Vote online at MTV, VH1, Fuse, BET, CMT & more

The number one way for you, as a fan, to support your favorite artists is to vote for them. Vote the Music (VTM) makes this easy by providing direct links to the voting pages of all the major video countdown shows and online music sites. Even better, VTM constantly scans all the voting sites to find the places where your artist is on the ballot. That means you don’t have to go from site to site to site looking for voting opportunities, just click on the vote button for your artist and you’ll know exactly where to vote.

Tell all your friends where and when to vote

After you logged in and voted, you can put yourself in charge of video promotion by making sure all your fellow fans know where to go to vote. VTM provides customizable links that you can e-mail to all your friends. These links will send everyone right to the voting page for your specified artist. Whether you’re on your own or part of a big fan club, this is the best way to get the word out. Sure, everybody knows about a big show like TRL, but you can let them know is also important to give support on Fuse, VH1 or even places like MTV Chi or MTV Desi. With VTM, one e-mail is all it takes to round up support everywhere it matters.

Monitor your impact on all the shows and sales charts

Keep up with all the results in one place. VTM provides a comprehensive listing of all the countdowns and sales charts so you always know what’s going on with your artist. With VTM’s charts, you’ll have all the historical data in one spot, as much info as any record business insider. And if you see your favorite artist start to slide out of the countdown on an important show, you can rally the troops and get the vote count back up again. Do this enough and soon you will be a record business insider, running the promotion department at a major label.

Putting the Masses Back in Mass Communication

Not so very long ago, the biggest problems for bands – whether they were major label stars or struggling indie artists – was the simple matter of getting exposure. Radio play lists were in a state of continual contraction, so getting meaningful airtime was always a crapshoot. Budgets for videos were through the roof and the Big Three of MTV, BET and VH1 emulated their radio brethren with shortened play lists and made things even more difficult by developing more ‘programming’ and playing fewer videos.

But in a world where change is the only constant, things are different these days – and not just because of the Internet. On the traditional radio front, things are even worse. For reasons entirely unrelated to the public interest, the FCC has continued its policy of letting the public airwaves be controlled by fewer and fewer huge conglomerates, making it ever more difficult to get a crack at honest and worthwhile airplay. That is somewhat balanced by the slow rise of satellite radio – XM and Sirius. With over one hundred channels each of nationwide programming, these two have opened conduits for a wide range of music that has been essentially untouched by commercial radio.

On the video front, the number of channels programming actual music videos has exploded, with so many subspecies of VH1s and MTVs out there that’s it’s hard to keep track of them all. Did you, for example, that there is an MTV Chi (Chinese), an MTV Desi (Indian), an MTV K (Korean) and an MTV Tres (Spanish) – all being cablecast not in the countries of their languages, but right here in the United States?

And, yes, the Internet has changed everything, with about a zillion Internet radio stations, countless avenues to view videos and so many ways to buy and download music that it’s downright frightening. Any band with an handful of functioning brain cells can have an entire online package up and running within 24 hours.

So what’s the problem? Same as it ever was – getting exposure. We’ve gone from limited choice to too much choice in the blink of an eye. It’s one thing to get a band web page together and quite another to actually get anyone to stop by for a visit.

It’s the same thing in video. It’s nice that there are so many channels out there, but it’s still a chore to get good exposure on those channels. And that’s where Vote The Music (VTM) and you – the fan – get in the game.

With everything that has happened to the music landscape over the last decade or so, the one thing that bands need more than ever is the same as it ever was, the support of dedicated FANS. Fans can make the difference between a band that is a perennial close call on TRL and one that routinely retires its videos.

But TRL and its corporate cousin at BET, 106 and Park, are by no means the only games in town. All of the MTV offshoots mentioned above have their own countdown shows, as do Fuse, CMT, Logo and a handful of other channels. Online, there are countdowns and rankings from a growing number of sites like AOL, Yahoo, Pure Volume and MTV’s Overdrive.

Until now, it’s been essentially impossible to keep up with all the places that you can go to and vote for or otherwise support your favorite artists and songs. Fan pages can’t do it, the overworked staffs at the labels can’t do it and even the bands rarely have any idea of all the places where they could use your support.

That’s why we created Vote The Music. We scan the Internet 24/7, constantly updating our listings, so that you can come here…and vote there. We’ll direct you to wherever your favorite artist is in the running for a valuable countdown slot or high band ranking. Instead of going to every site and searching, all you have to do is visit VTM and we’ll link you directly to all the voting pages where your artist is available. And if we’ve missed one you know about, we’ll let you add the polling place yourself.

As VTM grows, we’ll be adding a toolbox so that you can become the campaign manager for your favorite artists, alerting fellow fans about the latest voting opportunities and rallying the troops for ultimate victory. There’s lots more coming besides that, but for now, we’re just happy to help put the masses back in mass communication.

Thanks for stopping by Vote the Music.