In One Paragraph: Formed in 1997, Beatnik Turtle has released nearly 500 songs/18 albums in part by succeeding at their self-imposed challenge of releasing a song for every single day for a year, throughout 2007, at TheSongOfTheDay.com. They have written music for TV shows, commercials, films, podcasts, theater (including Chicago's Second City), have licensed music to Disney/ABC Family and AtomFilms/Viacom, and have written two books on being an indie band, "The Indie Band Survival Guide" and "The DIY Music Manual".
Sounds Like: They Might Be Giants, Fountains of Wayne, Barenaked Ladies, and The Saw Doctors.
If You Had To Pick Only One Song: Tell Me Ma (from the album Sham Rock, one of the "Top Ten Celtic Albums of 2008" by Celtic MP3 Music Magazine).
Notables: In 2008, National Public Radio dubbed Beatnik Turtle "remarkably prolific and fiercely independent". That’s because they've:
- Produced 18 albums.
- Released nearly 500 songs.
- Successfully completed a song-of-the-day project where they released 365 songs every day of 2007 as a daily podcast from their website, TheSongOfTheDay.com.
- Written two books as a how-to guide for musicians in a post-label world, The Indie Band Survival Guide (St. Martin's Press/Macmillan, US) and The DIY Music Manual (Ebury/Random House, worldwide).
In addition, Beatnik Turtle has written music for TV shows, commercials, films, podcasts, theatre (including Chicago's Second City), and have licensed music to companies such as Disney/ABC Family and AtomFilms/Viacom.
Other notable achievements include:
- Broadcasting their video Star Wars (A Film Like No Other) on SpikeTV for the 32nd Anniversary of Star Wars (see the video on SpikeTV).
- Having their album Sham Rock being awarded Top Ten Celtic album of 2008 by Celtic MP3 Music Magazine and also being a finalist for Best Celtic Album by the Just Plain Folks Music Awards.
- Being interviewed by MTV 120 Minutes icon, Matt Pinfield about their book, The Indie Band Survival Guide and the band.
- Two of the band members, Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan, are columnists at Electronic Musician Magazine.
- Have been on the web since 1998.
- Written theme songs to a dozen podcasts and have had hundreds of podcast plays of their music (and counting).
Creative Commons: Beatnik Turtle is a big supporter of Creative Commons. All of Beatnik Turtle's music is podsafe and sharable under a Creative Commons license. That means it can be used in any non-commercial podcasts, videos, remixes, mash-ups, and shared with your friends.
Indie Contemporaries: Jonathan Coulton, George Hrab, Nice Peter, and Brad Sucks.
