Dave Haynes

I’m pleased to say that I had an article published in Frukt’s Five Eight magazine this month.  If you or your company doesn’t already subscribe to Five Eight then you should seriously consider it - if only for the daily news bulletin that they send out to subscribers. For those who don’t already subscribe I wanted to make the article available for my own readers here on this blog.

The full text is below and you can also download the whole thing as a nice glossy PDF. I’ll also be publishing the four full interviews that I did with Tapulous, Last.fm, Intua and RjDj whilst researching the article.

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Later on today I’m hosting another OpenMusicMedia meetup in London at the William IV pub. You can read more information about it here. And make sure you RSVP here.

It’s been over 10 months now since myself and Jonas Woost first got together and decided that we needed to put on a meetup like this. Something that was informal but informative and somewhere that new ideas could be discussed and debated. This is just our fifth meetup but it feels like we’ve created something extremely worthwhile that is appreciated by all those that attend. If you haven’t been already then do come on down and join in the conversation!

A short while ago I blogged about my goal to raise more money for good causes in a year than I earn. I’m not sure if I’ll achieve this New Years Resolution but I’m certainly going to try and enjoy myself whilst trying. And I can now unveil the first project - Twestival.fm. We’re aiming to raise $20,000 in just two weeks by asking artists and labels to donate tracks. These tracks will then be made available on the main website and anyone streaming or downloading any music will be asked to leave a ‘tip’ in a Radiohead ‘pay what you want’ style.

It’s a great little project that combines two of the things I love… Twitter + digital music. It also  utilises SoundCloud (disclaimer - I work for SoundCloud) and the excellent new payment platform Tipjoy. It’s actually been quite simple to put together. I ended up putting the site together myself using a simple Wordpress template and teaching myself a little CSS so that I could lay it out how we needed. And then it was just a case of putting all the different pieces together using a little know-how and a lot of copy and paste. There’s still a lot of features that we’d like to implement and some of the processes are a little too manual and time-consuming but overall it’s worked out okay (so far!).

So what’s the history…? It was whilst working on another forthcoming project that @Stef (creator of the fabulous Odadeo and Isowish sites amongst others) gave me the idea to contact the people at Twestival to see if they needed some help co-ordinating a digital music project to run alongside the Twestivals taking place in 170+ cities across the world on February 12th.  The super hard-working @Amanda kindly and quickly put me in touch with an enthusiastic @Renate. Renate runs Madhouse Collective and is leading the charge on the music and entertainment front for Twestival so we soon hatched a plan over some introductions and dim sum in Soho (she paid, so I owe her lunch!).

Given the big time constraints and sudden busy-ness of many of the developers we intended to reach out to we’ve had to keep the project as simple as possible but it’s amazing how much you can achieve with the free tools available on the web in 2009. A site such as Twestival.fm which allows users to upload audio, make 100+ tracks available for streaming and download as well as taking micro-payments and cross-posting personalised messages to another website (ie. Twitter) would have either been impossible or very expensive to build just 2-3 years ago. It has cost no money to build and without any professional technical expertise. Our only costs so far have been the domain name registration, the SoundCloud Pro account (which was kindly donated anyhow) and the dim sum!

So what can you do to help?:

1) if you’re an artist/label then please go to http://twestival.fm and upload a track that you’d like to donate right now.
2) if you’re not an artist/label then please tell any that you know (and if you’re reading this blog then I’m sure there’s a high chance that you do know at least one).
3) if you Twitter please ask people to follow @twestivalfm

4) if you’re a company that might like to partner with or sponsor twestival.fm then please get in touch
5) go to the site sometime between 5th and 19th February and donate at least $5 to the cause!

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• Resolutions (bytesizemusic.net)
• What can $0 do? (pistachioconsulting.com)