alonetone blog

The new alonetone store & 10k prize winners!

2009-12-02T22:16:14+00:00

Hi there!

Inspired by a handful of crazy alonetoners who decided to home-brew their own alonetone t-shirts (you know who you are!)...

...the official-as-it-is-going-to-get alonetone store:

I was going to try and hold out on announcing it until my first order arrived and I could guarantee that everything was in order, that the product was sweet, etc....but...I want to give the non-USA alonetoners a chance to order some goods before christmas (still waiting on my order, as shipping to EU/UK and other places takes a good week.)

As mentioned on the store: all prices are at cost. Some of the t-shirts are rather expensive, in my opinion, but this is at cost, and supposedly the quality is decent. Also: Have a better design/idea for a shirt? I'm all ears (eyes?)

PRIZES FROM THE 10K:

Each of those awesome individuals who cooked up playlists and/or cover tunes for the 10k celebration - Thank you! You guys each get an alonetone shirt (or cup if you like!) on me. Email me your physical address to sudara@alonetone.com and tell me which item you want!

10K Playlists:

Wildgeas Celebrates alonetone

Bethan Celebrates 10k

10000 and rising by Alan

Da Faves by mmi

glu presents: Rhythmically Delish Vol III Alonetone Compilation

Last but not least, montgomeru recorded an amazing rendition of Finuto by Benjamin Wuamett, one of the very first tracks to be uploaded to alonetone. (I think actually the 2nd song to be uploaded that wasn't my own track!). Check it out:

OTHER NEWS:

I'm still working on a big update to speed up a bunch of the pages. It is going to be awesome fast when I'm done. I've pushed out a bunch of small fixes over the last week to the forums, and improved the spam-catching filters (it was catching too many valid comments). As always, leave feedback on the forums or email me if something is bugging you.

Enjoy!

Celebrate with us: 10,000 tracks on alonetone!

2009-09-10T21:17:24+00:00

Earlier this week, alonetone surpassed 10,000 tracks.

That just wows me. Wow.

If you loaded up alonetone and listened to every song in a row, you'd be kept busy 24 hours a day for pretty much a full month!

I've made so many new friends, heard so many new sounds, ran into some amazing music, had so much positive feedback on both the site and my music that I need to say thank you everyone for hanging out, sharing your music, letting me know when you run into glitches and bugs, and just in general being a wonderful group of people.

I want to celebrate. Anyone else?

I'm thinking the following: We make September the official 'show your love to alonetone artists' month and choose one of the following:

1) Cover and/or Remix a song of your choice by an alonetone artist. Be sure to get the artist's permission of course. Maybe send them a private comment asking. I'd be willing to bet most would be honored, but it's always polite to ask!

2) Create a playlist of your favorite songs from alonetoner artists and publish it. For those with 100s of favorites this could be a real job!

Do one of these two things then post a comment here pointing us to your track or playlist and we'll feature the results in October. Oh, and one person participating and posting here by the last day of September will be randomly chosen to win a Very Special To Be Announced alonetone prize :)

Thank you guys and gals again!

Piracy Didn't Kill the Record Industry

2009-08-17T16:33:52+00:00

Hi there!

For those short on time, here's the news: We have a new blog, hopefully more enjoyable to read.

For those with a few minutes, I want to tell you a bit of a story.

The other day, I crawled into bed and was flipping through the New Yorker magazine when I ran into an article by John Seabrook about the Music Performance Industry. (full article text requires login)

I began to read, comfortably getting drowsy and enjoying the article until I hit this quote:

With the collapse of the record business, as a result of piracy (album sales are almost half what they were in 2000, and, according to some surveys ninety-five per cent[sic] of all downloaded music is stolen), the business of selling live music has become the main source of revenue for the popular-music industry.

I sat upright in bed. I was very disturbed. For those who haven't had their coffee yet, this is what just happened in that sentence:

The record industry collapsed
The collapse was due to piracy
The collapse is proven by dropping album sales
Piracy is the cause of this collapse because up to 95% of downloaded music is "stolen"
Because of these industry-killing pirates, live music is now the #1 revenue source

What disturbed me the most is that the author is not (that I know of) a shill for the record industry, but an established writer from the New Yorker. I expected more.

So, I pulled my laptop in bed and began to write a letter to the editor. I couldn't say all that I wanted, nor could I really get into details (you only get a few sentences), but here is what I ended up sending to them today:

I was disappointed that despite John Seabrook's insights into the music performance industry, when it came to the recording industry, he seemed content to play the same broken record that the major labels play - attributing its collapse to piracy. Major labels largely failed to recognize the value and opportunity that the internet provided (it rendered the cost of distribution close to nil). They fell into a state of panic, suing customers, crippling their digital products (DRM) and generally acting in a protective manner hostile to their audiences. Definition of piracy aside (can you share what you own?) and the true effect of sharing music on record sales (many studies show it is has either no effect or a positive effect), the failure of the industry is more simply attributed to greed and lack of innovation in the face of a new technology. Fortunately, an increasing number of Artists see the changing landscape as an opportunity and have decided to bypass the industry altogether in favor of connecting directly with their fans.

If one were to take Seabrook's quote and replace "piracy" with "inability to address the changing market due to the internet", then everything would have been fine. Instead, audience members around the world apparently shoulder the blame for the poor poor industry and - oh, and anyone who shares music is a criminal. (Read up here for more history on the subject)

The author of this article should have gone to the trouble of googling "music sharing studies sales" and reading any of the studies that have been done that prove that "piracy" has either negligent or positive effect on sales, such as this, this or this.

Furthermore, album sales, though perhaps lucrative in the past for record companies, were rarely lucrative for the artist, even pre-internet. Another google search would turn up classics like Steve Albini's early 90s article "The Problem With Music". The Riaa testified to congress that 2 million records need to be sold before an artist would break even. Does this sound like a healthy business model, where less than 1% of artists in the system have a chance at making a decent living, and the rest are left in debt to their labels? And what about the tens of thousands of artists considered too risky?

People like music. Music is social. Sharing music with our friends is a deep part of our culture, and could never be controlled by corporations, even if it was contributing negatively to their bottom line, which it wasn't. Music is simply too important to people. I've turned on countless people to new artists(as I'm sure you have), both on major labels and here on alonetone. Heck, when I turn on a friend to a new artist, I'm basically marketing on behalf of that artist - I'm converting my friend into a potential fan who will now/later be a recurring revenue source for that artist. Not many folks will drop $10-16 to buy an album from an artist they've never heard, but most folks (given that they have money) will spend the money at the drop of a hat to support an artist they like.

How could the record industry not see that digital distribution was one of the greatest marketing opportunities that they could possibly posses? I have no clue, but what I do know is that major labels have spent over 10 years fighting against their audience, their artists and technology itself. Simply put: They caused their own collapse. Musicians and Music lovers around the world deserve better.

Chat room is open & ad hoc 24-hour albums

2009-08-01T15:24:21+00:00

Howdy!

It's been a while, but a lot has been happening.

Here's a roundup.

We got a chat room, in case you have not dropped by yet. Come waste some time with us LIVE! and talk about music, alonetone, or the latest funny youtube video you saw.

What else is new? Well, the very very very beginnings of my "secret project" are starting to bear fruit.

It's called ListenApp!

Listenapp! it is an "iTunes-like" way of browsing the music on alonetone. Basically, it is built for the listener (hence the name) rather than the artist (which is what alonetone is all about).

Only the very very basic features are in place and it still has many quirks, but if you have Firefox or Safari, you are welcome to poke around. IE will NOT work yet, but support for IE7/8 is planned.

http://ListenApp.com

I'd love feedback, and we got a whole bunch of goodies planned for exposing the music in a listener-friendly way. alonetone has always been about artists, so it was time to create something for listeners. It's going to be a long ride getting this thing going in my free time on top of work, music, and alonetone, but it's going to be great.

Need to make music? Right now? Like all day?

Jump on board and get a 24-hour album done with some support of your fellow alonetoners! A few of us are ROCKING RIGHT NOW: Saturday, August 1st. What is a 24-hour album? It's 24 hours of you making music with the goal of getting an EP at the end of the ride. It's exhausting, exhilarating, exciting, and many other e-words worth of fun. Check out the albums from last december and come chat with us about it if you are interested.

That's about it. Hope everyone is having a pleasant summer, and remember to keep your strings in tune, your throats cleared, and the midi keyboards dust-free.

Sudara

spring cleaning, see who follows who

2009-03-22T23:02:00+00:00

Hi there!

After a quiet january and february, alonetone is getting some development love.

I just came back from Vienna where Samo and I hashed out the UI design for the upcoming secret project.

Here's what I just pushed out on alonetone:

You can now see who everyone follows
You can now easily add favorites to playlists
The beginnings of a press page
A few IE7 bugs fixed
Playlist editing and track adding was...cleaned up a bit
A handful of minor changes here and there
Upgrading to the latest version of Rails and jQuery

Let me know if anyone sees any issues.

We're humming along at a good clip, track uploads are looking scarily...'exponential' on the stats page.

Welcome to all you n00bs - be sure to speak up on the forums if you have questions and suggestions.

Yeah, and if you wanna get creative with the alonetone logo for some strange reason, check out the press page with 8 different versions of the logo in 3 different formats.

Yeah....that's it for now. Time to enjoy all the good music that's landed here recently.