HOW OUR SITE PROMOTES INDEPENDENT ARTISTS AND HELPS MUSIC FANS

MUSIC SEEKERS - NovemberStar.com offers you a convenient way to find good Independent music. We encourage Indie artists, studios, promotors, fans, and others to enter new artists in our Artist Search Engine. From that database, you can then search for new music, based on artist name or genre. We also scour through the music in our database and other sources on the Internet to find the true gems for you - the best of the best of new Indie music - featuring those artists on our site. We research what other true fans are enjoying, saving you a great deal of time in finding music with which to load your mp3 players and build your hardrive and disc collection. We strive to list only music that is available in mp3 format and free of DRM restraints. Music that you can play on any device and burn to disc to take with you on the road. Our download section offers FREE promotional mp3 downloads from many great new artists.

INDIE ARTISTS - Our site offers another great opportunity for you to get noticed and rise above the crowd. Plus, we offer you information and links to help you promote your music on other Indie Music Sites. You start by entering yourself in our Artist Search Engine. Then, you can utilize the other links on our site to make sure that you have your music available for sale in all the important indie sites. In the meantime, we will be searching our database for those artists we feel have exceptional talent and potential and featuring them on our site. There is no charge for entry into our Search Engine and no charge if we select you as a featured artist. We strive to maintain objectivity, featuring only music that our music seeking audience will find worthwhile.

FEE BASED PROMOTIONAL SERVICES - Not all talented artists have the time, knowledge, and technical skills necessary for self-promotion, however. We have an excellent starter package for new artists ready to test the waters. While we do not sell mp3s ourselves, we are very familiar with the successful sites that do sell mp3s online. We are also keenly aware of the steps you need to take to protect the intellectual property rights in your recordings while offering them for sale. We know which sites are safe and which to avoid. We can fill out all the forms, execute all the licensing agreements, and upload your music for exposure and download sales to all the right places. We set everything up so that the proceeds of sales go directly to you, less only the reasonable commissions of the sites which facilitate the sales. Once your music is up and ready for download sales, we follow up with an Internet promotion campaign to bring attention to your music. We ensure that all of the arrangements are non-exclusive and terminable at will, so not to handicap or delay you should a promising recording contract come your way. We do all of this and more for a very reasonable fee. We can adjust our package to match your budget. Tell us what your budget is and we will tell you what we can do for that amount. Rarely, but at times, we will find an artist that is so promising that we will offer these services on a contingency basis. If we can be of help to you, contact us and we will go from there.

Also, if you want to advertise your music on our site, we make a limited amount of ad space available for a reasonable fee. Use our contact form to let us know if you are interested in advertising on our site and we will provide more information.

THE NICHE WE SEEK TO FILL - Traditionally, music lovers have discovered new music by listening to the radio, seeing it performed on television, at concerts and in bars. For music to be brought to the public's attention, the artist had to be offered a recording contract with one of the big recording labels. The big recording companies would then entice the radio stations to play the music and sponsor tours for the artist to take the music around the country or the world. Problem was, the recording companies got the lion's share of the profits from the music. The typical recording contract does not provide any profit for the artists (beyond the initial advance) unless hundreds of thousands of recordings are sold. That only happens for the very fortunate few. Janis Ian has said, " . . . [I]n 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money. So I make the bulk of my living from live touring, playing for 80-1500 people a night, doing my own show."

Now, new technologies are available to change the music industry, spreading the word about great new music at lightening speed. It is time for many, many Internet sites to come into the picture, including those already established, NovemberStar.com, and many more to be established or gain popularity in the future. The Internet and digital music is a much more efficient and fair system to connect artist and fan!

Today, good quality recording equipment is affordable to even the smaller independent studios. Once recorded, music can be effectively promoted independently by the artist or small Indie labels through the Interent. The music can also, of course, be efficiently and fairly sold digitally over the Internet.

Instead of embracing this new technology, the tradional big recording labels are fighting it. They have developed DRM (digital rights management) which allows music fans to only lease music, not buy it. Yet, they still want the same profits to which they have become accustom from sale of compact discs. If they have their way, you could only play music on approved devices and only when and how they allowed. With DRM, you cannot transfer your music from device to device. With DRM, you cannot burn your music to CD - or can only do so once under very limited restrictions - without paying for the music again. In addition to DRM, the big recording labels are attempting to lower the artists' share of the profits from the lease of their digital music. In the meantime, the big recording labels have, as of January 2007, filed over 19,000 lawsuits in Federal Court in the United States, in addition to cases filed in other countries; against honest music lovers, who have unwittingly downloaded copyrighted music from unauthorized sources. The have not adapted to the new technologies in music distribution. The big, traditional music industry is clinging to the past rather than embracing the future.

We welcome artists and fans alike to the new Music Industry. Enjoy our site!