Whazzup ProCollabers!
Newsletter #14 - April, 2016
Happy Emancipation Day! And McDonalds Day and National Glazed Spiral Ham Day, and Income Tax Pay Day. Yeah, those are all actual events. 
Video Sync Challenge 2016 – Rio Winners & Runners Up
A huge congrats to the winners of the Video Sync Challenge – Team Embers & Vuya. You guys did an amazing job. So far it’s been the judge’s favorite challenge and ours too! And of course a super loud shout-out to the runner up teams – Jasmin92 & Xan – and HootenAnnie & GoodVibes.
We know that these challenges can be a bit stressful and time consuming, but that is why they are called challenges. Sometimes you have to put extra effort into these specific challenges. You might have to keep after your collaborators, or stay up a bit later than usual to get your parts done, etc. But in the end, we hope you guys think it’s worth the extra effort.
On another note – please know that the video(s) that were created are under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Which means, you can take the video & put it on your YouTube channel, or on your personal website – or on any other site you’d like.
All that is required is a link to the original owner’s video. You can find that on any of the challenge video descriptions on our YouTube channel.
Tip of the Month
Do you have an idea for a song? Then you probably already started a project on ProCollabs.
But what happened next? Did you sit back and patiently wait for one of our many talented members to upload an audition, or did you take the initiative and start contacting members and inviting them to participate?
We’ve seen a lot of projects started, but many get quickly forgotten as they drop lower and lower in the active project listings.
This month’s tip, “be a proactive project manager”. These tips will be posted on our forum!
If you’ve got comments or your own ideas for how we can be more effective as project managers, join in by going to our Tip of the Month forum section.
Member’s Availability Status
On a related note, a reminder that members are expected to respond promptly to private messages and project invites. If you are messaging other members and they are not responding within a reasonable amount of time, we’d like to hear about it so that we can disable their availability status on their profile.
If you are one of those members who is sometimes unable to respond to messages, then please have the courtesy to set your own “Availability” notice to off. Setting the notice to “off” informs other members that you are not currently available for collaborations.
What’s New?
PRO Information
If you are affiliated as a songwriter with a Performance Rights Organization (PRO), you can now enter your CAE/IPI no. in the Edit Profile section from your Dashboard. Your info will be included in your split sheets and can optionally be displayed on your profile.
Affiliates, Friends & Partners
This month, we’ve added a new section called “Affiliates, Friends & Partners”. We’ll be using this new space to link to other related sites that may be of interest to our members.
The ‘affiliate’ links are links to other sites that we think are relevant and will be of interest to some of you, such as sites offering tuition, music services and products. We are not endorsing these sites in anyway, but we do receive a small incentive through their affiliate program, which, in the long term, we hope will be able to contribute in some small way to the ongoing maintenance costs of the site.
We will also be adding any links to sites where we have established some kind of partnership or reciprocal arrangement with other music related sites. Here, we also hope to be able to include sites that are offering special discounts or other offers to our members.
Last, but certainly not least, as a new benefit to our members, we now offer free advertising to those members having their own professional music related business.Your advertisement will be visible both internally to members, and externally to visitors.
So, if you have a recording studio, or any music related business where you charge for your services, you can advertise here for FREE! As members and business owners, we hope you’ll take advantage of this opportunity given that internet based advertising can typically cost anywhere upwards of $500 per month! For more details, click here.
Spread The Word!
Word of mouth counts. Spread the word about ProCollabs, if you enjoy collaborating with others, then invite your musician friends to join.
And please do stop by our social media pages and show us some lurve. We're happy that our numbers are growing, but they can triple if you guys can help pimp us too. Below are the links to our Social Media pages.
https://twitter.com/procollabs
https://www.facebook.com/proco
https://plus.google.com/+Proco
New Members
Warm welcome to all of our new members this month!
We encourage all newbies to introduce themselves in the forum introduction thread and get collaborating asap. There's no shortage of talented and creative individuals in ProCollabs Projectland, so jump on it! Talents in need include guitars, vocals, keyboards, drums, strings, brass and others – all in various genres!
We'll be sending out more updates soon. In the meantime, get yourself on over to procollabs.com and let's make some new and exciting music together!
