When you first encounter the UI for indie911 you might be struck by it’s similarity to MySpace. That perception is certainly not accidental. indie911 is building a social networking site that appeals to bands and fans who don’t want all the MySpace “noise” but do want to use familiar social networking tools to discover new music.

Why indie? Why 911?

Because the entertainment industry is rapidly changing with technological leaps and we believe its many issues are urgent. Most of the infotainment, music and film content that reaches the eyes and ears of mass audiences are delivered by large corporations whose very structure often dictates its content. When large corporations control most of the creative content, artists usually lose, especially new and developing talent.

Justin Goldberg, the founder of indie911, has an impressive set of industry credentials, most notably his book “Handbook For Hell: The Ultimate Survival Guide To The New Music Industry”. The buzz says that Grace Potter and the Nocturnals were taken enough by the knowledge displayed to hire Justin as their manager.

Back in the day, like in March, the problems between indie911 and MySpace were burbling as MySpace started blocking indie911’s Hooka, an embedded widget that allows artists to sell their own tunes (more on that later). MySpace seems to have been angered that a cut of the profits went to the profile owner and not all to the band. In fact, I see this as one of the key differentiators of the indie911 service that might gain some traction if they are interested in making a few tweaks to the service.

At the heart of the indie911 experience is the Hooka, a Flash based widget that the indie911 folks call a a “portable digital locker”. If you’re a musician you can upload your MP3’s and videos to your indie911 account and use the Hooka to preview and sell your tunes easily on your own or someone else’s website.

Building a Hooka is a fairly straightforward process, you can add the music or videos that you upload to your Hooka through their web based interface. One very cool feature that no other service offers is the ability to add tracks from any artist in the indie911 ecosystem to a Hooka. This feature allows bloggers to build an embeddable streaming player to any website with an additional bonus - a 10% cut of any sale that’s made. The current distribution cut looks like this. Artist (70%), Blogger (10%), Indie911 (20%). That’s a pretty sweet deal given that the current iTunes profit sharing model is 5% and with no widget support.

The Hooka I created in about five minutes is below - forgive me for kvetching but why isn’t the new Grace Potter album available to add? In general, adding songs/images to the list is straightforward.

Of course, this brings up a few VERY salient points that will apply to all the services I’ll be analyzing. I know the focus of these widgets to date has been to allow bands to sell their own stuff. Ideally, you’d cut the bloggers in on the profit and you’d expand your exposure by orders of magnitude. Imagine all the MP3 bloggers including simple “for purchase” song widgets on every post. Indie911 (and every other service) face two key issues if they want to pursue this strategy.

First, since you can only add music to a Hooka is the band has chosen to participate in the Indie911 ecosystem your selection is already limited. While I applaud indie911 for the amount of bands/music they have available if it isn’t “everything” then the value proposition goes down.

Secondly, the looming folks over at Apple. Why Apple hasn’t come out with an iTunes widget for bloggers baffles my mind. Usually Apple is the small guy doing the innovation - in this case, they are well behind the curve.

If the Hooka were to be adopted by the blogger community this issue needs to be addressed as well as a few UI complaints that I have. I’d like to be able to create a Hooka without all the interface overhead on my account. I’d also like different display options - the Hooka itself takes up so much space on the screen that I couldn’t imagine using it for most blogs. An adjustable and simplified visual display would be great. Once again, I realize that the Hooka wasn’t built with this in mind but it struck me as an immediate and interesting usage.

The Indie911 Hooka also has embedded messaging built in which is a very cool feature (click on the bubbles to activate) but it’s somewhat buried in the UI.

Indie911 includes a host of services to artists interested in signing up. These services include:

• Digital Distribution (to other sellers of digital media (iTunes, MusicNow, Napster etc)
• Search Engine Marketing
• Cost Per Click Advertising
• Search Engine Optimization
• Blog Marketing
• Press Release Distribution
• Social Network Marketing
• Street Team Distribution
• Advertising on Indie911
• Newsletter Announcements

More later . . .