or Desmond. Several ideas were discussed and the conclusion was that the whole concept of online promotion had to be much wider and more comprehensive than just looking at one web service. Facebook and Myspace were the social internet giants and should be included in any form of online activity. From this discussion, Gateway Music Promotions was created in January 2010.