blip.fm adds YouTube videos, indie musicians benefit BIG TIME

Once in a while at night while super multitasking (read: not being all that productive because I’m trying to do too much at once), I’m known to blip. For the uninitiated, blip.fm is known as “the Twitter of music,” in that you can play (or “blip”) songs while attaching a little message to them, and you can follow (they say “subscribe”) to other users (“Blip.fm DJs”) much like on Twitter.

A blip on blip.fm:

And to pile on top of all that, you can even integrate it to your Twitter account so that what you blip is tweeted and not just seen by your BlipDJ friends, but by your Twitter followers as well.

A blip on Twitter:

Talk about integration — earlier I decided to blip because I had a song in my head, and suddenly the some of search results had these little TV icons next to them. I didn’t notice at first but HOLY COW is this cool.

This is why it’s important to tag your content.

I have a lot of musician friends, and I don’t upload a lot of stuff to my YouTube channel but when I do, I make sure they’re able to be found with appropriate tags. Case in point, a band that is like family to me, 60 Second Crush:

Three of the first five videos that came up in the search results for them are mine, and all of the results are their band.

So what does this all mean?

This means serious, never-before-reaching exposure for independent musicians like my buddies.

In fact, I found myself blipping quite a few of my friends’ songs that weren’t previously on blip.fm but were on YouTube (including some of my own videos), and are now on both. Blip.fm’s audience is older and spans much farther across the globe than MySpace’s, which had been indie artists’ saving grace until a year or two ago, and I hope I don’t need to remind anyone that MySpace is now in serious danger of dying.

Not to mention that the audience likely has more money (I don’t have figures for this and it’s late so don’t expect me to look them up right now), which means increased sales. Which brings me to another feature I noticed — now if you blip an artist and they’re also on iTunes, there will be a little ad that tells you which album the song is from and a link to buy it from the iTunes store.

(OK, so I know that Natalie Merchant isn’t the best example for a screen shot here but it’s 3:30 a.m. and I’m working with I already had. Trust me — if you’re a smart indie musician with all your ducks in a row and are found on YouTube and/or blip.fm and hooked up on iTunes, it’ll work.)

The only bad thing I noticed, which may have been my own fault, was that the YouTube integration seemed to freeze up my Firefox a few times, which was a real pain in the butt because this is the third time I’ve had to write this paragraph & my auto-save wasn’t auto-saving fast enough. Somebody else on Twitter mentioned that she had trouble with her browser in this, too, but it was pointed out to me that it could be a noscript or script blocking extention I’ve got installed. I’m going to have to check that out but I’m sure it can be resolved easily enough.

Keep in mind that these new features aren’t just great for artists, either. Now that there’s video involved, it’s great exposure for professional music videographers, as well as those who just like to shoot live music for fun.

In case you can’t tell, I’m pretty passionate about supporting local and independent musicians (and always have been). The internet has really leveled the playing field, if not given them an advantage over the “big dogs,” and if social media strategies are executed properly, the possibilities are endless. This new cross-platform integration is pretty exciting, and I can’t wait to see what happens.

I know I’ve got some indie musicians and their fans reading this, what do you think? Lots of potential or just lots of hype? Blippers, has your browser been crashing, too?

(FYI, some more technical information about the changes and how they came about can be found at gigaom.com.)