Streamline your marketing and promotion with niche streaming web sites. The amazing onlinetv rage is right here and growing. Internet marketing attention is focused on broadband streaming media and nothing could be better for your music than a slice of that attention. This is a marriage made in heaven streaming media and music video.

With the free, built into Microsoft, Movie Maker most everyone can take their audio file and with a little creativity make it into a compelling video. Music videos are no longer a barrier for bands to take advantage of the onlinetv revolution. Just pop some cool pictures or some video shorts from your mini-cam, lay in your audio tracks and viola! You have made a simple music video to get that song out. A video with title, credits, lyrics and a message where viewers can buy it will more than suffice as a promotional tool. Don’t forget “Where is the next gig?”

Who has not heard of YouTube or Google video? These amazing amalgams of everything under the sun stand as monolithic compendiums. There must be more than 100 million videos on these sites containing an inexhaustible variety of material covering every topic under the sun. This makes them the world’s largest central repository for video. Like a dictionary containing every word it has the drawback it cannot be read even if using an index to find something. If you are not the most popular or the featured few darlings your message never sees the light of day, except by you. Google’s top 100 videos are populated with soft porn girlies and that is hard to compete with.

Never let it be said that having your music video on YouTube or Google should not be done. Au contrairy, that is the first thing you would do followed by posting that video to your MySpace account. What did you say? You don’t have a MySpace account? Then go get an account now! The accounts are free, easy and worth the effort. Move! Get back here when you are done baking that cake.

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Everyone loves music videos. They’re a highly enjoyable form of entertainment. If you like music, its almost a given that you will like music videos. My dad is 65 and he quite likes Eminem’s music videos, he even likes some of Green Day’s music videos. He has a taste for off the wall, my dad. He also has an eye for the ladies, not the half naked ones in the R&B videos or most of the rap videos but he likes Pink, thinks that she is pretty because she has character (and a hot body that she is not afraid of showing off), he digs her music too. He likes Annie Lennox for the same reason, she doesn’t show off her body but she has character and it comes out in her music and music videos. He’s also a bit eclectic is my dad.

Everybody has his or her own unique taste in music. Some people have very specific tastes and some people’s tastes are very broad, they’re the lucky ones because they can listen to a wide variety of music and not get irritated by what they hear very quickly. Very often people have a secret taste in music that they are a little ashamed of. This is because it’s often something that they would ordinarily mock but suddenly they find that they like some of a particular artist’s music and they feel the need to buy the new cd. They feel dreadful doing it and the self-chastisement and self-flagellation that they go through is enormous but don’t think that they don’t get enormous joy out of the cd also. They just don’t tell people about it. Only mutual sharing of embarrassing music will allow the secret to be told and only if the other person’s music is deemed to be more embarrassing than theirs. Key point, panpipes always wins in the embarrassing stakes, nothing beats panpipes, nothing, not even Spice Girls (but its close).

The fact that we can feel such acute embarrassment by something as silly as the music we listen to just goes to show what a powerful role music plays in our lives. We identify ourselves by the type of music that we listen to. Take a look at the Goth subculture; they are heavily influenced by the music that they listen to. The clubs that they go to only play Goth music, everyone dresses in a way that identifies them as Goth. The ravers are the same, they listen to rave music, dress a particular way, talk a particular way and have identified themselves as part of a particular subculture. They take pride in their identity. There are subcultures for every kind of music, even teenybopper pop as little girls identify with whoever the current icon is (no longer Britney Spear, thank goodness). There is very little crossover between subcultures. They tend to stick very much to themselves and to judge other music subcultures as inferior in every way possible.

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Caribbean Music is quickly gaining popularity all over the world due to its unique fusion of indigenous, African and European music. There are three main genres that make up the Caribbean music – Calypso, Reggae and Cuban Jazz. Each style uses different instruments that give it its distinctive sound and qualities.

Calypso was basically started in Trinidad in the 1900s by the local African people. These people were not allowed to talk, only sing, when they worked on the plantations. Since the lyrics carried an under-current of protest, the voice was considered an instrument, a strong and important instrument. The other instruments used were skin drums, bamboo sticks, rattles, etc. These instruments were rough and coarse because the musicians had to use materials that were easily available to them. Today, however, modern instruments have been incorporated but its integrity has been maintained.

Reggae on the other hand was born in Jamaica in the 1960s. The uniqueness of reggae music is due to ‘skank’ which is a syncopated rhythmic style wherein the number 2 and number 4 beats of the bar and made more pronounced. The rhythm guitar is used to play the reggae skank. Other than this guitar, the rich bass guitar is also quite predominantly used and the drum beats were given by any contemporary drum sets that were available. For an organ-like sound, reggae incorporates the use of pianos and synthesizers quite frequently.

The Cuban Jazz was a product of both American and Cuban musicians who skillfully meshed American jazz with Cuban and Creole styles. This style uses mostly brass instruments like trumpets, trombones and tubas as well as woodwind instruments like the saxophone and the flute. String instruments also help increase the appeal of this type of music and the piano has now become practically synonymous with Cuban jazz. Percussion instruments used in this type of music include bongo drums, conga drums, rattles and shakers.

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