UPDATE: SOCO MUSIC EXPERIENCE – TEMPE, AZ – CANCELLED

August 12, 2008, LOUISVILLE, KY – Southern Comfort has announced that the SoCo Music Experience scheduled to take place on Saturday, October 18, 2008 at Phoenix Municipal Stadium has been cancelled due to an unexpected escalation in production costs. At this time, there are no plans to reschedule the event this year.

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Southern Comfort has announced that it is partnering with several music and lifestyle sites to bring the SoCo Music Experience to the web in the form of custom episodic content. Music fans will get a taste of the music festival experience from the fans perspective mixed with live performances and interviews with the artists in clips produced by Pitchfork.tv, Heavy.com, My Damn Channel, Complex.com and Death + Taxes.

Check out Heavy.com’s first webisode, “Anticipation”.

“The SoCo Music Experience is in its fourth year and we felt it was time to take a fresher approach as a spirits brand by extending the event to millions of music fans digitally but in a different way,” said Campbell Brown, Vice President, Director Southern Comfort Americas. “We’re packaging the overall festival experience with interviews from both fans and performers and delivering the content in SoCo’s brand voice.”

The SoCo Music Experience festival tour is going to six markets with each event showcasing five national performers with five top local acts on two stages all for the low price of free*. An outdoor venue is transformed into the complete festival experience – food and beverage vendors, poster and t-shirt shop, the local record shop, merch tent, cornhole games, photobooths and the SoCo & Lime Dome, among other areas. The festivals are open to be people 21 and over.

Digital Partnerships

Pitchfork.tv – Episodes will feature behind the scenes footage, band and fan interviews and live performances. Viewers will get to learn how the performers came together as a group, as well as how groups of friends experience music together.

Heavy.com – Episodes will feature behind-the-scenes footage, band and fan interviews and live performances. Each four-minute episode will explore themes associated with SoCo’s brand positioning and the artists that embody them. The Heavy.com partnership has already launched with episodes including “Anticipation,” “Energy,” “Magnetism” and “Character” featuring the SoCo Music Experience in Atlanta.

My Damn Channel – Twelve weeks of episodes of “My Damn Channel Music Nights” will feature music bars and clubs in New York and Los Angeles and on the SoCo Music Experience festival tour this summer. Starting in July, original content will be produced for a customized, co-branded channel presented by Grace Helbig, host of My Damn Channel’s “Daily Grace.”

Complex.com – The fashion/lifestyle site is building a comprehensive guide to select SoCo Music Experience festivals, including an original “Best of” Web Series about the event and host cities, emerging artist bios and live recordings.

Death + Taxes – The music magazine will be creating custom content for their site featuring behind the scenes footage, band and fan interviews and live performances.

“These sites provide us the opportunity to bring a Southern Comfort experience produced in a way their viewers are accustomed to watching video on their sites,” said Brown. “It’s a partnership in the truest sense of the word.”

In addition to these partnerships, festival pre-roll videos will appear on Hulu.com, Billboard, UGO.com, Crave Online, PasteMagazine.com, Virb.com and numerous other music-focused sites.

“Not only have we increased our investment around talent and the experience, we are making a strong digital play for Southern Comfort increasing our spend in this area to 25% of the total media budget versus 5% the previous year,” said Brown. “Our overall digital spend is up 300% versus last year, which give us a real opportunity to engage our target consumers with a meaningful SoCo experience.”

Having already been to Atlanta and Denver, the event hits four more cities this summer. This year’s performers have included Against Me!, Gnarls Barkley, Ghostland Observatory and Blonde Redhead, while The Roots, French DJ duo Justice, The Black Keys, MGMT are among those scheduled to play upcoming festival dates.

The SoCo Music Experience festival tour will hit the following cities this summer:

August 23, 2008 – San Diego, Ace Parking Lot, Petco Park
Featuring Common, The Black Keys, Kinky, Saul Williams, Grand Ole Party
*Note: a donation of $5 for the San Diego Music Foundation is requested

September 6, 2008 – Madison, Willow Island at Alliant Energy Center
Featuring The Roots, The Black Keys, GZA, Benevento Russo Duo, Ha Ha Tonka

September 13, 2008 – Saratoga/Albany, New Venue TBA
Featuring Justice, MGMT, Lotus, The Whigs and other acts TBA

CANCELLEDOctober 18, 2008 – Phoenix/Tempe, Phoenix Municipal Stadium
Talent TBACANCELLED

In its fourth year, past acts at the SoCo Music Experience have included Flaming Lips, Cold War Kids, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Spank Rock, The Roots, Architecture in Helsinki, GIRL TALK, Sick Puppies, Cypress Hill, Z-Trip, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Rose Hill Drive, Galactic, Delta Spirit, among others.

With the SoCo Music Experience, Southern Comfort continues to back great live music experiences in 2008, including the Voodoo Experience, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Lollapalooza, Forecastle Festival and countless other live music events.

For more information and continued updates about the SoCo Music Experience, please visit (restrictions may apply):

Southern Comfort Music Experience

Musicians, bands, artists, music publicists, record companies, music fans and more have been submitting blog entries to Band Weblogs for free, for online distribution. All Guest Music Blogger entries are reviewed before publication and whether the entries are formal press releases about bands and their music or laid back music blog entries written by musicians, most submissions get published.

In today’s music climate, it’s important for bands to find unique ways to get their music heard. I’ve been a firm believer in musicians taking matters into their own hands when it comes to online promotion. Of course, the more help a band can get, the better, and adding music blog entries to Band Weblogs is just one more way to help spread the word about up and coming bands, new releases, reviews, music videos, music blogs and more.

Not only are the entries published on Band Weblogs, but some blog entries submitted by Guest Music Bloggers have been featured on quality news websites like Reuters, USA Today and Austin American Statesman. The more people that read the music blog entries equals more free promotion for bands!

Dave Tommo and I host the Band Weblogs Podcast Show which features ‘podsafe’ music by up and coming unsigned bands and signed bands. We love doing the show and it’s important to us that we play music by bands and artists that we really like. Band Weblogs Podcast Shows are aired on CBS owned KYOU Radio and 1550AM in San Francisco as well as distributed to podcast directories around the net. Podcasts are another way for musicians to get their music ‘out there’.

To keep up to date on the latest entries, you can subscribe to our RSS Feeds and add them to your favorite RSS news reader. You can also receive blog entries to your inbox.

Click on the links for the subscription options:

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For press inquiries and more, contact info at bandweblogs dot com.

Please note: all submitted entries and press releases will be reviewed and will only be published if approved. Not all entries will be published, and accepted submissions may be edited.

To learn more about Band Weblogs, go to the About Page.

By: Jenny May

A quick sum up of what a music blog is: a blog about bands and music.

Comments are welcome if you have additional ideas and thoughts.

Okay, let’s get started:

1. Promotion
Music blogs are amazing promotional tools for bands. They are their own mini buzz machines. If the blogger likes the band they’re writing about great, if not they’ll still probably link to the band for readers to check out for themselves and at that point, readers and potential fans can make their own minds up.

2. Links
As the population on the internet continues to grow, it becomes more difficult for new up and coming bands and artists and their music to be ‘found’ by potential fans. When a music blogger adds links to bands either in a blog entry or on their sidebar, this helps expose the band more to the public eye.

3. Music
Music bloggers writing about music on a daily basis will most likely be linking to the band website and/or adding mp3s for readers to hear first hand what the blogger is writing about. If they are adding mp3s to their blogs, hopefully they’re getting permission from bands to do so.

4. Videos
For bands with videos, websites like Myspace and YouTube have made it easy for bloggers to embed video codes onto blogs. Videos are excellent on music blogs as the reader not only gets to read about the band, but can also hear the band and watch their video.

5. Fans
If a particular band is being written about favorably by influential, popular and/or trusted bloggers then there is a great chance that new fans will be made from readers of music blogs. As mentioned before, even if what the blogger is writing isn’t favorable, then there is the chance the reader simply won’t agree.
6. Community
There are quite a few music bloggers out there who dedicate blogs to specific bands and music styles ranging from jazz, blues, rnb, country, folk, punk, rock and more as well as blogs with various music topics. This can create a community of dedicated readers, subscribers and commenters who visit the blogs frequently.

7. Sales
Numbers 1-6 above could all lead to sales of music for bands and artists. Whether music blogs have direct links to artist downloads and online CD stores or if a reader decides to go out to a music shop to buy a CD after learning about a new band or album/single release after reading about it on a blog, then the music blog was indeed influential to the sale!

8. Live Show Dates
Fans are always interested to know when their favorite band will be playing live in their hometown. Music blogs help to keep the reader informed and reminded of tour dates, shows, gigs and live music events.

9. Opinion
Music blogs are great places to go for readers to find out what other people are thinking of a certain band, musician, singer. A blog search in Google or Technorati for “music blogs” can result in hundreds of current conversations taking place.

10. Easy Access
It’s so easy to find music blogs by doing a search on Google or to go to blog directories and browse their music categories. Music blogs also tend to link to and recommend other blogs on their sidebars.

Bonus:

11. Free
For now, most music blogs are free (hopefully it stays that way). The information about bands, opinions, music, videos and podcasts are free for music lovers to devour!

Bands who want to request a review from a music blogger can usually get in touch by contacting them via an email address provided on the blog or a contact page.

BandWeblogs.com adds a twist to all that is written above. Bands and artists can come here to promote themselves, in their own words as Guest Music Bloggers. PR companies, record companies and management companies can also send in formal press releases and reviews of bands for publication on Band Weblogs. I also like to write about bands and music here, from a singer/musician point of view.

Sign up as a Guest Music Blogger to add entries and promote music at Band Weblogs!

By: Jenny May

When I first started reading blogs I was fascinated from the start. I couldn’t believe that people were actually writing their day to day activities down for all to see via the internet. What surprised me the most, though, was the fact that I was actually taking the time to read the often times mundane and yet interesting bits of information that depending on the writer, kept me coming back for more.

It wasn’t long before I realized that blogs are great marketing tools for bands and musicians. As a singer and musician I know how difficult it can be for bands to get their music out there to the world and blogs have been a unique and powerful tool for bands to keep readers up to date about their goings on. What better way for a fan to find out about their favorite band or artist but from the horses mouth themselves?

Before blogs, the norm was for bands to rely on journalists and magazines to determine whether or not to print stories about them. But then, even if the story was published, there was and still is – the chance that the writer might not like the band and give them a poor review. Unfortunately some people may brush off a band because of one person’s opinion about them.

Band blogs have now given bands the opportunity to express their feelings and opinions about various topics and their music in their own words, and on their own terms. People who like to read about bands before they buy their music now have more to think about by reading band blogs rather than relying solely on one journalist’s opinion.

Band blogs have also helped “unknown” bands get discovered just by their blogging alone and with sites like Myspace popping up around the internet, it’s easier than ever to give a band’s music a test run before you buy it. If you like what you hear, voila, a fan is made!

Click here to read band blogs on Band Weblogs!

By: Jenny May