Giant Step Jukebox / Giles Peterson Worldwide

Giant Step has been one of my favorite record
labels for some time. It was the first stateside
label with major label connections to spotlight
quality soul, jazz, house, funk, Latin, African and
other styles of music--that no one would touch in
the early days. Since then they helped launch
the major-label careers of Macy Gray, Jill Scott,
Nora Jones and many others.

Now they have a feature called Giant Step Jukebox
which is a simple Flash-based player with tons of
archived content. It really drew my attention
because it features (exclusively) the only
US-based place to listen to Giles Peterson's
Worldwide radio program. Originally broadcast on
London's Radio 1, Worldwide is an essential show
to check if you want to hear quality music first.

Sure you can listen from the BBC

website, but sometimes I
have trouble with the connection at my
office so I rarely get to listen to the entire
program. Now with Giant Step's service I can
listen to it (and several others) whenever I
want.Plus a lot of the music being played can be
purchased directly from Giant Step's store.

check it out HERE

I've been wondering how many music services would
pop up that allow you to sell digital music and
it seems that now is the time.

I think one of the shortcomings of digital music
stores is that they have not set up a system that
enables the regular, super-independent artist to
sell his or her self-produced music. Indy, digital,
electronic-music stores such as Beatport and
Traxsource require that you have an entire
catalog of music (or that you are "signed")
before they will consider you. That policy
eliminates many artists trying to make it on
their own. I'm sure they will have those services
soon but in the meantime companies such as
Musicane are getting a jumpstart on cornering the
market.

I think I'll try out this service since it seems
decent. You can use the free "Lite" program with
ads, limited uploads and a 40% cut taken by
Musicane for any music you sell. If you
subscribe, you can offer a lot more but they
still take 30 percent
30 percent isn't a lot but it remains to be
seen whether or not using this service will
actually help you. I think it's good for the
musician who doesn't know much about the digital
world and who doesn't want to fiddle with too
much technology instead of creating. But for
someone who knows how to set-up their own site
for sales, and who knows how to market it, they might
be better off on their own.

But then again it might be better to have your
digital music in as many places as possible, to
increase your chances of making some money from
your hard work.

check out Musicane HERE