The New Folk Revival is a blog and recording project from the Texas Hill Country documenting folk and acoustic music around Texas (or travelling through Texas). They are dedicated to preserving folk tradition and spreading the word about both up-and-coming and established folk artists. All the music on their site is available for free streaming or download, as the artists record these sessions specifically so they can be given away digitally. It's not about money, it's about music! Check them out...

I recently asked a forward-thinking indie media company friend of mine what artists needed to do to get noticed.  He said it's not enough to have a website and a myspace page and music available on iTunes, that you need to shoot for content and links on hundreds of pages.  Marketers talk about "impressions"; think about it - when you play live you make an "impression" on a potential fan, it's your best shot - if it's strong enough it will stick with them for a while.  Internet "impressions" are less strong, even with "mixed media" (video,audio, etc), so you need multiple impressions to make and keep fans - the more, the better; your "public" has a short attention span and a shorter memory.

Most of us don't have a marketing department and a publicist sending out press releases and working the phones and the links, so how to you accomplish this?  

Broadcasting an event over the Internet (so-called "webcasting") used to be a huge deal. Getting live video and audio distributed to a larger audience required the ‘caster to have a big “pipe” to serve many streams at once. Now days anyone with a decent high speed connection can get it out to any and all with one of the new services like ustream.tv.

This is a pretty revolutionary tool, a great example of how you can leverage the infrastructure of the internet, meaning somebody else built it, but you can use it for free, practically.  We first heard about it from singer/songwriter+ Erin McKeown who did a series of house /yard concerts this past summer. She charged admission, maybe even made money without leaving the house. efolkMusic wants to help artists and producers get the word out when a concertcast of interest to our users is happening, so please write us and we’ll let our 9,000+ newsletter subscribers know: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

We've always been interested in leveraging the power of the internet to get around the blockage posed by McMedia, bringing you the good music with our MP3 downloads, RSS feeds and with our "WEFM Radio" feature; now we'd like to turn WEFM into a full-blown streaming radio service (it's currently more of a "jukebox" than a real station), with live as well as pre-recorded shows, interviews, concert broadcasts and more. New technology is our friend here, as it is now possible to have live DJs from around the world broadcasting shows through our server.

Will you help us build this service? Our bean-counters suggest we could get equipment, software and a year's worth of bandwidth for about $2000, so let's get busy- it's simple, we put up a thermometer, see, and then raise money until it erupts: Please consider a tax-deductible membership or donation to our 501(c)(3) nonprofit- this can be a great way of getting the good music into more ears, and that is, after all, what we are about.