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What Is ProMusicDB.org?

For the first time ever as an artist, you can now control your music credits, your digital identity, manage your digital archives, and save your legacy all in one place online. And we intend for it to stay that way for you, forever.

So, what IS ProMusicDB.org? Simply put, ProMusicDB.org is a membership organization whose mission is to provide you, a music professional, with a digital platform, services, and tools, that enable you to centralize your music credits, metadata, and digital archives online.

And yes, we’re the first ones to help music professionals do that in the digital world.

Right now, we strongly desire music professionals only to join at this time as Founding Artist Members. This includes songwriters, composers, musicians, producers, engineers, background singers, performers, solo artists, etc. — anyone who would say that they have a role in the actual “creation of music.”

A general rule: founding artist members probably belong to a recognized music trade organization like AFM, SAG-AFTRA, ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, NARAS, etc.

Here are our two guiding principles:

1. Preserving Music Legacy should come from music creative themselves, as doing so will help the music industry, the music profession, and future music creatives in the digital era.

2. Practical, Centralized Solutions are necessary to unburden musicians from the digital realm. Online actions should not have to be repeated when the same (basic) information is needed for social media, distribution, licensing, and archiving.

Pretty serious stuff, but who knows about and endorses ProMusicDB?

We are proud to tell you that we have some pretty impressive fans, and have formal endorsements from the American Federation of Musicians Local 47 (Los Angeles), the Music Library Association, and Music Reports, Inc., to name a few. What do they really think? Well, here are their actual endorsement quotes:

We have also received testimonials from several well-established and highly regarded music professionals:

“Forget the fact that ProMusicDB.org is the easiest and most comprehensive database out there. Or even the fact that ProMusicDB.org ‘talks’ to more music services than any other option out there. If for no other reason, you should sign up for ProMusicDB.org just to get hundreds of hours of your life back. Think of how many more tunes you could write.” — Kevin Saunders Hayes (Composer, Songwriter, Producer)

“ProMusicDB.org is the absolute future for accurately documenting a musician’s film, television, and recording credits. This is the premiere one-stop database for artists to share their performance credits, and more importantly for anybody to find those credits.” — Terry Wollman (Recording Artist, Producer)

“Christy Crowl and her ProMusicDB.org team have pulled off the technological feat of the 21st century for professional musicians. As a musician and a technologist, I am all too aware of the challenges that exist in regard to validating information about music creators and musicians online. From my perspective, ProMusicDB.org not only encourages musicians to begin preserving their digital legacy, but bridges the gap between archival and business worlds for validated artist-contributed information. I applaud ProMusicDB.org’s monumental accomplishment to-date, and I encourage my colleagues to become members in this collective endeavor.” — Kimmy Szeto, Vocal Accompanist and Arranger, Argento Chamber Ensemble

I hope you get the idea that we haven’t taken on this mission light-heartedly in any way. As you can imagine, this is a doozy of something to take on.

So, who started ProMusicDB.org?

ProMusicDB.org was founded by a professional musician like you, and her name is Christy Crowl. She is what you would call a “working musician,” — she tours with some major live shows and artists, plays, conducts, and/or sings in about 200 shows a year, sings on recording sessions for movies, and does a lot of work as a Music Director and in the orchestrating/arranging realm. She is also a “Teaching Artist” for a prominent Los Angeles Performing Arts organization, and teaches collaboration through music to elementary school students. Any working musician probably wears a lot of hats just like she does.

So, why did Christy decide to spend three years creating ProMusicDB.org?

Well, in a nutshell — she loves being a musician — but she’s gotten so bogged down with everything being a musician and running her own career in the digital era requires. We need some serious help with everything we’re being asked to do online now. Maybe some of this will look familiar to you:

In addition, in a previous musical life Christy was a Top 40 Adult Contemporary artist with her own indie label. On top of being the “talent,” she booked her own tours, shows, publicity, and maintained her website and all the social media outlets she had to in order to just “be out there.”

On top of that, Christy wore the music business person hat for herself — she was in charge of following up on getting paid for her music that was licensed and/or distributed both in stores and online, tracking her radio play, figuring out who she needed to contact or “register with” to make sure she was the attributed songwriter and owner of her work on a Film/TV license, and she spent endless hours filing documents to prove she sang or played on different recording sessions.

In doing all of this, Christy found herself repeating and repeating her actions and submitting the same information to dozens of different entities that each served a different purpose in her musical food chain. And with more and more entities to get information to, the greater responsibility she had to keep track of where all the information was about her career. But keeping a running record of it all up to date and on her website wasn’t a solution, either.

Christy was stuck in an unending cycle of being a slave to the Internet, surfing website to social media site trying to keep everything up to date in all places, even if those places weren’t geared towards helping her music career or her profession.

Christy’s conclusions after 20 years of being “in the music biz”?

1. None of the entities that she needed to share information electronically with each other regarding her professional music work in order to save time and give credit actually do, and it’s not actually their function to do this.

2. There’s really no way for anyone or any current organization to know what the artist knows about their music career and keep up with their information and credits the way an artist can and does.

3 . One day it will make sense to turn off the artist’s personal website, social media will probably be completely different in a few years, and all that info the artist has put into both of them will be left floating around the Internet and lost.

So, obviously, the big idea was to figure it out, as it needs to be. Then create some good with it.

And the good we hope that we collectively create is this:

The story of music shouldn’t be so hard to tell — because in fact, so many people in a practical sense need to know “Who wrote that song?” and “Can I find out who played on that recording?” for business purposes.

What we do online can be practical, but don’t have to lose who we are. After all, we play or create the music of everyone’s life.

The diagram above shows the power behind ProMusicDB, and if you’re a Founding Artist, this will be behind you. This is our vision — and as we grow and develop with more members, we can make these further integrations happen, because we already know HOW they need to happen.

And here is a chart showing how we are different from other existing credits databases:

So, how would you use ProMusicDB? Here are 6 possible ways:

  1. To keep a record of all your professional activities current and in one place (like your live performances and recording credits).
  2. To keep everything that’s digital on a project in one place, related to your credits so it’s easier to find and locate later (like pictures, logic files, cue sheets, video clips, concert programs, press articles).
  3. To see what’s out there about you and filter/correct it (like what’s on Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, etc.).
  4. To give your colleagues credit on a project you worked together on.
  5. To save time and effort online and get back hours of your life.
  6. To take control of your information, your digital identity, and your professional reputation online.

What do you get as a Founding Artist Member?

  1. A practical, centralized solution for your musical life online.
  2. An integrated platform that can handle all your music credits and archives, and gives you a centralized location online for it.
  3. A 5 GB personal and private archive to put it in.
  4. We also offer help with this, and can assist you with a Personal Profile Setup.
  5. You’ll get hours of your life back by letting us do this for you!
  6. An online and a physical archive of your credits from up to five sources, researched by a Personal Credits Curator.
  7. Six months free of “Credit Keeping Services” — just email us your professional calendar, and we’ll keep your profile as current as possible.

We can tell the story of music and be practical, but we don’t have to lose who we are. Because we play the music of everyone’s life.

Founding Artist Member Enrollment is open through November 30, 2016.

Please visit https://promusicdb.org/ for more information, or register for a free on-demand informational webinar site demo at https://app.webinarjam.net/register/31302/b5452d2461.