Shannon's report to our musicians

Shannon has taken over artist relations, and in that role wrote this month's "for our musicians" newsletter which we send to our musicians to keep them up to date with our progress. I'm told people read this blog to "peek behind the curtain" and see how something like Magnatune is run, so I've pasted the main body of her newsletter below:

In other news, we've been *very* active on the conference and trade show circuit over the last month, and have made lots of great connections in the process. As a new member of the Recording Academy, John attended the NAMM show in late January where he met up with Jerry Marotta (drummer to Peter Gabriel, Indigo Girls, and Magnatune artist Sun Palace) among others. After attending two different public radio related conferences over the last month, Teresa Malango -- who handles all the licensing for Magnatune -- is making some serious inroads with National Public Radio's music and podcasting staff, attending two invite-only conferences (in New York and Texas) in the past few weeks. Meanwhile, I represented Magnatune at the fabulously cool Media That Matters Film Festival, where I saw a short film that prominently featured a great tune by Beat Under Control. It's #12 here if you'd like to watch it: http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/mtm05/, and I also recommend #14, "World on Fire." Couple of other things before we get to John's recent blog entries... First, who's going to South by Southwest? Teresa and I will be there to spread the word among filmmakers that they can license your music, and I recently learned that the fabulous Drop Trio will be perfoming too. If you'll be there as well, please drop me a line so I can see your show and/or just meet up with you and buy you a drink! Second, we'd like to start making Magnatune business cards available to you. It would have the standard Magnatune info on it, as well as your individual Magnatune URL and any other contact information you'd like to share. We want to make sure that the expense of doing this is justified, so if you'd like a box -- please do mention a little bit about why you think you need them and how they'd be of use to you. If you never play out and aren't very active with promoting your music, it may be best to hold off on the business cards until you ramp up a bit. Third, I'm starting to incorporate more press quotes on the artist pages. (i.e.: http://www.magnatune.com/artists/lieberson) If you have some good ones in your collection, please share! I'll post them to your page. Finally, starting this Saturday, we're going to try including a featured album on the Magnatune home page. We're not sure yet if this will be a permanent addition to the web site; for now, we'd just like to try it to see how it goes. You'll be hearing from me on this next month with feedback.