In addition to my work as a “communications guy” for Chor Leoni Men’s Choir and Elektra Women’s Choir, I sometimes do pro bono work in the same role for the Christ Church Cathedral Choir.
I sing with Chor Leoni and the Cathedral Choir. All three choirs sell their music on iTunes, so yesterday when Steve Jobs announces iTunes 10 and its music/social media arm, Ping, I immediately starting thinking about how to use Ping to help the sales of my choirs’ music.
I signed on and created my own personal profile (you can find my profile here) but hunted in vain for a way to create a profile for an artist. Apparently a lot of other choral people were doing the same thing, because my twitter feed was full of the same question this morning.
There is NO info to be found on how to do so.
Big Name Artists vs Aggregators?
So far the only Classical artist to make Apple’s “featured” list is Yo Yo Ma. Well, no choir I know of has that kind of international pull. The choirs I work with got onto iTunes by using aggregators (Tunecore and CDBaby).
My worry is that because we’re “small potatoes” and not at the artistic level of such luminaries (?) as Coldplay and Lady Ga-Ga, we may be unable to create and manage our Ping artist profiles ourselves.
Three Questions
1. Is it up to a “small” artist’s aggregator to create a Ping profile for them?
2. If not, how does said artist create their Ping profile?
3. How could Apple release something without providing some kind of support document that answers this basic question?
If you have any info on how to create an artist’s profile, please share it and I’ll pass it along.
UPDATE! Rec’d 2:45 pm Sept 2/10
After emailing everyone I could think of, I receive a response from Tunecore:
We were fortunate enough to speak with Apple today to begin working on getting the first TuneCore Artists Ping accounts set up. We will be able to get more and more TuneCore Artists set up over the next weeks as Apple works to authenticate and set up Ping Artist accounts for the millions of artists within iTunes.
So we’ve answers to questions 1 and 2, above. No answer to question 3, though.
