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more info coming soon - hopefully next week!

Well, we’ve been absent lately. Mysteriously invisible.

If you had gotten used to the regular music updates and occasional email newsletters, well, there was a good reason we’ve been practically off the grid for the past few months :

We’ve joined forces with Extreme Music - “the undisputed masters of production music” - part of the legendary Sony/ATV music publishing empire.

We love their attitude, dig their vibe, and are absolutely jacked that they believed in our production music and ideas and brand enough to write us a fat check - and as we’ve often said “It’s easy to say you’ll never sell out when no one’s making any offers.” Well, we definitely never said we wouldn’t sell out, and someone made an offer. So there we are.

In all seriousness, this is a deal made for reasons way beyond the immediate financial impact. We have long wanted to partner with a company who Gets It in the biggest possible way, one who was also willing to put their money where their mouth was - who would put as much effort and love into the promotion and marketing aspects of this business as we do in the writing, performing, and production of the music.

There are some exciting things planned for this new venture - a full announcement should be coming next week - but it’s safe to say that with the worldwide team at Extreme Music and Sony/ATV heading up the marketing, promotion, distribution and sales, and with our team here at Burst being freed up to concentrate solely on writing and producing great music, the best is yet to come. Stay tuned!

A note to our current clients - watch your email later today for details on how we’re planning on making sure you are taken care of during this transition period. Thank you so much for being our friends and fans for this past year! We’re stoked to get back to making more killer music for you guys ASAP.

Burst Labs blog listed at Alltop.com!

Guy Kawasaki’s latest venture, the news aggregator AllTop, is in beta right now.

AllTop is a sexy-fied RSS reader, broken into categories that cater to the Gawker set (of which we wish we were cool enough to be associated with). It will, I’m sure, quickly become my go-to site every morning, as I scan the internet for Domo-kun porn and the occasional bit of breaking news.

In related exciting news, the Burst Labs blog has been selected as one of the trusted purveyors of music industry news on AllTop’s Music feed. If there was ever a reason to step our game up, I think this is it.

It is extremely humbling and exhilarating to even be considered in the same universe as such giants as Stereogum, Coolfer, Hypebot, The Kings of A&R, and hopefully, soon enough, Idolator (hint, hint)… we promise we won’t let it go to our heads. [ms]

BurstLabs.com is one of 5 finalists in the Music category at this year’s SXSW Interactive Awards.

The award presentation will be held as part of the SXSW Interactive Conference & Festival March 7-11 in Austin, TX, and we get a ticket and festival pass as an award nominee.

As luck would have it, I just canceled my reservations for this years SXSW Music Festival due to all of the projects on our production schedule here at Burst. But our kickass designer, JD Hooge of Gridplane, will not be able to attend and offered his invitation to me… maybe I’ll have to rethink my travel plans for March if enough of our friends and fans vote for Burst Labs as the People’s Choice Award winner. Hint, hint.

Hey, congratulations to JD and our website’s programming guru, David Knape of Bumpslide. We all have our fingers crossed for you guys! [dh]

We’re super stoked to finally announce the long-awaited upgrade to our main project : the Burst Labs site for music discovery and licensing.

It’s taken us a bit longer than we’d hoped, but we really wanted to get you some of the most requested tweaks and didn’t want to compromise on our normal music production. So, after spending the past few months in furious emails back and forth with our web development team, here’s a quick hit list of what’s changed (some of these are covered in the preview video we’ve posted below) :

• new Home Page
• new About section (including FAQ, Credits, etc.)
• new Navigation bar
• Log Out displays currently signed-in account
• more Recent items at Home Page
• all submission forms (Log In, Send To Friend, License This Track, etc.) are now in Flash
• expanded live area for previewing Petri Dish tracks in Audio Player
• Audio Player keeps track of recently played tracks
• tracks that have already been played are darkened in Petri Dish
• new Track Details layout
• Track Durations (Time) now in list and detail views
• Downloads dialog in Flash lists all available formats, stems and edits (coming soon)
• License Track form allows for multiple tracks in one submission form
• new All Compilations view

Enjoy the walkthrough video below… after 5 or 6 aborted takes I decided to just play it loose and left a few goofs in there (I wasn’t logged in when I attempted to show the new License This Track pop up - just one example!).

And much, much more planned for very soon. First comment below is a list of some of the features we have in the works already, but we absolutely want to know what all of you would like to see… drop us a comment (or an email) and we’ll get to it.

Thanks! [dh]

Always fun to see and hear our music being used in cool productions and promos, and this year’s CRT/tanaka online Valentine (What Chocolate Are You?) has a jazz organ background track licensed from our production music catalog.

We’ll have to send any potential Valentine’s Day suitors over there, too, as we’ve been absolutely swamped with music production (and edits and artwork and mixes and plans…) and won’t have time this afternoon to try to top our Huey-Lewis-Tupac-Shakur themed promo from last year.

But hey… hugs, kisses and chocolate from all of us at The Burst Collective! [dh]

The Holiday Gift Guide from NOTCOT features a music player loaded with tracks from our very own catalog of licensed music here at Burst Labs.

8 songs from our holiday collection, Naughty + Nice, are available for shoppers and browsers while perusing the new tastemakers website.

I occasionally get asked about the gear I use for composing. While Burst HQ does have some expensive goodies (of course we spare no expense for YOU, our friends and fans), and I’ve already mentioned my beloved toys, some of my favorite things are free plug-ins. Because I’m a cheap bastard, I love to troll KVR Audio looking for that ever-elusive “free” tag.

I’ve compiled here my 8 favorite free plug-ins.

We’re in the middle of some major updates and upgrades today at our music licensing website and blog, with many more surprises on the way very soon.

Please forgive our dust as things get settled in their new homes…. there’s quite a bit of image editing and link tidying to be done, and I’m not sure how much is going to get done today as I’m out the door to LA tomorrow morning and we’re trying to finish up some music production yet this afternoon.

All of the Burst Labs catalog searching and music discovery should work,

Naughty + Nice, our collection of irreverent music for the holidays, is ready for downloading and licensing at Burst Labs.

Favorites from the Naughty side :

Two problems related to Burst in the November issue of Mix Magazine :

1. This month’s Sound For Picture section is titled Creative on Demand : Composers Reap Benefits From Production Music Libraries and, in our not-so-humble opinion, misleads their readers as to who’s responsible for the stature of FirstCom’s Velocity Music Library (through the beginning of this year, that would have been us).

2. The Track Sheet column for the Midwest region falsely credits us with recording “Chester French’s first release.” We did record overdubs for their Star Trak debut, but that’s it.

So Mix gave us credit where we didn’t deserve it, and didn’t credit us where we did (though a case could be made that they were getting their information on Velocity from FirstCom or the new producers of the library, in which case we’ll take this opportunity to set the record straight).