From: owner-digital-music-digest@smoe.org (digital-music-digest) To: digital-music-digest@smoe.org Subject: digital-music-digest V2 #1 Reply-To: digital-music@smoe.org Sender: owner-digital-music-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-digital-music-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk digital-music-digest Monday, June 19 2000 Volume 02 : Number 001 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Subscribe [JayG ] Hello! ["Gary Sedgwick" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2000 21:21:18 +0000 From: JayG Subject: Subscribe I don't know if I'm doing this correctly, but I am interested in joining the mailing list for independent musicians. Cheers, Jeff Greenway. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 02:05:39 +0100 From: "Gary Sedgwick" Subject: Hello! Hello and thanks for signing up to this list so quickly! I know there are only a few of us here, but thought I'd send an introductory mail out now - I apologise if I have to send this out again in the near future. First, I thought I should give you some background as to why I'm doing this. I got into music when I was at school, learning keyboards first, until moving swiftly on to guitar, singing, and writing and recording my own songs. I fell in love with The Beatles songs first of all, and "pop music" - mainly 60s bands - has been my main passion ever since. I was in a few bands from school until university, when I formed my first "real" band (i.e. one that was any good!) called The Hyphens. After uni, myself and the bass player moved down to London, where we found a new drummer and became Fly. Fly has been going a few years, we've done a whole host of gigs, from local pubs to the more well-known Rock Garden, and now we're on the verge of releasing our debut album to the world. During the last year we gave up playing gigs; the main reason being that they were getting so difficult to organise and for little return. New, original bands, in this country at least, seem to have a very hard time of getting support from venues, and the press, unless you have a great write-up from NME or Melody Maker, or have a recording deal and good management. And recording deals, I think, are best avoided until you're "big" enough to warrant one - I've heard of so many bad stories about first-time recording contracts to be put off for life! Another reason was that we all have good day jobs and not enough time or inclination to become signed. So, we've been doing everything ourselves, from promotion down to recording and producing our first album - it has all (with exception of drums) been recorded at home, and sounds as good as most professional productions. And it's all been very, very enjoyable. So, during this period, we obviously looked at the web as a great promotion / selling tool. We had a site for a while, which actually generated far more interested than we ever expected. And with the web exploding a few years back, I've wanted to start up a site for bands like Fly for a long time now. And now I'm in the position to do so. My day job is computer programming, so I'm fairly well versed in the technological aspects, but my partner in crime for this site is even more so. We've already got a very decent server hired, have played around with a lot of the technology we need, and both know that the technological side of things is going to be the easy part. So, what are we trying to achieve? My main reason for starting a site years ago was so that like-minded bands could build their audiences from being under one roof i.e. visitors to the site would browse around and discover similar bands' music. So navigation is going to be all important. We have loads of ideas for this - being able to search for bands via influences, style, etc, etc. And we also want the public to be able to find any band (or artist - I keep mentioning bands, but I'm referring to anybody making any style of original music) on the site in a few clicks. We're also doing this solely to get a great unsigned bands site up on the web. The server is already paid for, and we really only have our own time as a budget. So we won't need to have tons of advertising etc. - we're steering clear of that as much as is possible. Obviously we'll need to fund this somehow as we can't make a loss on it, but the goal is to have a hassle-free site for discovering new music. One big question we do have, and need feedback on, is how we balance the funding i.e. we could have a site which is free for bands but has more advertising, or charge bands a subscription and have less advertising, etc, etc. I'm in favour of a nominal subscription fee, as I feel this also helps weed out the non-serious / having-a-laugh types we'd get otherwise. And we do need to pay for out time once the site becomes popular. Any thoughts on this, or alternative ideas for funding, are most welcome. It almost goes without saying, but we will be offering a non-exclusive contract with artists - in fact, we want to make this site as hassle-free and easy to use as possible, so say if a band is worried about putting free MP3 songs up on the site for copyright reasons, they don't have to. Another side of this, which also links in with the two of us affording our time, is to have the bands / artists producing as much of the material for the site as is possible. This works in two ways - firstly, less time and work for the site managers, and secondly, it means bands have a great deal of control over what goes up on the site. There isn't much point in a band sending in a photo, biog, and demo for us to scan it / type it in / convert it to MP3 etc. if they've already done it themselves. So we're thinking of having templated pages where you can upload in certain formats - plain text, images, music, etc. - and the server creates the page around that. So bands can virtually design their own unique site, including as much or as little as they choose, fitting into the template of the main site for navigation etc. On the technology side, we'll be providing compatibility with as many formats as is possible - e.g. MP3, RealAudio, etc, etc. And the pages will be linked into the main site in a variety of ways e.g. having a "find similar artists" button which queries the influences stored in the database and brings up a list of bands with matching ones. Other ideas include a site "radio station", which for example could be playing a band's demos whilst browing their site. I'm starting to veer off into details for some of these ideas now, but the main thing we need to get right from the start is the ideas themselves - making them happen is the easy part! Looking at the plethora of other sites doing this sort of thing, I'm struck by how constrictive they all appear - pages often look all the same, with bands having to provide an obligatory 2 free MP3s, one photo, etc. We're aiming to let the band choose what they want their site to do, which can fit around how / if they sell their music, their style, etc. The reason for this mailing list was so that people who are going to be using the site can tell us from the start what things they'd like / not like to see on the site. The more popular opinion we have when designing the site, the better it will be. So feel free to talk amongst yourselves as it were! Well, I think that's a fair introduction for now. One other thing we do need is a good domain name - we grabbed www.digital-music.com while it was available, mainly due to the lack of availability of anything else we tried, but this is only a temporary home, maybe where we'll get the prototype up and running. I guess at the end of the day it's only a name, but if you do have any flashes of inspiration, please pass them along! Thanks, Gary ------------------------------ End of digital-music-digest V2 #1 *********************************