Last night I was trying to get a remix of Surkin’s Chromeo Knight done and ended up annoyed because cutting loops and stuff wasn’t really funny at all.
Now I was looking for a page which offers good samples and loops of recent tracks but found nothing worth mentioning.
Only the usual remix-competition material.
I would make a page which lets people upload their own remix-material and of course their remixes made from it and let users rate it.
There are 3 things I’m worrying about at the moment:
#1: Does it make sense and will attract people if done with much love and good material to start from? #2: Bandwith, who pays it? #3: to use a CMS or not? I would rather code my own as I have a lot of special needs. #4: any copyright issues?
#1 depends on too many factors, but it sounds like a good idea #2 you will, but ad revenue can help with that 3 as a web developer, start simple and wait until you have a specific need to roll your own - that way lies a lot of server scaling issues and client side development issues that really aren’t fun #4 of course - you are offering intellectual property to download. You could get people to upload under a Creative Commons licence but you would at least need to indemnify yourself somewhere in the site, and even that might not be enough
#1: For the start I would recycle the design of my dead homepage www.tomthong.de to save work. If it fails in that stage I at least didn’t waste even more time.
As soon as it’s up and running I could post material and already existing remixes (which i’m allowed to post) to attract people.
#2: I could outsource stuff to other hosts, but people want stuff as easy as possible.
#3: Currently I only have experience with WordPress and phpBB. You see one which could be fitting more?
#4: Material of remix contests is OK but not everything I desire. People should be free in their choice of what they mix, so that one might become a problem.
OK, no more numbered points - I feel like I am living in a Powerpoint presentation
I agree with recycling, but I cannot emphasize enough that a good clear layout that doesn’t get in the way of your content is vital. Web users are fickle beyond belief! You will also need to think a bit in advance on how you plan to organise the metadata for your content - tag clouds can be good, but an enforced hierarchical structure would allow for easy browsing of assets. So long as it is flexible enough to grow with your sites needs…
Bandwidth really is going to be a concern for you - people will more often download stuff from your site just because it is there rather than having a genuine use for it. The company I work for archives and serves terabytes of data but we still have the occasional bit of content that will “go viral” and pull down our servers. Nowadays we just push it off to Amazon’s excellent S3 service, which is charged at a very reasonable rate when you consider how much infrastructure you get for your money. All you would have to do is make your download links point to their servers and not your own.
I have never really used either of the systems you mention - I am a web developer by trade, so anything I work on has already reached the point where these systems have failed to deliver what is required, or are not even relevant. What I do know is that Wordpress and phpBB are two completely different products and do not bear comparison. I think WordPress has a strong dev community and there are lots of plugins available that may or may not be helpful but it is a blog, a bulletin board will be more useful for letting your users publish their own content. Having said that, WordPress also has a BB plugin you could use. Not sure if either will be helpful in adding metadata to your assets though.
The content really is going to be your issue though - how can you truly establish that your uploaders have ownership of the content in the first place? Of course, you can indeminify yourself, but people like the RIAA really don’t care about your intentions when they decide to go on the warpath. Also, as a content owner, would I be happy to let you serve out my song stems? for breaking artists this is going to be less of a concern as they are trying to gain exposure, but I doubt very much that the Oakenfolds/Hawtins/etc of this world are going to just give away their content in such a fashion, and even if they want to, will their record labels let them?
The problem, in the end, that you’ll run into is money. Now, if you were to try to set up a service with small labels to provide, at a cost, remix kits, that could be interesting. It would normalize and standardize the remix procedure for independent and small artists, and could provide them ways of getting noticed beyond what their standard levels and means of promotion could be.
But the safest, and most legal way to do this (in my mind) is to charge some sort of membership fee, or per-download fee of a remix kit. You take a cut and the artist/label takes a larger cut. Pretty much, as with any business, you’d need to provide a service that is not being provided yet, in a logical and helpful way. Before anything like this could start you’d need to approach artists and get their opinions on it. Approach labels and get their opinions on it. Granted you’ll probably get a better response from the artists than the labels, but if you stick this with the independent level you might not have a bad plan.
The security of it becomes an issue, but if they buy the kit then there really isn’t any issue. It’s that artist giving away the rights for another person to use that song. Of course it wouldn’t be condoning using it as their own works, etc. etc. etc.. This is something that would be really interesting for club DJs and scratch artists, as well as mashup DJs, and, in my mind, all DJs in general.
But it couldn’t be free, and it would need to be done with the participation of the music business, even on an independent level.
Good luck with it. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.
I just found http://www.splicemusic.com/.
It’s similar to what I want. Just no shitty online-arranger. I want people to care themself about how they want to get this done.
Explain please! I don’t get your point (not native-English nor good in it).
I tried all WordPress-BBs (some time ago), some are good, but thats not what I need. It’s easier to make my own site than making any CMS,board or blog fit my needs (+ more fun for me).
The pricing of Amazon S3 is really good. That should solve the bandwith thing for a while as well.
Now to the legal part:
frak is right about that
A friend of me bought 7 stolen sample CDs of Madonna’s Album “Music” for 200€ each. Recorded in stereo on one track there was only noise and on the other were her vocal parts.
That is enough to know that if all material was free I would prolly spend more time in courtrooms than at home.
DvlsAdvct’s idea is superb. Although I wanted to this as a hobby to suceed it might involve some more efforts.
At first I would take the remix-content stuff and freely available samples then get in contact with some unknown DJs who give out some samples of their work and therefore get known. That should hook some users.
Through the whole process I should try to get in contact with some labels and negotiate contracts.
I should however start small because it’s still meant as a fun project and not a startup which makes me quit my integrated degree program in business informatics.
Sorry - too much time spent in management meetings!
Basically, your average web user is like a spoilt child - if they don’t get what they want, as quickly as possible, they will sulk! Of course, you have a hook - the content, but imagine being a user, which of these would bring you back to a site: Having to wade through six pages of content to find the one artist I am looking for or a simple link to the artist in the sidebar?
You also have to cater for the two different types of information seeking that people typically employ: the user with the need for something very specific, or the ability to search; or the user who just wants to see what is there to be had, the browser.
DvlsAdvct is right, a membership fee is going to be your best way forward - maybe if you are Ben Huh and you have people falling over themselves to give you new lolcats that people are just itching to see then ad revenue is plausible, but this just isn’t the case for 99.999% of websites out there today, and you will have bills to pay!
I would also look carefully at this “freely available” content that you are talking about - there may actually be a licence attached to it prohibiting you from re-hosting it. I don’t mean to put a downer on you, but thinking about this first will save you a lot of heartache down the road…
Dj’s generally spin material that is not theirs to begin with, you will want to get hold of is producers that are not well known. There internet is completely littered with them, so they are not that hard to find Track down artists who you think have quality material and ask them if they would like to send you some samples of the material to put onto your site. Keep things legal and use the creative commons if you don’t want this to turn into some sort of business venture.
I’m not much into that webdesign stuff. If someone makes a template in photoshop I can crop it and write the corresponding CSS-Stylesheet but designing it is horror for me.
Spending money on it is currently an issue as well. I would spend some but I know that stuff can be very expensive.
That’s why I wanted to re-use the old design. How I arrange the boxes is another thing but I can make that fit my needs.
But when I have to deal with artists or even labels I need a more professional design.
BentoSan’s idea is for the moment what I would want to do although extending to the
membership fee thing will the first thing to do if I smell success (which I rarely did before).
Being the place to go for inspiring loops, samples is the goal.
Now any ideas for a good name and cheap domain?
remix.com is currently up for sale? What do you guess is it worth? 100k$?
Probably - .coms still go for silly money when they are catchy.
How about remix.es - .es belongs to Spain and EuroDNS have always been good to me with European domains
I can’t do design either, but it doesn’t need to be that much as long as you get your palette right - no glaring clashes of colour, nothing too crowded and you can worry about the rest later…
(BTW, I am not affiliated to any of the people I am recommending, just pleased with the services that have offered me)
The problem you’re going to run into was mentioned above. Almost everything is licensed now. This is a great business idea and something you might want to sit on for a bit, building a site around it without any information before you start shopping. Especially with a degree in Business Informatics you might be able to secure moneys from a bank if you wanted to go into business for yourself.
It can start small with just a little contingent of artists that are willing to put it up, and providing a shit ton of free loop and sound samples.
Then build it up from there. But money is always a factor.
Taking TomThong as a starting-point might not be the wisest choice because it has nothing to do with the page itself, but who cares in a world of ‘froogle’ and ‘flickr’
I just chose that name because of a word play I thought about during my English lessons (Tom Thumb hmmm).
I think I can handle some round edged rectangles and a better color palette
Btw. that was my last ‘webdesign’ project http://ali.tomthong.de
Remixammo is definitely a good idea. It hits the nail on the head and I even can think of a nice logo.
@DvlsAdvct: I don’t have a degree, just started studying it 1 month ago, but I can learn a lot from such a project.
Starting small is exactly what I want, but also I have to think bigger to not be surprised. I’ll definitely get in contact with some producing DJs and try to convince them, but need a cool page first to have something to show. Personally I only know a handful and those like to do their stuff isolated.
The problem with starting out using the creative commons then changing to a subscription service would be that as soon as you become a subscription service you would have to re-negotiate the licenses for all the audio on the site. That could quite easily turn into a logistical nightmare.
Hedgehog you should talk to Julio.
Julio has a similar sort of idea to this on a project he is working on, you could perhaps work out some way to put together your resources
