Wednesday, March 25, 2009

to Bob the critic not the artist

Hey Bob, let me just start by saying I want things to be the right way too!

I want artists to rule the world!!! (OK maybe not, but the cultural movement and the music scene at least)

Like you said "We're looking for people we can count on."

Right now I am building my own web site for selling and promoting music... specially created for all the talented and unsigned artists of Central America...

In these "3rd world" countries we don't have huge venues for live music, never mind major label executives... what we have is great talent. Just like our pineapples and bananas are of the highest export quality so our artists are quite unique, even more so for not having a real industry to back them up and give them support.

After trying to release a couple of CD's I quickly noted that it was useless to spend all this time, energy and $$$ in a piece of work that won't bring me anything but losses. You can't distribute it, you can't promote it, you can't avoid people making copies of it... So I decided to undertake a much bigger challenge (that's just me): create a web page for selling music. Of course at the time I thought it was an easy job. This idea quickly turn into something even more complicated, a virtual catalog of Costa Rican music...then Central America.

Now please take into consideration that most of these music have not seen the light of internet yet!! And to get your hands on a physical CD you probably need to do some big research... since every piece of music is self-produced or (indie) is like if everything was limited edition and after a few years of its release it's pretty darn hard to find them... sometimes even the composers don't have copies of their own cd's...

Now moving on to the next big subject: the site. As you so nicely said it "creating an interface/software that is intuitive and easily used."
What we have now www.vibratica.com ( http://www.vibratica.com/descargas.php ) is not good enough even from an administrative point of view, I have come to find that the guild of web designers is even more disorganized than that of musicians and after almost 2 years of bad experiences... we found Drupal.org !! So hopefully we'll have a new website soon.

I am more interested in utility than making money but I am not shure if I should use DRM, specially since I have music that nobody else has and probably many are looking for... plus it might be a positive thing to offer to the bands, at least the old ones with "big" names. Or maybe I should make a streaming software?? Monthly payments are too complicated because I don't know how to distribute the money among the artistas and we stiil don't have more than 2000 songs. Any ideas?

The way I see it iTunes is for selling, myspace for promotion... I am trying to make something equally useful for both...Hopefully I'll end up with a Facebook like, Twitter kinda way social network, that sells music and allows artists and users/fans to build relationships...

Thank's for your time! Thank's for sharing!

Gabriel Wiernik R.





I have been signing artists with a special contract (hard copy)... bla bla bla

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