Like Yozik, you believe the Internet can give the opportunity to reach a larger audience abroad and make your music cross borders. However, on your Myspace and Facebook pages, you eventually often meet the same earlier fans from your town and area… and you feel anonymous in the internet music profusion.

To start reaching an audience and sell your music, we tested a lot of internet services, mostly american ones. Some of them turned out valuable, like in this experience of salsa band Mas Bajo we are going to explain in a few posts : this eventually brought them a featuring in Putumayo’s compilation “Latin Party”.

At last, your music quality and popularity will count first, but we have to make it listened once to find and retain an audience. That’s what we experienced with a few web-services, starting with the most efficient of them :

Jango is a quite old american webradio, which income comes from  visual adverts (no audio adverts). Don’t be fooled by its old fashion design and character encoding problems you seldom find, it now gathers millions of listeners that are mostly american, but also from all continents.

From listener’s point of view, Jango starts asking for a famous artist’s name, from which it composes a thematic radio. After creating an account, it gives the opportunity to record this radio and to customize it with other artists’ names. Comparing to other european radios (or Pandora – when it was possible to catch it outside the US -), Jango lets the listener pass a song to the next one, which is a useful function as you are not expected to like all the songs you are given by Jango.

The strenghts of Jango go further with social interaction capabilities : import one’s contact list, recommand one’s own radio to friends, track their listening, share favorites on social networks…

Customized radios by Jango are often consistent with artists you picked up, made of the most popular songs from the repertoire of each musical style. They seldom push incongruities, due to any recommendation system based on artist’s name : evolutions of style, varied repertoire, crossovers…

After a few listenings, Jango pushes in its playlists developing artists, with a “I like/I don’t like” style interactivity, and gives the ability to leave a message along with an email to artists you like. Now that’s becoming interesting for our goal.

Those picked up emerging artists signed into the “Artists and Labels” interface on top left of the radio.

In this interface, Jango lets you targeting your music to famous artists that your music sounds like. A few names are sufficient to start, as Jango tells you after the first listenings who the listeners like best, so that you can target your music more precisely. Comments from the fans are always interesting, and you can send them internal messages they will read into their Jango account. Some of them will suscribe to your newsletter (downloadable lists), but they are fewer (around 1 over 400 listeners). However, they are your real fans abroad and you can start with them to settle in the countries you want to play in.

Nothing being free, this costs 4 $ cents by listening, but if you pay for a few hundred of listenings, you will soon find it valuable or not to find first contacts abroad, and figure out if your music can have an impact in foreign countries, and finally decide to go on or not…

Jango also lets you target your listeners from specific countries, this is very useful. Ultimately, the quality of feedbacks, along with precise reporting and direct contacts provided by Jango seems to us much more valuable than buying links on Facebook or Google. Be careful though to upload your music in 128kbps since not all Jango listeners have an ADSL internet connection.

Eventually, Jango lacks a mutli-artist access, since it’s now necessary to create different accounts for different artists.

If you get good listeners feedbacks, your songs will enter then “free” Jango airplay, and will be able to follow their path in this social network. For Mas Bajo, this turned into DJ’s airplay from Miami, and eventually a featuring of their song “Rico Montuno” in famous New York World Music Label Putumayo’s “Latin Party” compilation.

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