It wasn’t entirely obvious what some of the fields were when adding a new release. We’ve updated this to provide a bit more information by way of a handy little jQuery tooltip plugin

We have also improved the alerts and information throughout the site using our PopTarts class for unified alerts and error messages. Ths is a very handy PHP class we will be using a lot in the future. More to come on this at some point…

It’s currently very simple, very bland, very under-designed, but ultimately functional – which is good. There are basic stats and you can generate widgets from there too, it really is bare bones at the moment.

So now everybody can get their music into Music Wall and start promoting their tunes to friends, colleagues and new people.

What we really want now is feedback so that we can find out what labels and artists would find useful. As a taster we are going to be including the facility for hosting files and more ways to share music from the widget… What else?

Sign up here for the Music Wall

The widget can be embedded by placing a little chunk of Javascript into your page and then automagically you get a list of releases with thumbnails, streaming previews and a “facebook button” that connects into face book so that you can add the track to your profile and send it on as a gift.

The look of the widget can be customised with colours to suit your site and we’ll be adding more improvements soon. You can get the widget from the Music Wall on facebook

See an example here of it here… yeh the colour scheme sucks, luckily you can change it…

Here are a few blogs that have had something to say about Music Wall and Ok Cool Recordings in the last week.

• Mashable
• Download Squad
• Songaday

Needless to say we’re really happy about all this (really want to get some house music in Music Wall though)

There’s an eclectic mix of indie rock ballads and grimey blues. Samantha who runs SMtv Music has totally the right attitude towards the new music industry (I’m so loathe to call it music 2.0) and it is a pleasure to be able to work with her even in this small way.

Tom’s liking Tom Dangers’s, Wine Women and Song – but he would wouldn’t he?

Check out SMtv Music on Music Wall

You did read that right. DJ Krust is putting 1,000 copies of each of the following tracks on Music Wall.

• Choose Conciousness – Krust
• Mystery School – Krust
• New Humans – Krust

You can get them from Music Wall or you can join Krust’s group for more information.

You can forward the tracks on to your friends, you can download them to your Ipod, share them, play them, burn them. Enjoy them and send them as gifts to your friends.

It warms our record bags to know that an artist of Krust’s stature is embracing future distribution methods and has the balls to take on this experiment.

Now everything costs you, even a 30 second low quality 16Kbps mp3 preview thinly veiled as a truetone costs a punter £3.00, never mind the majors suing Youtube and the like for marketing their artists to millions of people for free – This is why people love p2p, torrents, and to a lesser extent services like Emusic, they’re tired of being f**ked. Consumers are not stupid they know they are being fleeced left, right and center.

So in reverse, we want to give the music away for free, and actually sell (or license) tangible products, kind of common sense really, it seems absurd to make people pay for an item that’s used as a marketing tool.

Which is why we created the Music Wall – the hardest thing is getting people to hear an unknown artists music, social distribution (or digital gossip as we like to call it) seems to be the way forward.

The purpose of the facebook Music Wall is to allow forward thinking labels and artists to distribute and market music directly to fans, allowing those people to then send full track music to their friends as gifts. The tracks can then be played from the recipients profile, downloaded, and/or sent on as gifts to their friends…

There are currently two tracks you can send at present – Melancholy Fingers and “Real Me”, both by Pman featuring the vocals of the
lovely Clari T

Both on Ok Cool Recordings, our test label, which we’ll be signing up more artists to soon. Our copyright policy for OK Cool is basically – take it, it’s yours, burn it, share it, play it – just don’t make money from it… Read the mandate on Ok Cool Recordings copyright

Essentially with facebook, you can manage your fans, your events (gigs) and now you can market your music too, driving people to your website and getting your music and you out there… Originally intended for distributing “free” music, the Music Wall can also be used for restricted licenses and marketing too.

Although let’s see how well our test goes first…

The track is “Melancholy Fingers”, by Pman featuring Clari T on vocals. We’re not sure what genre you’d call this, but we like to just class it as part of the Bristol Sound… It’s sweet, sad and quirky. We hope you like it.

Download it here

Please read the copyright notice, but essentially it’s yours to do with what you will, share it, burn it, upload, download it, just don’t make money from it. Please refer back here if you can and always include the artist and track name where possible.

This will be the first test of a new social distribution platform under the Pushhit banner… This is where the real excitement is, we think that we might cause a little bit of a stir with this… We’ll keep you updated…