Bye Bye Record Labels, Bye Bye TV
A recent IM:
Draxtor Despres: dear friends, while my RL assignment continues, i recommend a story about music promotion i did a while back http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrlSek4O8g4, the ingenious guys at CRUXY are currently working on avatar-based players and they are indeed shaping SL in an exciting way for musicians and video folk alike. enjoy! i am back in a month from now…
Cruxy cuts out the middleman
Drax brings the goodness once again!
I heard from Nathan a couple of months ago and it sounded like they were almost ready to go on this. So Cruxy does it again with their new music player, making it easy for artists to “hand out” their songs to other avatars in the virtual world. I like the idea of making avatars into walking music players as well. It means that I can tell my friends about an artist I like, play them a tune, and then they can decide to buy an album based on a real preview of the music instead of just my opinion.
Many artists are figuring out that handing out portable, cheap-to-free media like MP3s and MPGs are the way to go. Look at Participatory Culture’s Miro, for instance: 3,440 channels, many in HD, indexed, searchable, brilliant and free. It’s amazing how far they’ve come.
Net-heads take things like these for granted now, but it’s important to remember how recent all of this is. A few years ago they were Anarcho-Syndicalist activists. They called it “Democracy Player” back then, and they had a side project too: “Downhill Battle” (now visible only via Wayback Machine). They were going to take down the big bad corps, and make damn sure that if you had genuine talent you wouldn’t be robbed blind by the record labels.
They were spinning their wheels a bit, and they knew it, I think. Their utopian dreams required public buy-in to come to life, but labeling themselves “activists” was a sure-fire way of preventing people from thinking of them as “legitimate”. So they ditched “activist” in favor of our age’s chique image of all things good: “geek”. They closed Downhill Battle, probably assuming (correctly) that sites like OpSound.org were kicking this problem’s butt already without getting all in-your-face about it. They then re-branded Democracy Player into the more Web 2.0 style appeal-to-the-techies “Miro”.
Now things are changing. Things like Cruxy, OpSound and Miro aren’t pop-culture yet, but they’re one decent social-network API release away from becoming revolutionary. Stay tuned folks, we’re at the tipping point.