Here is a great website community that endeavours to “help musicians and music entrepreneurs create sustainable careers.”  They’re building a vast wealth of resources that include video clips, articles, blogs, text transcriptions and full-length video pieces that cover a huge range of topics like musician strategy, marketing, production, legal, education and careers in music.  These topics then get broken down into more specific sections like tools/gear, careers, genre, networking, songwriting, publicity, promotion, advertising, retail/distribution, merchandise, touring, fan base, internet, arranging, home recording, pro tools, manufacturing, mixing and mastering, pro recording, msuic videos, entrpreneurship, ethics, publishing, services, touring, music as business, copyright, performing, learning, teaching, and believe it or not that’s not a complete list of the topics on which this site has resources for a musician to dig into.

This site is also an aggregator of video interviews and footage from a large number of musicians and music industry professionals… the list is way too massive to include here but I can link to it here.

Furthermore, Artistshouse is very active on Twitter, and they are always sending out links to articles from all over the web that will be of interest to independent musicians and people in the music industry, and I definitely recommend following them.

They also host a live weekly video-stream/online chat program that takes place every Wednesday (or almost every Wednesday anyway) that extends their community into the live arena, and allows you to see the folks at the centre of the site.  The folks seem really nice, they’ve certainly been kind enough to me by linking several of my blog posts out to their community of musicians, and I appreciate them for it.

The people behind this site are backed by the Herb Alpert Foundation, who had the idea to create an online non-profit resource for musicians to get information, support, professional guidance and expert resources to help them navigate the challenges of the music industry.  To read more about the folks who are at the centre of the artistshouse community, check out their about page.

It seems like Artistshouse is organized by people who are trying to help musicians for all the right reasons…which is a great thing, but as with all communities, they are only as good as what their members make of it, so I suggest if you’re interested in checking it out, then try it out with fervor.  If you’re going to sign up, then interact, watch, learn, listen, talk, comment, suggest and be active regularly… get involved and make the most of the platform being provided.