The simplest of these is to capture the audio by rerecording it. this is simple to do and there is no protection against it.  It is all to simple to create an mp3 from captured audio and post it online. This means that when a file is not made available for download but is available to listen to, there is a certain group of people that will listen to and capture the music and not respect the Artists choice of it not being available for download. In the real world, we call these people thieves.

On this subject I fall solidly on the side of the Artist and do not want to contribute to the culture of corruption that is the music serving website group. I can easily gain access to the root file from most music sources and as far as I can tell, I am about the only programmer on the planet that cares about protecting the copyright of an Artist. In my recent review of music delivery technology I was alarmed to find that almost every system makes the file easily available to the web browser.

I will not go into the details because obviously someone that doesn’t know would read them and use that information but If you are an Artist you need to face the reality that in most cases your music is not protected. The systems that do protect music files are complex and difficult to make workable on large scale sites.  Since for the most part, Indie artists are not protected by an agency such as RIAA, copies of their music move freely across the Internet far beyond the  few people they have been sent to, the rule is, if it is online, it is available to everyone. This realization is what lead to Rhapsody being a log on only site. this way they could track their users actions. Sites like last fm and ilike, the music can easily be grabbed as soon as it is played by many methods.

This is both good and bad. Wide scale distribution is necessary to reach and maintain listeners as well as to compete with label music that is spending millions to manufacture Artists and music. It is in these positives that a realization can be made. If you intend to put a file on the Internet, make it available for download. Do this because it eliminates any reason to propagate thief methods which will slowly make them less widely known. Also you can load your mp3 with tons of id3 information including your website address and a picture. this means that any file out there becomes an advertising entity for you. If it is copied and distributed, chances are the id3 tags will stay intact. In 2010 it will become obvious to most artists that record sales will not fuel their careers sufficiently to make a living. It will be live events that fuel the future of music. Most artists sell their music at live events and can reduce the price of a CD to make it nearly impossible to pass up since no shipping is required. Fortunately we live in a world where a live video of your performance has unquestioned copyright and they are easy to remove from the Internet but it is inadvisable to do so unless the audio is horrible or there is a bad costume moment on stage

What all this points to is the need for Independent artists to have an effective association that makes live music opportunities far more available than they are now. Independent artists also need an effective association that helps to  control the technology of distribution as well as tracking web and other exploits and securing against them but there are some common sense things an artist can do to limit the duplication of their music.

Do not put your entire CD on the Internet as mp3 tracks. select a certain number of songs and go with those as your advertising set. make sure your other songs are just not available. Do no place your album art in a high res file on the Internet. The combination of album art and all the tracks makes it all to easy for people to duplicate and sell your music without your permission especially in distant countries. While artists have to give examples of their music for advertising reasons, the only thing that happens when you make all your songs available to listen to is you eliminate the reasons for people to buy music, which we know, creates new music.

Just to go on record, I firmly believe in the artists copyright, I also believe in free music as a form of advertising. All I am saying is, don’t think anyone including me can protect your music online because it is just not possible.  Even if I implement every conceivable protection on the server, your music can still be captured. The truth is, there is no way to prevent it. The good news is that if you look at the data, there is still about 85% of the listening public that will not steal music. These people take the downloads they are offered, get familiar with an artist and if they like their music, the do something really cool, they buy it.

One last thought, if you produce a CD and never put any of the songs on the Internet it doesn’t mean someone else won’t. A person can buy a CD, make mp3’s and upload them many places. The simple fact is that unless people get serious about protecting your rights and apply technology to do that, the music industry will continue to sink beneath the waves and the independent artist will continue to be pulled under with the ship as it goes.

Site Wide Music Radio with the following features

1. Runs in a separate tab or window
2. Allows you to blacklist tracks you don’t favor
3. Can run continuously, loop and shuffle
4. Artists info included for every song
5. Ability to rate song elements separately:
   1. Lyrics
   2. Vocals
   3. Production Quality
   4. etc

Email Notification:

Mod to allow each person to customize their notification settings:

1. Limit the number of messages generated.
2. Select certain categories to notify about

More to be added…..

Suggestions?

Go to my profile and click send message

Each time this happens, a community is lost or damaged beyond repair. This is because the goals are not clearly defined, for example the major question, why am I making this website? is not answered.  You should know the answer before you start.

There is a common endlessly repeating theme that is present on the Internet, the repackaging of other peoples work. This is what the common music site does. Imagine the complexity of capturing all the music available on the Internet and duplicating it real time to your audience on your site. It is not possible. At least 300 new music CD’s are created per day in the world. the mass of music files and the server load they would create would bring any server to it’s knees.

The solution, use multiple servers. but how can you place a website on multiple servers and not go broke? well, you can do it by linking. Most artists have a web presence and as I said before, they don’t need to become a web site manager. When a website like T61 or Last FM puts up their music and a user profile they are really not doing them a favor and all you have to do is look at the pathetic royalty payments generated on some sites to see that.

Each time an artists website is accessed the traffic is recorded so each time you visit their site directly, you drive them up in the website rankings and allow their artist site to appear number one in the listing for them on the Internet. just google your favorite artist and look at how much competition they have for their own name.

This is why I have decided to take this site in a totally different direction. My goal is to drive traffic to Artists websites so they rise to the top of search results. I also want to encourage people to support the artist and not a website competing with them for their own music. This approach is 100% scalable. and it should lead to better quality music available for sampling.

My dream is much bigger than this website, It is about live music, Artist assistance, A community music label, many many things all focused on helping the people that make the music find fans and helping listners find Artists to discover.

To do this takes a community. It means you bring your favorite artists to the site, link to their pages, tell them what we are trying to do and support them by buying their music. There are musicians working everyday pursuing their dreams, making beautiful music, lets help them succeed!

Steve

Artist Stand In Pages: Artist Stand in accounts are pages I have created to allow the site to link to that Artist prior to them signing up. If you would like me to add an artist Stand in page, please let me know. Feel free to add Video links to the Music Video Forum as often as possible to increase the scope of the site. Each stand in account offers links to an artists resources that already exists on the web. This saves me from having to reinvent the wheel or at least postpones it till a later date. What is missing on the Internet is not the song library itself but more the ability for Artists and Music Listeners to interact in a safe environment. Good links from Artist Stand in pages can bring music to this site while boosting the web stats of the artists website moving it up in rank and making it more important on the internet so it is a good place to start.

Music Video: I have also started a group that has as it’s purpose, making it possible to link to artists videos from the BMC community, the group is called Music Video, Please add any links you think Listeners would enjoy watching. Please link directly to the video and not to a play-list or featured video on a users page and include a description. Also don’t forget to tag the video with any relevant tags.

Invite New Users: Our community will only grow stronger with more people to add content and create links worth exploring. Shortly, I will be contacting all of my friends in music to try to get them to come and help us move the community forward. It is my intention to make this community both a discovery community and a review and listening community. I will eventually bring Artist music to the site itself but after a great deal of research I can see that is a big project that will take some time and I would like to move forward constantly so these three steps can help.

Let me know if you think this community is not ready for they above elements to be implemented.

Thanks, Steve

First: There is nothing more important than tying this community to music, pretty obvious. What is not so obvious is this, reinventing the wheel is not necessary. I have in my mind a path from where we are now to the point I want to be in the future. Most web sites have no interest in preexisting information because they have as their goal, capturing the monetary stream from musicians, not building a community to support musicians.In the case of this site, it is not only a good Idea to link to the artists website it gives it the ability to have access to the music that is already present on those sites. At the same time, that action will drive up web stats for each artist making their site rise in the listings, in other words, we will be helping them.

I do not consider this the end place at all and I will not be satisfied until this site can allow you to make and keep playlists and play your music choices when you want to. you should be able to vote for songs you like and you should gain a reputation based on your activity. At the same time I don’t want it to do the senseless stuff like losing artists into black holes in favor of others just because they are new. There has to be, if you amass information, A way to filter it and select what you want. At the same time it is imperative that information is not obscured. This is a very complex problem.

If I had found a site that truly supported indie musicians then I would probably be there right now but even if I was, I would wonder what was coming to ruin it. It seems to be a constant that sites that build communities destroy them. This is mostly caused by someone wanting to be a king or be rich or both. I have no problem with being rich I just don’t pursue it with a plan of becoming rich while riding on the backs of others. I am not saying everyone should be forced to pay for every song play. I am more into heavily reminding everyone to support the musicians financially and in other ways but money is the power of producing quality music so let us as a community stay focused on the needs of the artists if we like their work.

Most individual songs cost hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to produce. When an artist gives away a song as advertising we should not assume that it feels good, they may feel it is necessary. It should be in our will as listeners to help artists forward if we have it in our will to listen to their gift of music. Still in this economy everyone has to give as much as possible both Listeners and Artists.

It is the same as planting a garden so you can reap the harvest. In that plan you always protect the garden because it makes no sense to put it at risk. Some of us can afford to help artists financially. Some can become their advertising agency, some others can offer them support by praising their songs when they are created and others can offer technical support on the creation of music itself. There are many levels of support all equally important.

So, now is the time to contact artists you might know and tell them we will link to their website. We will bring them to the attention of new listeners and we will provide the critical feedback they need about their music and help them in any way we can. I have always believed that what is necessary is for artists to work together for their own mutual success. Right now many are lucky to even find an audience. At the very least we can offer them that. If you haven’t joined Bestbop Music Community and you just stopped by to find out what it is about, I can sum it up like this:  Helping each other succeed.

8^)

Steve

Thanks for coming

Steve

The player currently loops and replays the songs. You can pause it or select the songs using the small inner arrows. This is just a place to start, I am working on a much more interesting player/user relationship.

Steve

Invite all my music loving friends to join

Create a full improvement and maintenance cycle for the community

Implement Music by a method yet to be discovered.

Please give me your input about anything you see that isn’t working the way it should.

Thanks

SteveI