It’s Cyber Monday, one of the busiest online shopping days of the year, and Broadjam is offering one of our best deals of the year. Broadjam is offering 50% off submission fees to music licensing opportunities until noon (CST) tomorrow, 12/1/2009. This discount is automatically applied at checkout for all members, and there are almost 75 different music licensing opportunities on Broadjam right now.

Broadjam’s new song contest opens today, and it’s all about the weekends!

The Weekend Quickie Contest gives you the chance to submit, review and win all in one week. The contest will be ongoing every weekend, and is open to any genre of song. Here’s how it works: song submissions will be accepted every Friday, 5:00 PM central, through Sunday, 11:59 PM central. Reviews are then open Monday through Friday, and the winner from the previous weekend is announced each Friday. Then it starts all over again!

This week is Thanksgiving here in the United States, so the first Weekend Quickie Contest will expand to take submissions any time from this posting through Sunday, 11:59 PM central. After that, the contest will follow the schedule described above.

This week’s prizes include:
- $250
- DrumCore (Mac & Win) – $249 value
- MattPack I DrummerPack Add-on for DrumCore – $69
- $50 gift certificate to Loopworkship.com
- Artist feature on the Broadjam blog
- Mention in 1 Broadjam newsletter

Find out more about The Weekend Quickie Contest prizes and other information.

In a time when information must be fast to be relevant, RSS feeds serve as a valuable tool for web users. Broadjam’s recently added RSS feed for music licensing opportunities allows users to subscribe and receive updates about new opportunities almost immediately as they become available. This particular RSS feed is useful whether you are a blogger and you want to draw traffic to your own site, or if you use an RSS reader and want to keep up to date on the new licensing opportunities that Broadjam has to offer. The new RSS feed for music licensing opportunities gives users the ability to get the information they want when they want it. Simply click on the “subscribe to RSS feed” button on the music licensing page seen below:

RSS feeds (or Really Simple Syndication) are a family of web feed formats used by websites to automatically publish new content. This is especially important for sites such as blogs, which authors may update quite regularly without having any means of letting readers know about the new content. Adding an RSS feed to their blog will allow those who subscribe to it to receive an automatic update of the blogger’s post after it is published.

RSS feeds can be used by website operators to draw traffic by offering expanded content, or by readers who want to use an RSS Reader (NetVibes, etc.) to aggregate up-to-date information from a variety of different sources. To learn more about RSS feeds in general, see the full Wikipedia article here. Be sure to check out the newly-added feed on our music licensing page to keep up to date on the many opportunities available to Broadjam members!

Peter G. Olach is a product of the 1970’s Detroit folk scene who now lives in North Carolina. His songs are meaningful, story-driven, and incorporate elements of Country/Western, Southern Rock and Traditional folk music. Peter plays the guitar in a fashion that he deems reminiscent of mountain dulcimers, saying “I just happen to have more strings and frets than my mountain brethren do.”

Olach has been playing music for over 30 years, and has created a sound that is all his own. His love of music continues to drive him to create new music for the world to hear. Of his path, Olach says “My journey has brought me full circle and back to a place that I find so rewarding, the place where my heart belongs – the creation and performance of MUSIC.”

There are only two challenges still open for submissions in the 6-Pack Song Contest, so get them in! Can 5, the “Cover Can”, closes Thursday, 11/19 at 11:59 PM Central Time. Can 6, the “Two-Timer,” closes on Friday, 11/20 at 11:59 PM Central Time.

There’s still time to get songs in the competition. Once submissions close, you still have time to perform reviews. The first close date for reviews is for Can 1, on 12/6.

Mastering is the process of preparing and transferring audio recorded from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device (the master). It’s well known that quality mastering can make a huge difference to a recording. Now, Broadjam’s Mastering Service provides top-quality mastering exclusively to Broadjam members. All mastering is either done by, or supervised by, award-winning mastering engineer Craig Anderton. Learn More!

Here are a couple of Broadjam events that you might be interested in:

Nashville Songwriters Association International
– Roy Elkins, Founder of Broadjam presenting
Saturday, November 21st, 10:00 am – 1:00 pm Paradyme Studios

Roy Elkins, CEO of Broadjam, will be speaking to the local Chapter of the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) and talk about the music industry, music placement in film and TV, publishing, and other strategies for indie musicians and songwriters! This is an excellent organization and if you haven’t been to their monthly seminars, you should check one out. This particular event will be their holiday workshop, so there will be a luncheon as well. All workshops are held at Paradyme Productions, located at 636 W. Washington Avenue, in Madison, WI, directly above Kelley’s Market. You can send an email to Gerry Grothues at gerrylehr@charter.net for more information.

MAMAs Annual Kickoff Party
Tuesday, November 24th, 6PM at the Broadjam offices

Broadjam will host the annual MAMAs kickoff event at our office at 6401 Odana Road in Madison, WI. This is a great cause and we are looking to you to help us put instruments in the hands of children. This year’s MAMA awards show will be held at the Capitol Theatre in the Overture Center and will be the biggest and best event to date. Broadjam staffers will be on hand to help you register.

Broadjam has made some updates to the member profile menu. To make your edits and updates easier, we’ve moved the profile menu from the lower left-hand navigation of your profile page to a “floating” menu style at the bottom of the page. We’re hopeful that this will not only make accessing the many options for your profile easier, but also more intuitive and fast.

Please note: if you’re using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 browser, or anything previous to it, this improved menu will not appear and your profile page will default to the old menu style. A newer version of Internet Explorer is available here.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact us at customerservice@broadjam.com.

The 5th annual 6-Pack Songwriting Competition is coming to a close at the end of this week. The deadline for submissions to the first challenge is 11/15/2009 at 11:59:59 CDT, with one closing each after that until the last challenge closes at the end of 11/20/2009.

Get your songs in, keep reviewing, and watch as the leaderboard excitement picks up! It’s important to note that this year the leaderboard points are delayed by one week, so the results will not be final until December 18th, 2009.

Winners will be announced on December 18th, 2009. With over $100,000 in prizes on the line, you don’t want to miss out on your chance to take home some great prizes from Sony, IK Multimedia, Big Fish Audio, Yamaha and the rest of our great sponsors. Prize packages are awarded to the three winners in each challenge category as well as the top 20 finishers.

Attention MoB and Mini MoB’ers. Treat yourself to a Pro MoB membership upgrade!

Upgrading to a Pro MoB membership will save you money on contest and opportunity submissions, increase your media space for songs, pictures, videos and albums, and give you up to 4 free classified ads. Upgrade here.

Let the upgrade begin!