Audio Visual Bunker

Having owned my own business for over four years now, I’ve had salesman after salesman visiting trying to convince me to advertise in their magazine or newspaper. Others have told me to pass out flyers and mail out letters in order to drum up new business. I have a good friend who works at a popular local radio station and she started telling me about how productive radio advertising can be. I know personally that I’m more likely to remember an ad I hear on the radio over one that I see in a magazine or newspaper. I realized that radio advertising wasn’t the cheapest, but I decided to trial it for a month. Within the first day of having my ads on the radio, I had a couple of people walk in off the street saying that they’d heard my ad. I was absolutely thrilled. At the end of the first week, I’d seen my business profits increase already.

There are many different things to think about when considering radio advertising for your business. Is your product or service something that can be advertised on the air and attract attention? And, what type of radio advertising would be the best for you. You obviously wouldn’t advertise on an oldies radio station if you’re trying to attract a younger crowd. It might be cheaper to advertise on an oldies station, but it will definitely not be more profitable for you. How about what time of day you want your ads to be played? Different time slots during the day have different costs. It’s much less expensive to buy radio advertising in the middle of the night than early in the morning when people are most likely to be listening while driving to work or getting ready at home. You also need to think about what day of the week you want to have your ads played on the radio.

One of the best decisions that I made in choosing to go with radio advertising was having a live remote at my store. The radio station organised for two deejays to come to my store and broadcast live for two hours. They attracted customers by having door prizes and giveaways to anyone who came into the store. It was amazing how many people actually drove down to my store just to see what was going on. Obviously, lots of the people were only there for the radio giveways, but I just accepted that. It still meant that every person that stopped by was one more potential customer and one more person who knew where my store was located.

Since investing in radio advertising, my store has become a lot more popular. I’ve seen my profits increase and I’ve had more people paying attention to my ads. I hardly ever bother to run an ad in newspapers anymore - I don’t even have to.

With the growing popularity of MP3 players, in car CD players have become more affordable than ever. Even though they’re still more than adequate for listening to music, car audio cd players are hardly cutting-edge technology anymore, so this means you can get them for a fraction of what they cost just a few years ago. If you’ve been doing without, you’ll be amazed at the difference that one can make.

I never really bother fixing anything that’s not broken in my old heap. When my friend suggested that I get an in car CD player, I thought that he was missing the point. Why would I pay money for in car CD players when I had a perfectly good radio available? It just didn’t make sense. I’d never had the option to chose exactly what music I wanted to listen to before, so hadn’t really missed it - it never really crossed my mind that listening to the radio in my car wasn’t the only option.

When I saw how cheap in car CD players were, I decided what the heck and went out and bought a JVC car CD player right away. It was a lot easier to install than I’d anticipated. I think anyone with even a basic understanding of electrical would be able to do it. Pretty much most of the cars that don’t come with in car CD players come with a deck where you can plug one in. All you need to do is connect a few cables, screw in a few screws in, and you are up and running.

I don’t know how I did without an in car CD player for all these years. I love being able to select my own music! It’s made me think about upgrading my other audio equipment. Having in car CD players is great, but I could probably enjoy it even more if I hadn’t blown my speakers already. Listening to high-quality digital music on speakers that pop and hiss with every beat can get kind of annoying!

In my opinion, in car CD players are even better than MP3 players. Think about it - everyone wants an MP3 player or an iPod. People rip them off all the time. They’ve taken over from CD players as the best thing to steal from a car. People used to break into your car just to steal your car CD audio player or your radio. Now that iPods are around, however, people don’t do that anymore. They leave the in car CD players alone. The way I see it, it’s better to have something that’s a little out of date that can still bump the tunes than something that’ll get stolen in a couple of days!

The Freesound project is a site where you can download (and contribute) sound samples, recordings, noises and all sorts of audio snippets. The beauty of the site is that everything is released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License (you can view the license here). To paraphrase from the license - this means you are free “To sample, mash-up, or otherwise creatively transform this work for commercial or noncommercial purposes.” Wicked!

Now, keep in mind that the site isn’t just a massive repository where you can leech tons of useful sounds. There is a thriving community too, where once you create an account you can interact with other sound artists.

All in all, it’s an awesome resource, you could spend months trawling through the available sounds. Just make sure you do something creative with them!

Check out The Freesound Project here.

Even though most television programs are viewable for free to anyone who owns a TV set, it’s also useful to know where you can find TV shows online. That way, in the event you happen to miss an episode of your favorite program or, even worse, you suddenly find yourself somewhere without a television you can still catch up on what you missed.

Most people who have been using the Internet for a while would have already heard of different file-sharing venues and peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading sites where you can get virtually any MP3 or audio file that you can think of. The fact that these music downloads are available is pretty common knowledge, however, what is perhaps less commonly known, is that you can also find a significant number of TV shows online as well.

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The word is that video games are more than just addicting toys that keep people from being responsible, productive members of society, have them cutting school, see them skipping work (or playing video games AT work), or turn them into violent war-mongers within weeks of playing the latest Doom or Laura Tomb Raider or Black and White or Myst.

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Music licensing is very important for almost any musician. Its especially important for a serious musician, whether he play jazz, rock and roll, folk, or even classical or some other genre. It is crucial for a musician to keep his rights, and that means licensing and copyrighting his work properly.

If you right a particularly successful song, some one else might want to license your music from you, and that means big bucks for you. I had a friend once, a classically trained violinist. Even though he rarely composed songs, one day he decided to enter a contest to compose a hit new piece of music for a commercial for a popular fast food chain which shall remain nameless. He though he had made out like a bandit when he won a $500 award for his song and heard it played on the television, but soon he realized that he had been robbed.

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