Frustration

The view for this post is from behind a slightly different keyboard, the computer. As an independent musician/artist, the job of promotion falls to myself. This is pretty much a one man operation. So over the weekend, I spent many frustrating hours trying to put up an internet radio station. In the long run this will be an awesome way to get piano music in front of a large listening audience. One such station has 20,000 listeners daily and was just picked up by iTunes and is poised to be picked up by either XM or Sirius.

I know I can be successful in this area, there's just a huge learning curve involved. The first thing that happened was a dumb mistake on my part. To post music to the internet radio site, it has to be in the MP3 format, not a WAV file like CD's are. Problem is there are about 20 different ways to convert to an MP3 file. The way I've always used was not compatible with Live365.com. To complicate the problem, I didn't discover this until I had upload 20 songs and 5 announcement spots. And it takes about 15 minutes per song to upload. So I had to dump what I had already done and start over.

Once I got everything uploaded, I found out that there were playlist rules about how many times an individual artist could be played. I'm now in the process of navigating around this. It's actually on the air, but not listed in the directory. It won't be listed until I satisfy all the requirements. That's alright. I know in the long run it will be a great station.

Well, back to the keyboard. Computer, that is.