Mr. Tunes

5 uses of Posterous in music

I have been experimenting with Posterous this month, and I think it’s a great fit for people who are involved with music.

In a nutshell, Posterous is a blogging service that lets you post by email. They try to make it so easy that you don’t even have to sign up to create your first blog, you just have to send an email.

That’s cool and all, but the real power kicks in when you realize you can attach anything that email, and it ends up in the post. Audio, video, random files, you name it and it shows up. Or you can paste in a youtube link and it will embed the video.

If you are interested in knowing what it can do for your music, here are a few uses:

1. Blogging

This one is obvious, but musicians in their nature are impatient, so I think Posterous is a good fit for people involved with music who want to get their feet wet in this area.

The experience is kind of like Twitter, but since you’re not limited to 140 characters and you can post more types of media, I would say you are creating a more “meaningful” archive of your work than if you used a normal microblog. It can also be set up to auto-post to those sites after you’ve done your writing anyways.

2. Podcasting

Posterous says that it makes your feed iTunes-friendly out-of-the-box. Therefore, this would be a great way to take away some of the pain involved in podcasting with other platforms. It also provides you with a streaming flash player when the post goes live to the site.

You don’t even have to worry about file size. If the file is too big to email, you can create the post in the backend of the your blog. But on the whole, if you reach any limits you can talk to the Posterous team and they will up your storage for free. I can see this being one of the features of a premium service in the future though.

3. Collaboration

You can set the blog to be private, or an individual post to be private. This makes for a great area to share music with fellow artists or DJs, and people can provide feedback in the comments. This idea can be expanded further to accomodate something like a record pool too.

4. Events log

One thing I have found is that when i’m at a show I want to post photos and videos to share the experience with others. But when I get home, I don’t want to offload the footage, and i’m kind of lazy with writing reviews.

Taking away a few steps from this process as Posterous does would make for a great place to share your live experiences, especially if you go to many shows in a week. Think about what would happen if a group of people got together to keep track of all the events in a city?

And this goes without saying, if you are playing a lot of shows then the options are endless in this regard.

5. News and gear updates

It is really hard to run a blog where you showcase your favourite news releases for gear. But you can hook Posterous up to your Google Reader, and items can be sent to your Posterous. If you don’t use Google Reader you can put a bookmarklet in your browser for another way to post easily. It will also link back to the original blog that created the item inside the post.

Posterous is really powerful, but some things to keep in mind:

• There aren’t a lot of themes available for it at the time of this writing. I took a look at making a theme this week and it actually isn’t too bad if you understand HTML and CSS, but it will take some time for more to pop up.

• If you go the route of creating an advanced theme, there are a lot of facets that you have to style. For example there are the buttons that appear if you are the owner of a blog and you want to edit or delete a post right from the frontend. Or the site search would have to be styled too. It is a very long list (understandably).

• Email is very prone to spam attacks. Before a post goes live to your blog you have the option to moderate it, but I do have concerns about this because if a spammer got a hold of the email address that you send posts to, it could effectively ruin your blog. I am sure the developers are doing great work to fight this, but think of the effects it could have on a collaborative setup. I would not worry about this until I’ve read reports of this actually happening.

This is a very convenient service to use, but don’t approach it in a way where it will solve all your problems. A cool blogging tool doesn’t suddenly give you something interesting to say, doesn’t produce great music, and doesn’t write event reviews for you. If you are not motivated to contribute great posts, this is not going to fix your problems.

All in all, since email is the most comfortable way for us to write, Posterous has a very promising future. It is so powerful that it doesn’t even need an iPhone app to make posts, since the functionality is built into every phone out there.

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