Very happy with TalentCast, that give independent artists the oppertunity to be heard.

The presentation of the playlist could be better, it's very Dutch-English, sorry for that!

Thank you Piet. I really do my utmost with presenting the programme and I realize myself that it's far from perfect. I am afraid that I am more talented with mathematics and physics than with speaking and writing in foreign languages.

TalentCast started nine years ago with another presenter, but she left in 2010. Although presentation is not my favourite thing to do, I took it over to continue TalentCast.

Also thank you for uploading your new songs.

I like TalentCast as it is, great idea and lots of interesting music! Thank You very much!

Kattern

Good to hear from you Kattern. Thank you very much.

Great having somewhere to listen to Independent artists

I've been less than a month on TalentCast and I really glad I made it here which I first knew about from my friend John McMenamin from Moscato. It's a great source for us INDIE artists. I love visit this great site and participate in it opportunities to show my music work to the world.

Thank you Martin and Bamil. I really appreciate your response.

Johan, regarding presentation, one thing I like about TalentCast is the sound of your voice. You're an improvement on MissY.

With Sellaband gone it is nice to have a forum here, so that is one thing that has gone right, even though the forum has not been used much yet.

Thanks Peter, nice to hear that, although I really enjoyed it to make the programme together with MissY.

I am sad that so many people only use Facebook nowadays. A forum is so completely different, not only your Facebook friends and fans read it, but also others who have the same interests and people who find us by coincidence, for example via search engines.

I made the forum, because so far I am making the programme, artists send music and listeners tune in via the podcast or radio, but there is hardly any interaction. I think the interaction with listeners and artists is what I miss the most since the SellaBand forum is gone.

Also nice that almost everybody uploads a photo. This is the first time that I see how the forum really looks. It was quite a job to make it, because I almost never use code of others when I program for the website. On the forum only the rich text editor is made by somebody else, Trix editor.

TalentCast is great - I really enjoy the fresh music, enthusiasm and, as an artist, appreciate your support!

I think forums are fun, so long as they are well-moderated and steps put in place to combat spam and abuse (which I have experienced).

In recent years I am certainly guilty of putting most of my time into social media, especially Facebook. I don't know why this is, but I guess time and the fact that Facebook has network and content in the same place.

Also, with the popularity of smartphones, communication systems that come with an app are much easier for checking/communicating on the go. I guess it's important to have a strong social media strategy in place, so that folks are reminded of the site and will check regularly.

One thing I'm not a big fan of is Google+, it messes with my Google Calendar which I use for a very specific purpose, so I have had to decline these invites, but that doesn't mean I am not listening! Haha.

There's no harm in using others' code and templates such as WordPress when making websites, it can really help you save time and give you lots of flexibility to make fast changes.

All the best and keep up the good work!

Thanks for your long reply Benny. I started this thread to learn from opinions of our members, but compliments are also nice to read.

I build the forum because one of our members suggested it and because I like it myself. Here are mainly visitors with the same interests and to me it somehow feels more cosily.

When I started to build the website, I wanted to learn and understand how everything works. Many code has vulnerabilities. For that reason I was always afraid to use code or templates of others. If there is a vulnerability in code of others, many people know about it. When you have your own code, it's for most people too much effort to find the vulnerabilities, at least for small projects like TalentCast. I also feel responsible to protect the account information of our members the best I can and I think I can only do that with writing all code myself.

And yes, I will continue as long as I get enough good independent music to play in the programme.

Great to be played on global(!) radio. The earth is indeed flat on internet. Talentcast attracts so many varied styles and artists/bands and give them the boost on radiowaves. Radio is still an important force. The more listeners (and there are always curious ones), the better for unknown songs. Keep up the positive vibes!

Thanks for your support

We have nothing but praise for Talentcast, great support with all new music, we used the album listening show to  great success. Keep up the good work Johan. The internet needs more people like you, bringing new music to the masses

Also JoosTVD and The Crocked Monsieurs, thanks for your positive replies. You bring some good energy in these dark autumn days which I really hate.

And for our other members who didn't reply yet: Any response about TalentCast is welcome in this thread, positive, negative, suggestions, improvements, whatever.

If you like to start a new thread on this forum, please do. You can start threads about:

I am just thankful that there are devoted people like you Johan that give a voice or should I say an ear to the Indie artists. It is so very, very hard to get people to listen to our music, so good folks like you are a much welcomed friend to the Indie artist. Thanks for all you do Johan, it is much appreciated, at least my this Indie artist.

In the begin Talentcast was closely connected to crowdfunding site Sellaband, everyone knows what's happened and how it came to an end. Also music platforms ReverbNation and MySpace are a source for the weekly music program and charts by voting. Later became Soundcloud and as last Bandcamp also a source.

Together with Johan his private music collection are this music websites an enormous great source to create the weekly radio program.

My personal vision that I finds always the same names go back into the playlists while there are a multitude of other artists who have never got a chance.

On the basis of the number of votes you notice that there is only a small group of listeners are constant (+/- 30). There are certain artists once again in the list than there are that week suddenly a mass more votes.

I do wonder whether this really all be listened or that fans and friends who just vote at the request of certain artists.

I listen every week here at Talent Cast of Fame Music Radio and of course I vote also for my personal favorites..

Hi DJ Freger, Thanks for your reply. With the amount of podcast listeners you are quite right (about 65 listeners a week at the moment), but don't forget we have also thousands of listeners via FM, cable radio, digital radio, the news text channel of Ede TV and internet radio of Ede FM. These listeners don't come to our website to vote. They are in their car on their way home, read the news text on Ede TV or do whatever. We have a few active listeners who come to vote, but mainly fans of the artists who are played in the programme are willing to vote. I am often surprised that podcast listeners don't vote, because they are already online, but it's the way iit is.

GoLian, also thank you for your opinion.

hello Johan, hello fellow Musicians and Music Lovers,

first of all a big thank you Johan for your efforts to make and keep alive TalentCast. 

Yes, we usually post votings on other social media to mobilize our fans. we guess also that they just vote but most often will not listen to the Radio. There are many pros and cons about these votings! What I like here is that one IP can vote only once. In other votings it is hard to tell your fan base to vote several times (sometimes every hour for one week is possible...). 

So the result will reflect only, which band has the bigger fan base or the more loyal fan base than it would say anything about the taste or quality of the music. Nor does it, as stated before, drive more listeners to a Radio Stations usually. 

To get more listeners I guess there have to be other means, one idea would be (if it was a live radio show) to make it more interactive (take phone calls during the show) and honor the effort of the caller with giveaways from the bands (CDs, T-Sirts, ...). For the podcast, you maybe could put some quiz questions into the stream and give an email address to send answers to etc. I am sure the bands here will send you some stuff as giveaways and can come up with more ideas.

To improve the "quality" of the voting, maybe the fan votes should be only one part and votes from DJs and other musicians could be another part. I am thinking of sort of a Jury that has also an impact of, say, 50% on the result for the top hits list or the selection of the aired songs.

I am well aware that this is mainly a one-man-show and that you are competing with much larger stations that have other resources and possibilities. my hope is to activate a bit the readers (fellow musicians, DJs, etc.) and maybe there are coming other/more ideas, or even offers for some help. For example, someone that says he would do a neat logo for you for free, nice pictures for the site, program code for a missing function etc. So I hope this is only the beginning of a cool discussion among the members here to start something really cool.

thank you all and have a great day,

Reto

COREIGN

https://coreign.ch/

Thank you for you ideas Reto, very appreciated. Yes, TalentCast is indeed mainly a one-person project and I am quite at the limit of what I can do, because of my health situation and because running the project really takes a lot of time, about 30 hours a week, and often more. Last summer break I didn't have a break at all and spent my time on programming the website. This summer I will have to install two new servers with new server software, and I will have to replace almost all hardware. The software has expired, the hard disks are full and at the moment there is just one simple consumer hard disk keeping up the server. If it breaks, the website and mailserver will be down for a longer time. So I cannot delay maintenance any longer. That's why I will start the summer break one month earlier than usual.

For TalentCast, listeners mainly come via our radio stations, not via our podcast, and I am very grateful to Ede FM, Universe Radio and Fame Music Radio for Broadcasting TalentCast every week. Although quite some people listen via our partner radio stations, not many are willing to visit our website and to vote, so far out most votes come via the fans and friends of the artists.

Some years ago I updated the voting page and prepared it for counting votes differently for certain members, for example regular listeners or for people who vote after listening to the programme. In the end Catself and I decided to keep the voting as simple as it is. Everybody understands the rules and nobody can say that we treat some artists better than others. Some of our artists dislike the voting, they simply don't invite their fans to vote for them.

I know how annoying it is to bother your fans and friends by asking them to vote for you. Indeed you have to vote frequently very many times per voting round or to connect with your Facebook profile, or even like a page. I tried to keep it as simple as possible, knowing that people would try to cheat the voting. To keep the voting simple it took my quite some time to build monitoring tools to detect manipulators.

To be honest, for me the voting and also the amount of website visitors is not so very important, it's just nice if people come to vote. I am happy that quite some people listen via the radio stations to our artists and I hope they enjoy it.

Last summer when I built this forum, I hoped that more members would write here, because I would really love it if TalentCast would become a small community where artists and fans meet, support and advise each other. When TalentCast started ten years ago, SellaBand was such a place and I really enjoyed it. For me social media websites are competitors, not other independent music radio stations. It's great there are so many.

Nice, while writing this, a great musician signed up. Let's make him an account. Hopefully next Friday on TalentCast.

For sure I will Benny. Thank you very much.

It was really nice to meet you and Chester, and to see you both perform in Leeuwarden last Wednesday.

Success with touring France the upcoming weeks and have a good time together. Oh yeah, don't forget to say 'hi' to Chester from me.