It sounded great, but trying to find out what it was so that we could play it on the radio proved to be an exercise in weeping frustration.

Tom Robinson presents Fresh on the Net on BBC 6 Music

Last Saturday, Newcastle's Discovery Museum played host to another showcase of new musical talent from the North East (you can read my write-up of last year's event here). It was promoted as a free afternoon event by the local music development agency Generator as "Transmission - the NEw Wave" (capitalisation intentional; see what they did there?).

This year the catchment area extended south to Teesside. A panel - consisting of Bob Fischer from BBC Introducing at Radio Tees, Kingsley from The Chapman Family and myself - were invited along to offer comments and encouragement to five new local acts in a strictly non-competitive setting. And, once again, two established headliners were booked to round off the afternoon's entertainment.

First up, Cult Image had the unenviable job of opening the event in a large room that was only starting to fill up. A dark, powerful four piece with the classic Smiths/Joy Division lineup, they laid into their set with an authority and conviction you'd never guess from the early demos on their MySpace page. Kingsley admired the vocal stylings and startling cardigan of frontman Sean McMahon but it seemed to me the real kingpin was Fintan Dawson behind the kit, whacking out the backbeats with metronomic precision and a wonderful feel. Bassist Anthony Hethrington and guitarist Chris Knight simply locked into place around him, Knight creating a wide ocean of sound without any flashy posturing - or even apparent effort.

This is a group that will never need a rhythm guitarist. To overtake the competition they perhaps need to move up a gear with their songwriting but for players this good it's simply a question of putting in the hours: the more you write the better you get. Watch this space - with a batch of memorable and well-recorded anthems under their collective belt, Cult Image will be unstoppable.

Next up were Ajimal (formely Ideogram), a shapeshifting beast of a band that hasn't yet decided quite what it wants to be. Tyneside guitar legend Mick Ross (currently with Frankie & The Heartstrings) rates Fran O'Hanlon as one of the region's most important songwriters. A thoughtful, widely-read individual fired by a restless curiosity, Fran's material is dense and ambitious. Yet hearing him with Ajimal it was clear that as a live entity, the trio of songwriters he now fronts is still in experimental form. Violinist Stefan Noons and multi-instrumentalist Jan Rezner are strong players but - awash with digital sound from Fran's piano and Rezner's electronic wizadry - the whole was somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Interestingly, Ajimal are named after a Haitian witchdoctor and when, beset by technical problems, they ditched everything to play an unamplified last number - we finally heard a hint of the primitive, elemental spirit in O'Hanlon's best material. Technology is often liberating in the studio - but live it can also be a severe liability. Audiences don't go to gigs for the joy of hearing a particular sound played back through a speaker. We go to shows in order to witness a performance.
.

Teesside was represented by the Stokesley five-piece Toyger, playing only their sixth or seventh gig, since forming in Spring this year. The only hint to their lack of experience came from a slight unsteadiness in the powerhouse drumming of Wayne Mizzi, that left him slightly at odds with the rest of the band. It's a problem common to young musicians that soon solves itself with gigging, and wouldn't even have been noticeable had they been slamming out hamfisted garage rock. But Toyger have set the bar remarkably high, delivering brave, ambitious music with panache via the twin guitar attack of James Diggins and Wayne's brother Dean plus the excellent Nick Short on bass.

As Brian Eno once wrote, "an arrangement is where somebody stops playing" and Toyger's songs were arranged with a subtlety that escapes many professional musicians twice their age. Their not-so-secret weapon is Rory Duffy, easily the most charismatic vocalist of the afternoon. Completely at home behind the microphone he made easy eye contact chatting with the audience between songs - and delivered each lyric as if his life depended on it. And, a rarity among bands of any calibre, you could hear every single word.

By the time Matadors took the stage, the Discovery Museum's Great Hall had filled up. A confident quartet of 6th form students from Heaton, they grabbed the audience from the get-go with their storming opener Glass House. The chorus not only had me singing along in seconds, but there were some nicely jagged guitar arrangements to keep the surprises coming.

Their main songwriting axis lies centre stage between drummer Joss Elder and frontman Alex Blamire, balanced by Joe Sowter and Liam Clarke on either side. Four focussed, ambitious young men who give the strong impression of having their eye on the proverbial ball. Even without obvious clues such as matching clothes or haircuts, they somehow even looked more like a band than the previous three acts, and Bob Fischer eloquently praised the tough edge to their sound.

Having grown up as a teenager in the sixties, what struck me overwhelmingly about both Matadors and Toyger was the astonishing quality of musicianship among today's young players. Grumpy Old Men often hark back to the far-off days when bands could really play their instruments, but thinking back to the standard of school groups I used to play with back in that supposed golden age, they couldn't be further from the truth.

The Discovery Museum was presenting seven new bands for free that afternoon, but you could pay a lot of money at a top venue without seeing a better band than Vinyl Jacket. We'd just watched four groups with great potential, but here - suddenly - was the finished article: joyful, life-affirming music by musicians with an absolute command of their instruments and the stage. Their whole set sparkled with loving attention to detail - from drummer David Pullen throwing in unexpected backing vocals amid a barrage of cross-rhythms, to the astonishing Sam Quilliam hammering out virtuoso handpercussion with ferocious energy behind his keyboards. It was only at the end that frontman Ben Dancer (whose brother Jack is on bass) publicly thanked their guitarist for learning the set in two days flat. It seems regular member Andy Roberts had suffered an embarrassing hand injury and Grandfather Birds guitarist Stuart Walkinshaw had stepped in to save the day.

The world may not have heard of them yet but, take it from me, Vinyl Jacket are a band at the very top of their game. One memorable radio record is all it needs and they'll be all over the 6 Music playlist like a rash.

Finally we three panellists were officially thanked and dismissed. The stage was then set, quite literally, for longer sets by the two headline bands - both already well established within the region's flourishing indie scene.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Chased By Wolves. The demos we'd heard on MySpace were melodic and memorable: acoustic sketches featuring the twin vocals of Richard Smith and Emma Williams, tinged with a sepia hint of Americana.  The word "folk" had been bandied carelessly around in their online reviews, and sure enough second guitarist Tom Fletcher was busy strapping on an acoustic.

And yet... the band themselves looked more like a renegade motorcycle gang than any kind of folk group: all tattooes, black vests and lumberjack shirts. And the music they made was a million miles removed from the usual selfindulgent slop you get when singer-songwriters recruit a backing group.With crunching guitars teetering on the brink of feedback and the sledgehammer rhythm section of Lewis Brett on drums and Jim Brown on five string bass, this was authentic brooding Americana from Newcastle - Byker gothic, if you like.

The songs sound very much more at home in this setting and the big shame is that you can only hear so called "teasers" of their latest recordings online. Why some bands still follow the idiotic practice of making sure nobody hears their best songs (in the hope of forcing us to buy them) is beyond me.

And so to Polarsets: three gifted and charismatic individuals whose grasp of marketing is second to none. Their knack for irrestistble hooks and killer grooves has already translated to two outstanding singles, and I wondered how such carefully produced music could be presented live by just a trio. The band themselves have obviously given plenty of thought to the same question. Rob Howe and Mickey Smith set up their matching white guitars, synths and laptops on either side of the kit - giving their stage set the clear and uncluttered look of a TV studio.

Everything about Polarsets, it seems, is planned to perfection - yet somehow last Saturday it all seemed just too planned, too perfect. Rob's guitar and vocals, Mickey's bass and James Rudd's exhuberant drumming were faultltess, but also subtly synched up with backing tracks to provide the extra textures. So although their set was consumately professional, it was also strangely unmoving. I longed for them to cut loose and rock out with some of the passion that had inspired these songs in the first place.

• Polarsets
• Chased by Wolves
• Vinyl Jacket
• Matadors
• Toyger
• Ajimal
• Cult Image
  
• More Generator events in the North East
  

Launched three years ago as an outlet for editor Martin Kendrick's musical musings, Noize Makes Enemies has quickly grown into a fully-fledged 'zine as passionate music fans and hip young gunslingers have joined the online team of scribes.

The reviews are passionate, the interviews respectful and the photos and postings crackle with the kind of life only genuine grassroots reporting can offer. Augmenting the site is a growing community of noizemakers voicing opinions and sharing musical loves, hates, news and views through its messageboards, blogs and social network.

The editorial team are always on the hunt for brand new music writers to review albums, singles and gigs, write features and interview bands. Payment is in kind rather than cash - but if that's no problem and you can offer commitment, enthusiasm and an appetite for startling new music, they want to hear from you at noizemakesenemies.co.uk. That's why they're my Website of the Week this week. 

Links

http://www.noizemakesenemies.co.uk

Tom Robinson presents BBC Introducing - Fresh on the Net on BBC 6 Music.

When promoters, publishers, managers and broadcasters want to find out about an artist, there are five basic facts we like to know: who you are, what you look like, what you sound like, where you're playing and how to contact you.

But, as anyone who's spent any time online knows, most artists are extraordinarily bad at conveying this fundamental information in a clear and accessible manner.

Enter Sonicbids.com - which allows artists to create an Electronic Press Kit and send it to the key people people who book, license or broadcast music anywhere in the world.

You can update your EPK on Sonicbids anytime with your latest songs, press buzz and tour dates and use it to connect with people either within the Sonicbids network or outside it. Promoters on the other hand can find talent for local street fairs, international music festivals, songwriting contests, licensing opportunities, radio and more besides.

Since we live in a world where bills have to be paid, the site also offers corporate brands and indie bands a chance to get into bed with each other. OK, so sponsorship and endorsement aren't for everyone, but Sonicbids holds open the possibilty for those that do want it.

So that's why I chose Sonicbids.com as this week's Website of the Week on BBC Introducing - Fresh on the Net.

Links

http://www.sonicbids.com/

Tom Robinson presents BBC Introducing - Fresh on the Net on BBC 6 Music.

For one week only we're throwing modesty to the winds and proposing own podcast as our Website Of The Week. The reason is, we're giving away a spectacular free two-hour mixtape of brilliant music by some of our favourite acts from the first three months of 2010.

The unique thing about our BBC Introducing show on 6 Music is that we don't only check out tunes sent to us by musicians via the BBC Introducing Uploader. We also have a recommend music page where anybody - literally anybody - can tell us about great new tunes they've discovered online, anywhere in the world. 

Week after week, we're gobsmacked by the sheer quality of new independent music that listeners and musicians suggest for the show. This double podcast of favourites is available until 3am next Monday, so if you like these 32 tunes as much as we do, then spread the word and tell your friends.

If you know of more great music elsewhere on the web - including your own - then tell us where to find it. If we like it, we'll play it - it's as simple as that.

Tom Robinson presents BBC Introducing - Fresh on the Net on BBC 6 Music

In today's broadband-enabled age, online musical collaborations are so common they're pretty much taken for granted. Yet although the likes of Soundcloud and Yousendit make it pretty painless to send files back and forth these days - actually syncing them (so everyone has the latest version) has remained a bit of a headache. At least, up until now.

Dropbox.com does the job better than any service we've ever seen - across any number (or any combination) of Macs and PCs. All the files are stored locally on your hard disk - updating rapidly and seamlessly in the background. Everyone in the team always has the same folder with the same files right there on their own desktop.

So, for example, if you save a new recording of that solo you've been tweaking on your computer, it updates on everyone else's machine moments later. Better yet, you get full multiple undo: if you make a mistake, just retrieve an older version from the Dropbox web site.

Best of all, as long as you don't exceed two gigabytes of storage space, the service is completely free. So for writers, musicians, designers - in fact anyone who needs to access the same files from different computers - DropBox.com is this week's Website of the Week.

Links

https://www.dropbox.com

Tom Robinson presents BBC Introducing - Fresh on the Net on BBC 6 Music.

Which is why you and I need Wufoo - a lean, clean and beautifully designed form-building tool you can use in a web browser with no expertise at all. Wufoo helps you create things like contact forms, web surveys and invitations without writing a single line of code.

It might help you make a mailing list box or an order form - for instance using PayPal - which can integrate seamlessly into the look and feel of your existing band blog or website. All very handy.

Any incoming entries are sent to you by email or RSS as aoon as they arrive, and there's no longterm contract.

I found the site to be fast, fun and easy to understand. You can even have three forms and 100 entries a month for free. So for these reasons, Wufoo.com is my new website of the week.

Links

http://wufoo.com/

Tom Robinson presents BBC Introducing - Fresh on the Net on BBC 6 Music

Their sessions have featured the cream of Britain's indie aristocracy, including Micachu and the Shapes, Peggy Sue, Kill It Kid, Internet Forever, Brakes, Sons of Noel and Adrian, Emmy The Great and Speech Debelle - not to mention Lulu and the Lampshades - all of whom have busked on their bandstands for free. 

You don't even need to live near London to enjoy the video interviews and performances posted on their website - or subscribe to their podcasts, all of which are free and permanently available.

The whole thing is run by a cooperative of music likers with a range of different skills and passions. Anybody is welcome to help with suggestions, filming skills, promotion, feedback and opinions. For these reasons, I picked Bandstand Busking as my Website of the Week on the show this weekend.

Links

http://bandstandbusking.com/

http://www.youtube.com/bandstandbusking

Tom Robinson presents BBC Introducing - Fresh on the Net on BBC 6 Music

As more and more musicians come to realise the ideal band website is in fact a blog, the importance of ping becomes ever greater. Not (in this case) the kind of ping used for testing network connection speeds, but the sort that lets everyone know your blog has been updated.

Pingomatic.com is a single simple web page that allows you to ping 23 major aggregators (from Feedburner and Technorati to the likes of Icerocket and WeBlogaLot) in seconds. It's provided by the Wordpress foundation, works with blogs on every possible platform and - yes - it is completely free to use.

Bloggers! Bookmark the page and use it every time you publish a new post: Pingomatic.com is my latest Website of the Week.

Tom Robinson presents BBC Introducing - Fresh on the Net on BBC 6 Music

The Indie Maximum Exposure 100 is an entire subsection created by a team of industry experts - plus artists making a fulltime living from music - and it offers, as the name suggests, a hundred nuggets of valuable advice that every recording artist would do well to consider. 

Every headline is followed by an explanatory blog and appropriate onward links. Whether it's "Get Involved in Your Home Town", "Join Charitable Organisations", "Post photos on Flickr" or "Create Cover Tune Videos" the site provides a comprehensive tool chest of creative promotional ideas - ranging from the fiendishly cunning to the blindingly obvious. That's why, by quite some margin, musicthinktank.com/100 is my Website of the Week.

Read our interview with Andrew Dubber and Bruce Warila from MusicThinkTank.com.

Listen to Tom Robinson on BBC 6 Music

Launched late in 2008, Fairtilizer offers an alternative means for artists, labels and media to publish and promote music from one single place, offering public and private URLs for your tracks, playlists, widgets, statistics and more.

Based in Switzerland, Paris and New York, Fairtilizer describes itself as a 'Do It Yourself Music Club' and combines the licensing, publishing and selling opportunities of sites like Bandcamp with the easy customisation of access offered by the likes of Soundcloud.

Music discovery and rating options are available for music fans and consumers, and in its relatively short existence, Fairtilizer has managed to drum up a substantial following.

Their embeddable music widget can be used by bands and fans alike across all blogging platforms and social networking sites.

For example, here's a player created by Sheffield's Bromheads:

I think the site offers the best combination of attractiveness and functionality I've seen for a while, which is why Fairtilizer.com is my Website of the Week.

Tom Robinson presents BBC Introducing - Fresh on the Net on BBC 6 Music on Sunday and Monday nights.

Read Tom's previous Websites of the Week.

Website of the Week this week is the grandly-named Internet Archive - a non-profit digital library founded in 1996 with the impossibly ambitious goal of providing "universal access to all knowledge." And, actually, it already does provide access to the world's largest creative-commons resource of software, videos, books, audio recordings and websites from across the years.

Its collections are available to researchers, historians, scholars and the general public who can upload or download material at no cost. Many musicians permanently archive their live recordings, or find inspiration among its vast visual resources - which include the complete NASA images and the celebrated Prelinger Archive of vintage Public Information films - to name but two.

Best of all in many ways, you can go back in time to view websites and pages from the earliest days of the World Wide Web. Being a non-profit publicly funded organisation you won't see fancy graphics, cutting edge web design design or slick PR campaigns telling you how great it is. But the fact remains, it's a fantastic resource for creative artists of every kind, and one of the nost underrated wonders of the online world.

All of which is why I have no hesitation in making Archive.org my Website of the Week.

Tom Robinson presents BBC Introducing - Fresh on the Net on BBC 6 Music on Sunday and Monday nights.

Read Tom's previous Websites of the Week.

We all then further inflate the hype - either by repeating it - or else by rebelling and telling everyone how rubbish the artist actually is. 9 times out of 10, it turns out the happening band of the moment is, actually, not bad at all. But at the same time, they may not be as mindblowingly, insanely sensational as the tastemakers would lead us to believe.

Disillusion quickly sets in, this year's 'in thing' becomes last year's in thing and perfectly good artists end up dropped and tossed aside through no fault of their own.

All of this is why I like anewbandaday.com, which cheerfully disregards the trends, tipsters and whatever the music mags say on their front covers, to offer an eclectic mix of artists its writers happen to like.

Some of those artists end up rising to wider prominence, most of them don't. But pretty much every act they feature is interesting for its own sake: whether or not you agree with a particular pick, another one will be along 24 hours later.

Best of all, you can recommend any music you like (including your own) directly to the editors. They listen to everything and everything they like ends up on the site. So that's why anewbandaday.com is my new Website of the Week.

Listen to Tom Robinson on BBC 6 Music.

See Tom's previous picks for Website of the Week.

Pledge Music is the brainchild of Benji Rodgers from the band Marwood who became tired of playing great shows, selling a good amount of CDs and having no money.

Surely, he thought, there must be a way that people can just make music and get it out to their audience without accumulating huge debts.

Benji's best mate, Rupert, came on board with the technical coding know-how, other friends got the financial and legal angles covered while A&R veteran Malcolm Dunbar joined the team to bring musicbiz acumen to the party. Their aim was to create a funding system for musicians in which nobody loses.

Bands agree their fundiing target with the company, and decide on a range of benefits to offer their fans, according to how much money they're willing to pledge. For five pounds you might get a pre-release download of the album. For five hundred they'd probably come and play the songs live in your living room. All through the making of the record, the investors get exclusive updates, rough mixes and studio footage that no-one else will ever see. And unless the financial target gets reached and the project goes ahead, your credit card doesn't even get charged; everyone walks away as if nothing had happened.

Best of all, from the musician's viewpoint, it's a music company run by music people. At the end of the deal, the artist retains 100% of their publishing and recording rights, which is where it scores over platforms such as Sellaband, SliceThePie and Bandstocks. Pledge Music takes a flat 15% of the capital raised, and also encourages performers to factor a charity donation into their margins.

Practising what he preaches, Benji's own band Marwood has just released its 5th album, donating a quarter of the proceeds to Amnesty International. All of which is why Pledge Music is my new BBC Introducing Website Of The Week.

You can hear Tom's interview with Benji from Pledge Music by listening again to last Sunday's show.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could see an artist's entire tour history, or a list of all the gigs that a legendary venue has ever hosted?

Well, two years ago, Ian Hogarth, Pete Smith, and Michelle You founded Songkick.com with the goal of doing just that: building the world's definitive live music resource.

They've since amassed data on over 1 million gigs, to which concertgoers are now adding posters, photos, videos, setlists and reviews.

Users can share their personal gigography of every gig they've ever been to - and see who else was there. You can track your favorite artists, venues, festivals and concert buddies and be notified when they have upcoming events. If you already use Last FM to track your music listening or iTunes to organsise your collection, you can simply connect Songkick to your library and in a matter of seconds you'll be tracking the live movements of the acts you listen to most.

With most major ticket outlets across the English-speaking world indexed by Songkick, it's pretty comprehensive. But what if gigs by your own band or your favourite artists (past and present) aren't listed? Why, you can add them yourself.

For these reasons, musicians, promoters and gig-goers alike (not to mention obsessive collectors of music memorabilia everywhere) Songkick is my BBC Introducing Website Of The Week.