ArtistForce recently launched featuring "self-service booking tools for independent artists." They also have partnered with Celebrity Access for TourIntel:

"Access thousands of reports to analyze and compare touring artists, North American venues, theatrical productions and other live entertainment events. Tourintel provides new details for each show and a unique new way to view, interact and tailor the information for your needs."

Sounds interesting and potentially very useful. I don't know anybody testing this stuff. Most of what I see from music industry bloggers are pretend reviews that just list the features as if every time you read a features list that's what you'd actually get from the site!

I think there's a real opportunity for a blogger who knows how to communicate and can connect with working artists testing and reviewing these services.  There's a real sweet spot for people that can communicate with and about both the entertainment and tech industries without disrespecting either because there's actually very little of that on the web.

If you know anybody doing that, drop me a link in the comments, but if they're just listing features as I describe above, get set to be made fun of! All for the greater good, of course.

If you’re an indie, diy hip hop (or related) artist, you owe it to yourself to check out Audible Hype, if you haven’t yet. And, if it’s been awhile, the site is in the midst of a reconstruction project and your input is encouraged. Go tell Justin Boland what you need and you might just get it.

Already up is a links feed linking out to music industry insights on other sites. If you’re really about your biz, that alone is a pretty nice feature.

If you have a blog or website, it's to your advantage to have a way of looking as closely as possible at what users are doing on your site and to have a way of sharing analytical data from your site that's provided by a neutral third party.
ComScore, the industry standard among the big boys, announced Saturday at TechCrunch Disrupt that they are now making their basic service free for startups, with under a million unique visitors a month, via their new "Start-Up, Step-Up" program. This is good news for smaller sites that anticipate sizable growth in traffic for whatever reason.

I've applied to see basically how they'll respond and, hopefully, to be able to evaluate it but I'm not really in their target market.  Currently I'm working with both Quantcast and Google Analytics.

Quantcast is cool because it's also tied to a public ranking service similar to Compete and allows you the option to have third party verified statistics in a public comparison setting.

Google Analytics is cool for some because it can be tied into other Google services to increase their information sharing, "all in order to help you sir and certainly not to increase our ability to monitor your short hairs once we take over the world", which is supposed to improve services.

I haven't really explored connecting things like Google Analytics and AdSense, which I also use. Google kind of creeps me out these days but their analytic tools are awesome and you can share access with individuals when needed for business purposes.

Evolvor.com:
Forget a Record Deal: 100 Digital Resources for the Indie "DIY" Musician

Related ProHipHop Coverage:
Evolvor Launches Label 2.0 Press Kit Maker

Here are some recommended business and technology news sources that I'm currently following.

Mixergy offers interviews about web and tech business with entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

The Business Insider provides a solid flow of old school business news in a new school format.

Techmeme has been around for a minute and remains an excellent source of tech news drawing from a diverse array of solid web publications.

While SEOmoz is a great resource for insight into search engine optimization and web publishing, I also found this post by Danny Dover, Ten Resources That Changed How I View the Internet, worth considering.

If the "tyranny of the urgent everyday" keeps you from stepping back and taking account of the bigger picture, this post may give you an easy way to take that step.

Marketing Sherpa has a review of 13 free press release distribution sites.

A lot of their stuff goes behind a pay wall though this might not.  Nevertheless, check it out sooner rather than later!

Mashable’s Sean P. Aune brings you 200+ Tools for Surviving the Economic Crisis aka Our New Daily Reality.