Banned Forever from the Ultimate Guitar Forum! Forever! OOOooo!

So I've been spreading the word about the pretty good gig podcast, interviews and conversations with musical people. The two most recent podcasts feature Tim Berens and Doug Jones - two really great guitarists with plenty of information to share with other guitarists. So I decided to post on the Ultimate Guitar Forum. The rules said no URLs so I did not put any in the post. I got the following email:

Hello Bill Kahler,

We're sorry to inform you that your account has been banned forever by Carmel. In the current case, you've significantly broke Ultimate-Guitar.Com website rules. In fact, here is the reason you've been banned for: advertising account.

Additionally, you can not post comments and rate songs on Ultimate-Guitar'com members profiles during the period of you ban.

Sincerely,
UG Team

Wow, strong eh? Seems to me the very reason for having a forum is to spread information and help members connect to resources like hmmm. . . podcasts that have educational info etc. I was not exactly advertising - the podcast is free. I am trying to connect with musicians and offer and educational, informative and entertaining musical podcast! I guess sending messages out like the one I received makes the Ultimate Guitar Forum moderators feel special and elite! Banned forever! How will I ever get any sleep now?

Then I decide to write an email back:

Wow you guys are strung pretty tight! Sorry for trespassing on your elitist organization. I merely wanted to let folks know of a very interesting, entertaining and professionally done podcast that has much educational info and many of the episodes are guitar related with world class musicians! It's free. I was not trying to use your precious forums for my own personal gain, I only (wrongly) thought that your forum might have in its mission statement something about expanding guitar knowledge and connections with other musicians.

Bill Kahler

and got this reply: ( I love the "people like you" phrase.)

Dear Bill,

Our website runs on advertisers that pay in order to get their websites on our pages.

If people like you register to gain FREE advertisements, for gain or no gain, we will lose our paid advertisements that keep the website running.

Carmel

Forum Administrator

Ultimate-Guitar.com

response to previous post

Tess from Sonicbids left this comment and for some reason it never showed up so I pasted this from the email:

Tess has left a new comment on your post "Sonicbids, Taxi - worth the money? Scams?":

Hi Bill, Tess here - I'm the Community Manager at Sonicbids. Wanted to post a note here for you and address a couple of your concerns.

Your comments on the venues/submission fees are ones we’ve heard before – so we’ve taken a lot of the feedback we’ve gotten and we are actually getting rid of submission fees for most of the venues and more accessible promoters you mention. The $2-10 fees you see for gigs like that were instituted as filters originally to prevent spam, but now we're shifting gears and turning them to No Cost listings and are currently in the works of developing the right kind of filters for these. As we do this, we already have over 150 No Cost Listings on Sonicbids. You can read some comments from Panos (our CEO/founder) on his blog about this initiative: http://panosbrew.sonicbids.com/no-cost-gig-listings/

Also, sorry if you felt blindsided by your recent membership charge. Our membership plans are just like a gym membership where you set it up and it auto-renews you when your period is up. If you want, I can take care of that for you. Just send me an email. (tess at sonicbids dot com)

Thanks – hope this helps!
Tess

Nice note. Still, you pay a membership, submit to a gig that only pays in tips, and you could just call them on the phone. For that matter why even go through the trouble of a free gig unless you think you can sell some product and make some tips. And, you can call some of those places on the phone yourself. It just doesn't seem like the kind of gig that most folks need help getting.

I find it interesting the way she compares the auto renewal to a gym membership. Health clubs are notorious for their automatic renewal of fees and make it very difficult to cancel at times. Their main interest is signing new members, just like Taxi and Sonicbids.

Additionally Sonicbids claims to have Nashville connections but in reality music submitted to Nashville publishers is never done in person. It goes into a drop box and then into the trash. Same thing for Taxi. Nashville publishers really have no interest in checking out outside submissions. They have writers on staff that they pay to write songs, usually on a draw. The only way they get this money back is if they get cuts on songs those writers.

I'm not saying either service is a scam or anything of the sort but I have plenty of musician friends with simlar stories and who eventually dropped memberships.

Sonicbids, Taxi - worth the money? Scams?

A couple things bother me about Sonicbids.The membership renewal without prior notification is the main reason I dropped them. I realize there is the "fine print on the contract" and so on but the first notice I had of renewal was on my credit card statement and I did not appreciate feeling like the fee was "sneaked past me."

Secondly, many of the venues you have to pay to submit to are a total waste of time. I have played many of the places listed and it was easy to book dates there with a phone call. Paying to submit to a place that does not pay anything makes no sense to me. Who makes money on these listings? The venue and Sonic Bids.

Might be too strong to call it a scam. . . might not. It is obvious that there is a bigger advantage to Sonicbids and many of the venues than there is for a musician or performer.

In some ways this is similar to Taxi, whose main goal is to sign up members, not to do the thing they sell. If you talk to publishers in Nashville about Taxi, they will tell you they have writers on staff and thousands of the worlds best writers at their fingertips. Why would they spend time going through Taxi submissions?

one music career strategy for the just out of college set

I heard an idea once from Alan Rowoth that I thought was brilliant was advice to a young singer/songwriter which could apply to a band. "Young" being the key adjective.

After college or so, pick a major metro area to live in that has a huge music scene within a one day drive. You could live in the Philly area and play New York, Boston etc. Live there for 2 or3 years until you know the town and gigs inside out and build a large email list and then move to another area like maybe Chicago, going back to play favorite Philly, Boston, N.Y. venues ocasionally. Next move again, maybe to San Francisco. Repeat.

By the time everybody is in their late 20's or early 30's the band, or duo or solo act will have enough places to play to make a living with three geographic locations as far as touring.

Lots of work but very doable if you have a dedicated band. (The idea probably works best for duos and solos obviously.)

Podcast tip for itunes

All week I struggled with getting my podcast up on itunes - prettygoodgig.com. I set up hosting through godaddy.com, installed wordpress, and used feedburner to establish the RSS feed. It looks like feedburner would have all you need but I could not get my image to show up in itunes! No artwork at all. I also was missing the author tag and some other stuff.

While searching around I saw dozens of posts that said "can't get my image to appear in itunes using feedburner, wordpress etc."

During my search I came across powerpress which was rated very highly, so I installed it and struggled with that for days. Nothin'! Nada!

While looking at the site for the podcast called audionowcast, one I really am a fan of, for the information and humor about all things audio, I discovered they used podpress which was not as highly rated but should be at the top in my opinion because everything came together after installing that plug in. I did end up using a separate player for the mp3s of the podcast, and I also installed my itunes image in the wordpress "Resources" folder. If I had this step by step along with the other info I found about starting a podcast such as the Apple podcast help, it would have saved me 20+ hours of fiddling.

Lastly, to get an image to show up in album art on the itunes page, you embed the jpg in the mp3 file. With the file loaded into the itunes program, click on get info for that file, choose album artwork, drag the image to that location. The artwork shows up in the little box on the bottom left of the itunes view. After that upload this new mp3 to your podcast site. I had already done 4 episodes, so I had to reload the mp3 files and change the name of each one too.

Still working on trying to get the image to show up in search results!

This week was like a college course! Hope this helps!

pretty good gig podcast

Announcing my brand new podcast - pretty good gig. Check it out at prettygoodgig.com. The show features interviews and conversations with musical people - a behind the scenes look at gigging, songwriting, recording and working in all kinds of situations as a musician. Should be searchable on itunes very soon, but you can still subscribe to it through itunes. Instructions are on the prettygoodgig.com site.

First interview is with James Casto with a hilarious look at playing the Conyers Georgia Fall Festival and the prisoner skit. Show #2 features Justin Kahler talking about attending SAE audio recording school and working in a studio. Then show #3 features Charles Williams of the Bonaventure Quartet and his work with Bernadette Seacrest. Lots of stuff about Django and gypsy jazz.

So I had a letter published in Tape Op about my Native Instruments gripe

But they edited the letter and here is what was left out:

I totally agreed with what Larry Crane replied to the part of the letter that was published but
I had just spent the money for the upgrade on the software a short time before they ended the product. I'm sure they knew they were selling an upgrade to a product that was going away. Might as well have burned some 20's in my front yard! I just think it's reasonable for a company to give you a heads up on when they are discontinuing something, since you have to register etc. and they have contact info.

Additionally, the $60 product they mentioned is pretty cool, but why didn't N.I. tell me about it? Seems like the company is a little screwy when it comes to customer service.

Then on the other hand, I bought some way out of date IK Multimedia software for 50 bucks, and they gave me a download link for the latest version of the 400 buck mastering software! Which company do you think I am going to buy from?

Great customer service from IK Multimedia! Just the opposite of Native Instruments

So I picked up a copy of T-Racks Mastering software. Bought it online and the description seemed to suggest it would work with my current Mac OS. When the box showed up, I had my doubts. (I am using Mac OS 10.5.6 and the box actually said it would work with OS 9!)

I called Musician's Friend where I had purchsed the software and asked them if it was compatible and they said I would have to ask the tech department. I asked if they could transfer my call. No, I would have to email them because they can't take calls! (?)

So I emailed them and received a message that someone would get back to me within one business day. (That was a week ago and I still haven't heard back.)

I really wanted to try the software so I emailed IK Multimedia. Received a reply in about half an hour! They told me I probably had version 2 and when I registered the serial number they would send me a download link that would work with my system.

When I was registering the number, it looked like I actually had version 1 and I thought, oh no, I had just wasted my money on an outdated version. I really expected to find out I would have to buy a new version or at the least, purchase an upgrade.

Immediately I was sent a link for downloading the version 3 of the software, which installed easily with no problems, and more importantly, sounds fantastic!

Way to go IK Multimedia. You just won another faithful supporter. Native Instruments should take a lesson from you!

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/