Monsters Are Not Myths Kill Valentine's Day Lameness

Monsters Are Not Myths are at it again – our favorite San Fran Indie band are spreading the love this Valentine’s day with more personalized songs for that special person in your life.  From their website:

Monsters are not Myths, beloved Bay Area band and all-around funny people, will call your loved one or crush and sing them a customized song for FREE! (plus, we'll even send you a mp3 of the call)

We don't sign you up for any mailing lists or try to sell you things...all we'll do is ask that you check out our music.

Check them out performing calls on Mother's Day:

In a world full of lameness how cool is this?

We wrote a while back about Tim Halperin who was running a competition along similar lines but we have to hand it to MANM who’ve been doing this approach for a while, and unlike Tim you can contact MANM right now and still give your main squeeze something unique this year.

They have a simple sign up form that asks a few questions so that they can personalize the song – and if you’re digging the service – why not drop them a small donation – you don’t have to but hell – isn’t this worth more than hallmark card and sad looking stuffed puppy you were thinking of? Here's a little more MANM for you:

Finally – if you dig MANM – you should enter the#FREECHAOS website and hosting competition for them – or for any band that you dig – free site, free hosting and free ecommerce! – Wow – that’s a Valentine’s gift any band would be happy with.

Give Your Girlfiend Tim Halperin For Valentine's Day

Tim Halperin's music is piano driven accessible pop / rock – think The Fray, Ben Folds, ColdPlay with an 80’s twist – that kind of thing – he’s got a great distinctive voice that sits nicely on top and he writes the kind of songs that make your girlfriend open up.

But we’re writing about him today ‘cos we want to throw a light on some of the great ideas he’s putting into place to get his career going.  First off – check this video out:

How cool is that – you’ve got another 2 days to get in there.  What a great idea and doesn’t he come across totally charming and genuine on the video – you don’t exactly need a $5k video budget to make this work do you?

What really struck me though his how he’s quite literally “playing to his audience”- clever guy, playing the Sororities – that’s genius!  Not only do you get gigs you get gigs in front of chicks – in their houses – where their rooms are – as I said Genius.

He’s got smart of use of merch with a hook up into Zazzle – a great "Help Tim” page where he tells you how you can help him and how to connect across his various networks – and finally he’s making good use of NoiseTrade – another tool that helps get his music out and about while still allowing him to make dough.

His site design is pretty simple and straightforward – I reckon he could benefit from having a blog – it would put his videos, photography and news into some kind of context. It looks as though he's on the Joomla platform right now - which is fine but not so easy to get blogging.

If Tim entered the #FREECHAOS competition he could win a brand new spangly wordpress site that would make blogging a snap - it would also get rid of those janky urls which must be buggering up his SEO.

Overall however – I think he’s doing a pretty good job.  If that kind of music is your thing – check him out – he makes it really easy to get hold of him.