5 Hypebot Questions With Music Arsenal’s Jimmy Winter

Music Arsenal is a web based application that helps smaller indie labels keep track of contacts and data.  Since founder Jimmy Winter spends his days working with indies, we thought he might have an interesting perspective on that important and growing industry sector.

What do you think about the current state of Independent record labels? – Indie Record Labels have an opportunity to grow now more than ever. Promotions have become easier through sites like MySpace and PureVolume, its easier to get online and ringtone distribution through digital aggregation companies and labels are working together through organizations like A2IM towards a common goal. The majors and pop culture are going to keep looking to indies for whats new and fresh.

How can your product Music Arsenal help Indie labels survive and thrive? – Music Arsenal helps labels get their day-to-day operations and data all in line and their employees collaborate and share information. If everyone at a label is sharing their data with each other and all are on the same page on projects, tours, etc., an end result of that is going to be a tighter organization with more sales and exposure.

What differentiates your product for the competition? – There aren’t many applications available designed for record labels and Music Arsenal is the only one available as a web based application. Its available 24/7, anywhere in the world, on any computer platform through nearly any web browser and eliminates the need for computer hardware purchase, having to install upgrades and worrying about your computer crashing or corrupting.

Tell us about some of the labels that use Music Arsenal? – Some of the labels using Music Arsenal now are We The People Records, Kufala, Sonic Boom Recordings, Drive-Thru Records, Swami Records, Light In The Attic and plenty of smaller, one or two man operations.

What do you see in the future for Indie labels? – I think indie labels will continue gaining more of the overall market share and their artists keep getting as much recognition as the major artists. I also think there will be more success stories at the levels of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah due to there being so many more, easier avenues for music to be heard.

Bonus Question: Share something cool your working on, thinking about or just on love with. Shameless self promotion is allowed. – I’m very excited about what we’re creating in Music Arsenal for Bands. Its not released yet but there are some killer brand new features in there that are going to give bands the edge to take them to the next level. What else am I in love with? The new Van Stone album, the most recent Marked Men album and some of really cool applications other web 2.0 companies are creating.