“Fort Gaze” is the product of a collaboration between Dreamlin, an electronic music group from Belarus, and Kim Powers, a vocalist from the UK. These artists recently began working together, and this track is a great example of worldwide collaboration done right. This is something we can appreciate at MixMatchMusic, as each artist brings their own distinct sound into the mix. The result: a grooving downtempo jam with elements of soft-psych that will make you want more! Listen to Fort Gaze here.
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The first band in the Tra.kz Artist Spotlight is T. Mandrake, a clever new outfit out of the UK that fuses rock with ’60s Stax soul and jazz. They say a T. Mandrake song is as likely to remind you of Strange Days era Doors or Young Americans era David Bowie as it is to conjure up images of a Weill/Brechtian theatre-piece performed by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Yes, they are unique and they don’t care who knows it. Take a listen to their song “Honey” here.
They take their name from the flower (mandrake) whose roots (which resemble human figures) are used in magic rituals – although a lifelong love of the Peter Sellers character Captain Lionel Mandrake in Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb surely proved an influence. Later this year, T. Mandrake will release their debut album entitled From East To West And All The Rest. Until then, you should hear these four tracks, and prepare to think again.
To celebrate the launch of tra.kz, a great selection of indie and emerging artists have come together to release new music using tra.kz. Throughout the day, new songs will be released on Twitter, with Evolving Music providing extra golden nuggets of information.
As part of the Tra.kz Artist Spotlight, MixMatchMusic has partnered with the forward-thinking folks over at Controlled Substance Sound Labs to release new music from Pepper, Slightly Stoopid, Rebelution, the Expendables, Mat McHugh and the BlackBird, Fishbone, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, and Sabotage Soundsystem.
Controlled Substance Sound Labs was formed by brothers Jon and Matt Phillips as an artistic pipeline for the family of artists under Silverback Management. As a firm that has represented the vision and career direction on the management side, they have created a refreshing record label and distribution scenario that caters to the new “independent” minded landscape of the music business, and its changing climate. They have created a trustworthy scenario to release albums and own their own masters and copyrights, which as we all know, is not a practice commonly held by the major label behemoths currently in a steep decline both creatively and from a business standpoint.
Here is the full schedule of today’s Artist Spotlight. Get ready for some great music!
7:30AM: T. Mandrake — Honey
8:00AM: Dreamlin featuring Kim Powers — Fort Gaze
8:30AM: Angel Pier — Skullz and Xs
9:00AM: Throw Me the Statue — Ship
9:30AM: Trifonic — Gutter Box
10:00AM: Fishbone — Behind Closed Doors
11:00AM: Pepper — Too Much (Straight Board Mix)
12:00PM: The Expendables — Set Me Off
1:00PM: Slightly Stoopid — Closer to the Sun
2:00PM: Mat McHugh — Under the Landslide
3:00PM: Rebelution — Feelin’ Alright Dub
4:0PM: Sabotage Soundsystem — Love 2 the DJ
4:30PM: Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad — Season’s Change
5:00PM: BLVD — Vortex
5:30PM: Enzyme Dynamite — Girls
6:00PM: Radio Nowhere — London Calling
6:30PM: The Dance Party — Sasha, Don’t Sleep
7:00PM: Alessandra Conti — Empty Words
It seems that the more accessible and fast information becomes, the greater the urge is to make it go faster. The evolution it took to go from snail mail to e-mail was not only a giant cost and speed leap, but a shift in thinking about the way to convey information simply. From there, IM made short and fast the norm for online communication. With these changes in communication and upgrades in data sharing speeds, artists are now not only able to immediately present new content to their fans, but they’re also able to spread the information about that content much more rapidly. Now, as the internet culture reaches another stepping stone in social networking and media, Facebook status messages and sub-141 character Twitter messages have become commonplace, making the need to dumb down traditionally fingernail-on-chalkboard length URLs to something that can link to a site and still hold space for a description. There are numerous sites that provide services like these already, Twitpic for pictures and bit.ly for other content, but this morning marks the launch of a URL shortener specifically made to direct readers to music related content.
MixMatchMusic has been working diligently with the online music community through their site which promotes the collaboration, organization and monetization of user created content. And while online artist content and collaboration remain the primary focus, MMM has been forward thinking in their approach by quickly recognizing and assimilating various aspects of the ever-expanding musical presence on the web, as evidenced by both their Remix Wizard and their site sequencer. It makes sense then that today they offered up a new and incredibly useful tool to the online community in tra.kz, a URL shortener for all things music.
When sending a shortened URL over the web, it’s easy for other people to skim links if they’re not sure of where it’s going or why they should be interested. With tra.kz, users will always know that the link points to an Mp3, artist interview, music video or something else musical, making the custom URL creator perfect for anyone trying to share music related content with a simple and easy to remember link. Like the press release about the tra.kz launch found at tra.kz/l82g.
In conjunction with the launch of tra.kz, numerous artists will team with MixMatchMusic today to release a new song on Twitter each hour. With musicians and fans increasingly turning to Twitter to keep up to date with the latest group information, the ability to share songs and other band related information through an easily recognizable music URL shortener can become central in online promotions. It’d be easy to stop there, create the tra.kz/___ URL and leave it at that. But in the interest of making the service social platform friendly, the Twitter box is provided right below the short form to send directly from there.
Keep checking in today with @EvolvingMusic and @MixMatchMusic for new songs released using the tra.kz link shortener. Artists will include Pepper, Slightly Stoopid and Throw Me the Statue to name just a few. The folks over at Controlled Substance Sound Labs are using the launch as a platform for their artists to interact with their fans and harness the TwitterVerse to drive content exposure. As someone just latching onto Twitter, the idea of something as easy as tra.kz to identify music related content comes as a welcome way to filter links that I’m simply not interested in. For some solid Bay Area hip-hop, I recommend with my first use of tra.kz The Tones’ “The Movemeant” over at tra.kz/thetones. I’m also enjoying this multi-lingual track from Breez Evahflowin and Indiefeed’s very own Dirt E. Dutch at tra.kz/4wind . Enjoy!
As it stumbles through its awkward adolescence, outgrows old clothes, and starts to think for itself instead of just bowing to the powers that be, our precocious little evolving music industry is beginning to resemble the unencumbered and creative entity that it might one day become.
2008 saw all sorts of interesting trends in music production, distribution, and consumption. Major labels and middlemen were forced to reevaluate their roles, artists and fans continued to empower one another and interact in totally new ways, and people (music bloggers perhaps among the noisiest of the bunch) analyzed the musical space ad nauseum debating issues like DRM and copyright, free downloads and choose-your-price models, social media and social music…
All of this begs the question: What will 2009 bring? Pundits near and far are surely throwing out predictions left and right (let’s face it, we probably will too), but no one really knows what could happen this year.
One interesting development, which could potentially be an early indicator of a new direction is Groove Armada‘s new viral music sharing model. The English duo, made up of Andy Cato and Tom Findlay, has now come up with a legal way of sharing music that rewards the fans for doing so, thereby recruiting those fans into somewhat of a virtual street team. Empower the fans and they will become your evangelists. Amen to that.
“When you give away music for free it’s disposable. When you share it, it’s done with love,” says Cato.
Using Bacardi B-Live Share (they sure do love their Bacardi), they offer the first track off their new EP for free, which users then pass along to friends, thus enabling the original user to access the next track. NME states that this system is being called PAP4 (pass-along-paid-for)… questionable nomenclature to be sure. Yet, the concept seems solid. Essentially, the more you share their music, the more of it you get for free.
It will be interesting to see if this gets as viral as it has the potential to do, or if it will be just another good idea that got no traction. One stumbling block could be that although the concept seems as simple as 1) download free song 2) share song with friends 3) get more free songs, it’s actually a little more complicated once you look closely. Click here for more details. You know, things like a) you have to be (or claim to be) of legal drinking age b) you have to have shared track one with 20 people before you get track two, then 200 for track three, and 2,000 for track four… keeping in mind that the second two generations compound so you get credit for your friend that your friend shared the song with. See where this gets complicated? In any case, it’s probably best to just try it. If nothing else at least go get the first song and the facebook app.
Apparently this model has been in the works for a bit. Sadly, none of us were chosen to fly to Ibiza for a day to write about it while it was still in top secret mode…
So let’s see. We’ve got artists ditching the majors and going it alone, with only the internet as their guide. Then we’ve got artists flocking to independent labels looking for that warm and fuzzy we-actually-care-about-you-and-won’t-screw-you-over vibe. And of course, we’ve got artists with smart managers, PR people, or maybe just creative college interns coming up with all sorts of wacky – and sometimes highly effective – pricing models, distribution models and the like.
We’ll see if Groove Armada’s new model works out for them and if so, if others copy it. Until then, however, we can rest easy knowing that the world’s favorite rum has still got their back.
