Cashmusic totally agrees with Thom and instead of just talking about the obvious Cashmusic has started an open source foundation that will be providing software, social tools and hosting capabilities to help both young and established artists with solutions for the new digital music industry. Some might ask why open source? We believe that open source software makes Cashmusic solution owned buy by the community which will give the software and services a long life that is controlled by it’s members and users. We have witnessed many start-ups that create software for the musician community, but tend to fail or get acquired by bigger corporate organization. We are dedicate to creating value for musicians in this paradigm shift in the music industry.
In a rare interview, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has warned young musicians not to tie themselves to the “sinking ship” of the music industry, suggesting it will soon collapse. The singer said it is “only a matter of time — months rather than years — before the music business establishment completely folds,” he said in an interview for a school textbook.
He advises musicians to self-release music rather than yearn for a major label contract, suggesting the loss of the mainstream music industry will be “no great loss to the world.”
His group, who were previously signed to EMI, shook the industry after offering a ‘pay what you want’ system for the digital release of ‘In Rainbows’ in 2007. The model has since become a common option for groups selling their music online with stores such as BandCamp.com.
Although the concept of the whole music establishment folding may seem implausible, it could be agreed that the annual deluge of music graduates often find they have few full-time prospects. The RIAA report that music piracy is now costing 71,060 US jobs and $2.7 billion (£1.86 billion) in workers’ earnings every year. However, hard times have encouraged some of the most prolific music movements in history. The modern affordability of recording equipment and global distribution could be the factors that prove Thom Yorke right.
Ten years ago my good friend Scott Yara and I had a dinner in LA where I agreed to join him on his early vision of a start-up that we didn’t even have name or solid product vision for. We eventually came up Metapa which stood for Media To All Places and our product vision was a data platform for digital media. We raised about 15MM from investors. Ed Sims lead our first round and hung in there for all ten years. After many rounds and big product changes Metapa actually successfully changed into a smarter and better idea called Greenplum. And now after ten long years of amazing hard work Scott and team created a really intelligent software product that IT groups find remarkably helpful and EMC agrees by stepping up and acquiring this rising star – Greenplum.
I have been impressed and admire Scott’s ability to start and run Metapa and Greenplum through the dark days of 2001 and 2008. I have learned really important founder lessons from working with Scott: never give up and great people are hard to find. It was an honor to be a co-founding member of the Metapa team. Bravo Greenplum.
There has been so many killer programming libraries released over the past five years it is hard to keep up with and have a chance to play with. I have very been impressed by node.js. What a genius idea and execution. Bravo
An example of a web server written in Node which responds with “Hello World” for every request.
var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(8124, "127.0.0.1");
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8124/');
Recently my friend Anthony Volodkin from HypeMtweeted about a recent press release from BUZZMedia. As Anthony points out, BUZZMedia does NOT own HypeM. I also need to make some other things clear. HypeM is a stellar independent Web brand and BUZZMedia represents them exclusively for ad sales. In fact, there are a few sites that we represent solely for ad sales, and only when it can be a win-win for both the site and BUZZMedia. It has been the founders’ strategy since 2005 to be a publisher and owner of our brands because that makes much more economic sense for us, but there are rare occasions when you bump into genius like HypeM, Rcrd Lbl, and Concrete Loop and you take what you can get.
With that said I wanted to take a minute to tell the Buzznet story. Buzznet was founded by myself (@djabatt), Marc Brown, Steve Haldane and Kevin Woolery in 2003 as a social photo sharing network focused on music and pop culture (SF Gate article). One year later, in July 2004, Marc and I presented at the first Blog-On conference where we met Jeff Clavier and Jonathan Fram who both became our angel investors and helped us secure an investment of $1,000,000 from Transcosmos, so we could finally ignite the engines (hire a small staff and actually pay ourselves) after over a year of self-funding the Company. Around the same time Bill Woodward, Founder of Anthem Ventures Partners, and Brian Mesic lead a small Series A investment round. I have been friends with Bill from a previous venture and he’s a great investor to have on the team early. His experience of having been recently on the board of the MySpace owners, Intermedia, during the acquisition by Fox was helpful as well!
Buzznet grew quickly and we found that pop on the Web was hot and sticky and created engaged audiences that wanted to consume and share their ideas. In early 2006 the Buzznet model was to grow authentic music and pop culture voices on the web by using our published brand Buzznet and by acquisitions. We were fortunate enough to have met a huge supporter in Alan Beasley from Redpoint Ventures who lead Buzznet’s series B financing. Alan joined our board where he has been an instrumental advisor to me and the company. As the CEO of Buzznet I was looking for talented folks to join the team and I was introduced to Tyler Goldman who came from Movielink. We brought on Tyler to assist Buzznet in its business development and acquisitions efforts. After about a year of outstanding work Tyler finally agreed to join Buzznet as CEO and I became President in order to focus my time on the product and content strategy.
After we completed additional investment rounds with incredible investors including Sutter Hill Ventures, NEA, Universal Music Group, MK Capital, and Focus Ventures, followed by the acquisition of several additional Web properties, we all agreed that it would be best to create a new parent company called BUZZMedia – to separate the site, Buzznet.com from the ever-growing company, now called BUZZMedia.
That brings up to 2010 and speaking as a Founder of the Company and a member of the Board who’s been grindin’ for a long time now, I couldn’t be more thrilled with the current management team, the growth of the company, and the sites we publish today. This team represent some of the best and brightest in Web media today. Our sites are very authentic and independent which makes their voice so unique in market. We don’t tell our brands what to write. we encourage them to fearlessly produce as authentically as possible.
And that’s the story of Buzznet and how we became BUZZmedia
Nirvana 1989 had Jason as a guitarist that I met when I booked Soundgarden in 1989 in LA. Jason came down with Soundgarden and he flipped me some very early demos of Nirvana. Those were the days of good music.
I don’t recall attending the Nirvana show at Rhino, but who knows those days were green and hazy.
Based out of Tampa FL, Dominique Young 18 years old works with producer Hard Feelings (Yo! Majesty) to create her complex, fluid beats and catchy dance hooks. But Dominique has a natural talent and a series sexy hip MC style that sets her apart for the rest. Dominique has the most unique hip hop / house / grime inspired dope ass music that I have rocked to in quite some time. Her sound and look is exciting and I am sure her live show kills. I am bummed I missed her show at SxSW 2010, but I herd really good things.
