Most people don’t know what IODAPromonet is, or was. And I don’t see any news articles about it closing, so I’m making a little post to say goodbye to what was a remarkable resource. IODA (now merged with Orchard) is an online distributor of recordings: they take the music made by independent labels and feed it out to iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and other online music retailers and subscription services. Promonet was a site that IODA created, which gave bloggers some tools to easily post and promote music in the IODA catalog. The idea was to encouraged people to discover and promote music in the “Long Tail” – the vast, undiscovered or under-discovered bulk of contemporary recorded music. I used it extensively, posting links to hundreds of records and promotional free mp3s that I found there over the years. Word is that as of today, the site is going dark along with all the content in it. I’ll miss it. But it isn’t a huge surprise. In the evolution of music and commerce in the digital age, there are hundreds of former sites. I’ve been following this stuff since IUMA. What a long strange tail it’s been.
If any fellow music fans or bloggers have any thoughts on this, please chime in.
As of the time of this comment, the Promonet site is still live. Not sure what that means!
Update: got another note, they have extended the drop-dead date to March 1st to give us users more time to update our content. Apparently they heard from more than a few of us blogging fools.
Aaaand.. it’s gone! IODAPromonet site now redirects to Orchard. Fare thee well, tree falling in woods.
Thanks for the post, they will keep pushing people for money to enjoy good times, I know it all, they stole my income too as artist.
Let me stop there before I write a book on this.
Dubroom reprezent. I’ve been diggin your music since Mucster blogged it up at MP34U back when. Thanks for the ping and I look forward to reading the book!
Yeah, Mike, it really was. funfunfunmedia.com is a site I blogged in extensively. All the IODA posts are still there, but without the promo mp3s. Maybe some folks will still buy the music we recommended. It’s really good stuff.
So sad. This was such a great resource. Tried to log in and after a quick google search found this post. :'(
I apparently missed the first “warning” message, so I’m SUPER grateful to’ve found the “last chance” warning message literally -just- in time. I came upon it the day before the site went dark, so I spent literally that whole day and night -scrambling- to not only recover my old music, but to discover as much new stuff as I could, before the site went down. Thankfully I found a lot, but I still have to wonder what I might have missed in my panic.
As a podcaster just reviving their podcast, Promonet’s loss was a -huge- blow. They had such a wealth of really -good- world music, and their sudden absence has left an -enormous- hole in the podsafe music universe, IMO. I’m gonna miss them like crazy. And now, the only real place I can seem to find for Podsafe music is the PMN, which is okay, but has nowhere near the vast annuls of music that IODA did. (Besides, it was lovely just having more than one resource, in case you’d plumbed the depths of one, or needed to find something different in another.)
IODA, we shall miss you so!
♥
Amen to that, Ylluria. Thanks for the comment. I’m always glad to hear from anyone who heard that beautiful tree fall in the woods.