NINA GODDESS

Nina (aka Nina Goddess) was nice enough to give me an interview for Artist
Launch. I first heard this Swedish singer a year ago, and since that time
she has received considerable attention. Nina Goddess is one of the top
earners of MP3.com, and is played regularly on Artist Launch. Her music is
danceable, she has a pretty voice, and based upon the emails we've exchanged
I am left with the impression of a friendly down to earth lady. The
following is the interview we did. I have tried to edit our exchange as
little as possible, so that the personality of Nina comes through.

Interview: NINA GODDESS
by Shauna Skye


SHAUNA: For those who have never heard you, Nina, how would you describe
your music?

NINA: My music is upbeat and something like a cross over between dance
techno-trance and pop. Maybe the trancier stuff is more due to some
excellent remixes of my tunes.

SHAUNA: You have said you are influenced by pop with a good beat. Do you
have any favorite artists?

NINA: My listening to music has actually changed a bit the last years.
Now I'm more listening to get ideas more than just listening. Of course I
always
admire great voices too! I've mentioned a lot of similar artists and
influences but I actually like all sorts of music.

SHAUNA: You are doing extremely well on MP3.com. Is there a secret to this
success other than putting out great tunes?

NINA: Very good question, which I love to answer to. It's actually tons of
work behind it. I've been on mp3 for over a year now and I'm spending full
time promoting myself. Basically I'm surfing around the web finding places
to submit my url, getting features, interviews, whatever. I've been really
lucky sometimes in getting those things. My latest success (feb 2000) was due to a major article in ahuge Swedish newspaper in their IT section. So I got out to all the "right" people with the fastest connections. The article is still on their page
online, not front page anymore though.

 I've also got major articles on About.com first in August 2000 and then for my video just recently. The secret is to write a nice story for them to publish, and you have to think
in terms of what would be newsworthy for them. Of course I might not get
more than (max) 5% of what I'm asking for, but it's always worth trying.

I also have this thing called "shaking-nina" it's my interactive dance page
(www.ninagoddess.com/shaking-nina) made in flash. It gets featured all the
time and I don't even have to ask for it. Well sometimes I do ask or try to
get it featured on "fun places" sites. It's just a fun, silly thing that
people enjoy. I keep posting on some message boards as well, trying to find
non music ones, infiltrating the other boards where they talk dancing for
instance. (I've learned new things from that as well) Answering all emails
is essential. I've got a lot of interesting turns just from answering a
simple hello. Taking care of every such contact can lead to lots of stuff. I
got to know several people who works for magazines for instance. But also
regular fans are really important and I've given away cds to die hard fans
just to make them so happy they tell all their friends. I've submitted to
search engines, using all submitting tools I could find before many of them
started to charge for their service. Submitting to other music sites is good
too, just to get your name out and your links there. Mostly I just submit
one or a couple of songs, as I (still) want the main traffic to go to my
mp3.com page. And last but not least, I got some nice features from mp3.com
as well. Most of them I didn't have to ask for, but I've got the "site
savvy" feature twice, and the first time I actually did ask about 4 months
before I actually got it. I also finally got noticed by women of mp3, and
got an interview/article there. It's actually one of the features on mp3.com
I value the most, as it seems so hard to get it--for me at least.

SHAUNA: I think your "shaking Nina" thing is extremely cool!  I played with
it and got a kick out of making you dance around. Tell the readers more
about what it is.

NINA: As I said above it's my interactive dance page, programmed in flash.
It's made from lots and lots of digital photos, with me posing in strange
ways and then all cut out and put together in short movie clips in flash.
People seem to enjoy it, link it and feature it for me. It seems like it's
continuously gets about 100-150 visitors per day, which also means extra
visitors to my mp3.com page. When it was at it's highest it got over 2000
visitors, and when featured on good sites it often gets about 500-600
viewers.

SHAUNA: I read that your husband makes electronic music. Is he responsible
for your dancey beats?

NINA: My husband used to be a fairly well kept secret on MP3.com, but now it
doesn't matter any more. I can tell you. His name is Hakan Andersson, more
known as Master Zap. He is producing my song, usually he makes a beat and
I'm improvising some singing to it. Or I get ideas when I'm about to fall to
sleep like in "You are my life" and "Trip to the Moon."

SHAUNA: Who are some of your favorite bands on MP3.com?

NINA: There are a lot of good bands, excellent singers good friends and all
the remixers. I would like to mention all of them. But if I have to pick out
just a couple I would mention www.mp3.com/zap  www.mp3.com/mikeburn
www.mp3.com/andreapriora.

SHAUNA: How did you learn about Artist Launch Radio?

NINA: From the good old bulletin board on MP3.com.

SHAUNA: What is the music scene like in Sweden?

NINA: Maybe what's most curious about the music industry itself is that
many of the big stars are actually produced in Sweden (Britney Spears,
Backstreet Boys for example), and record their music here, and many of the
songwriters are Swedish. It might also be a bit surprising that the
underground music is getting a lot of space on the radio. At least on the
national radio.

 SHAUNA: Where is the best place to get hold of your music?

NINA: It's on mp3.com/nina .....or a store in Chicago who bought 40 of
my albums. :) [Nina knows I'm from Chicago--Skye]

SHAUNA: Do you have any tips or words of wisdom for us?

NINA: Aw I don't know if I'm that wise.. :) Hmmm . . .  I would like to say
be yourself. Make music that you feel good about. If things scare you, you
should still try it. But if it makes you feel bad forget it.

SHAUNA: I hear you recently made a video. Want to tell us about that?

NINA: There is a story about the making of the video. It's really a zero
budget thing but the result is actually pretty good anyway. It all started
out in August with an email from a small label in LA that said they wanted
to release a compilation cd with my song "Fly With Me" on. After accepting
their terms and even accepting two other songs for the compilation, they
also asked me if I could shoot some video footage so they could make a promo
video for the compilation. I said sure I'll try to figure something out.

I borrowed a digital video camera from my brother, and my husband and I went
out shooting--although we didn't knew exactly what to shoot. We had some
thoughts about rock climbing, as it was the closest to flying we could get,
but then we got the idea of going out to the local airclub. It was on a
Saturday and they should probably be there fixing with their airplanes and
maybe we could get permission to shoot while they take their planes up in
the air.

Said and done, we went there, just walked in there while they had a coffee
break, and starting to explain what we were up to. An older pilot, excited,
got on his feet saying "I know what we should do. Nina rides along in my
plane. And you," pointing towards my husband, "will ride along the camera
plane. Then yelling cross the room, "Thomas you'll fly the camera plane."
And another guy got to his feet looking quite excited, and said "Great I'll
get another flight today." :)

We went out to the planes, and my pilot dragged me along to an open
1930-ties biplane, threw me in a leather jacket and a leather hood and said
"Here is for you." My husband was shooting as much as he could and we even
did some lip-sync singing "Come Fly With Me." Apparently my pilot got that
fragment of the song because while we were in the air I heard his voice
through my headphones singing "Come fly with me . . . free like a bird in
the sky."

Well, after shooting some more climbing and pretending to fall off a cliff,
etc., we thought we had enough material to send it to LA. It sounded like
they were in a hurry so we sent it over with fed-ex and didn't take any
copies. They got the tapes all right but nothing happened. Week after week
passed by, and we started to realize that we made a mistake not making
copies of it before sending. Anyhow we had a VHS copy, but nothing to edit
with at that time. So I got this stupid idea to point a simple little
webcam to the TV screen while playing the VHS copy, and after some sync
problems we got something editable into the computer. Some hours later we
had the first version of my video ready, and not too bad at all, to use for
web streaming. So we got it up to my website and started to promote it.

After a couple of weeks I got noticed my NOW TV and they wanted to feature
the video together with a Live interview. I said sure I'd love to. The only
problem was that we hadn't got anything from LA yet. They had some problems
with the compilation release and his father died--so it was delayed once
more. Then we decided to get a proper video editing card, but still no
original tapes. We said to the LA guy that we wanted our tapes back and he
actually made a transfer to his computer and sent us the tapes. NOW TV
featured the still unfinished video and I made the phone interview. Now at
last we had the tapes and we made our own digital edited video. The poor
guys in LA though, lost all material in a computer crash so just recently we
sent over a couple of cds with our transferred material once again to them
and we are still waiting on their version. The finished LA version will be
promoted together with the
compilation and sent out to MTV for instance.

The video can be found at
www.NinaGoddess.com/video

Also see the review of the compilation
http://rhythmus.bizland.com/music/reviews_megatropolis2001.html
and where you can buy it at amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005ANPT/thengoredruidsho/102-97888
60-4688149


SHAUNA: Wow, thanks for the story Nina! Sounds like you had fun making the
video. I'll be sure to check it out. I'm sure it's great.

NINA: Thanks again for this wonderful opportunity! I really appreciate.!




SHAUNA SKYE
http://www.mp3.com/shaunaskye