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Let's attempt a different approach

rico	Date: March 15, 2008 @ 6:49 PM You know what it is? Its everyone having the same exact page. Its like going from cubicle to cubicle. How about being able to add my own html, or non-flash video? Or putting a picture or graphic WHEREVER I want. This is what I mean when I say this site is ugly. So stop talking about skins and whatnot, please. Its making friends, and then watching them all leave never to return. When I joined the site was ugly. But at least it worked. And it was simple. We could trust that things worked. Everyone participated, everyone was friendly. Now its still ugly, and we have no peace of mind. And the complexity is through the roof. Partly because of broken services, yes but still. Is that an excuse or a reason, or both? Sure the site is free, so some leeway is deserved, but I'm looking at an ad right now, and I wonder if that money could go to a programmer or better equipment. Maybe it is? Or is it going into someone's wallet? Look if your using ads then u care about traffic. If you care about traffic then u should care about us. And if you cared about us, then why have we all left? Where are all my old friends? Why is it when I use Dmusic I'm forced to see the long list of presumably permanent offline friends? Dmusic feels dead inside to me. Just my two cents. Or is that four cents now.
rico	Date: March 15, 2008 @ 6:55 PM Anyhoo, my apologies for creating a ruckus. And Leflaw, if you have people more in your face and louder then me, well u have my respect sir.
Woof	Date: March 15, 2008 @ 8:05 PM I understand where you're coming from, Rico, and I agree with a lot of what you're suggesting. Let me offer a little background, so you know where we're at. Right before Christmas, DMusic got fried. Literally, the drives fried. We lost a lot of our coding, a lot of our music, and the site was offline for a heck of a long time. Leflaw and the team are still working to bring everything back to the way it was before the crash. DMusic has been switched to brand new servers, that should be a lot more reliable in the future. But there's a problem. The code used for this site was deeply flawed, even in the old days when everything appeared to be working really well. The redesign didn't help things either. It added to the confusion and bugginess. So you might say that DMusic is being rebuilt from scratch. The first step is to get everything reloaded and working again. We're not there yet. But the crew is working on it. Once that happens, there will be room to discuss which features to add, and I'm sure that suggestions from the community will be taken into consideration. I have a feeling that it'll be a couple of months before those steps can be taken. The recovery has been a long and painful process. Distilled and I both want to see much more customization of user pages here. Other members would rather have a simple, functional look. It's an ongoing discussion here in the forum, but until the recovery is complete, all it can be is a discussion, because the programmers are too busy bringing the site back to life. Membership here began dropping off a couple of years ago. A lot of bands that I became friends with just stopped coming. I don't know if they are even doing music anymore. A lot of things can be blamed for the dropoff, but realistically, I think that the one major culprit is the same disease that has plagued every OMD site that has ever been: People upload their songs, and expect the site to provide them with an audience. When that doesn't happen, they feel discouraged and give up. DMusic is pretty interactive, but really, getting lots of attention from other artists who also want to get lots of attention is kind of like the dog eating its' own tail. We can compliment each other till the cows come home, but at the end of the day, all that's been accomplishes is reciprocal back patting. No new attention is paid to anybody's work. And I think that people get tired of that game after a while, and give up. We're seeing a low membership here, but we're also seeing dropping numbers at any number of OMD sites. Everybody thought that the web was going to do a lot for them, and they were wrong. Look at it this way: You can have a great resume published for you, but if you don't send it out to anybody, you don't get the work. And it seems that's what OMD websites provide. An online resume. The artists still have to promote themselves, themselves... if that makes any sense. A lot of artists don't know how to do that. They think that, if they build a site and get compliments from other artists, they will be discovered. It just doesn't work that way. Well, it does if you want to be the next Numa Numa or Chocolate Rain or Leave Britney Alone guy, but that's positioning oneself to be an internet novelty. A joke. And most artists would rather be artists, I think. Anyhow, that's what I've seen, and I hope this helps bring you up to speed.
LiQuidMetamo...	Date: March 15, 2008 @ 9:17 PM Yes, agreed. Especially about audience and promotion. The proliferation of cheap or free computer software with a limited amount of hardware knowledge has led to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide laying their music down and all of these people want a slice of the pie. We should forget dreaming. The average musician will not make an existence through music. Only the very determined, who establish a ton of connections and dedicate many hours per day might have a chance of being the next big thing. People say 'well the Arctic Monkeys were signed on Myspace' which is a myth, that band had already been playing a while, had a manager and established the contacts and had the material before anyone and were starting to become a buzz through word of mouth. The fact they were filesharing and encouraging it helped to start a buzz but they are now a signed record artist and don't share much of their new material since then. 10 years ago it was too costly for the average home musician or band to make a CD. Now you can do it from pocket change. And everyone has the same dream, riches and fortunes through music. For 99.9% of us, it ain't gonna happen. Even if some of the music we make is better than what is released. And Dmusic, Soundclick, MySpace etc will only make a tiny bit of a difference, and the people listening are other home recordists who might send you a nice acknowledgement but are not going to go out and be part of your street team and generate a buzz for you, when they have not enough time and resources to devote to creating their own buzz. I made a CD last year. I took a lot of time and trouble with it and sold nearly 60 minutes of music for just US$9.00. I sold approximately 55 copies and that was mainly through whoring myself out through 2 dozen websites and probably 30 of the sales came from Dmusic friends and my family/their friends. I made that album free at Jamendo and on my website and publish that it's free on less than 6 websites and it gets more than 1300 downloads. People don't want to pay for music, especially homebrewed music by independent bedroom producers or even small town bands. The big boys ram what they want us to buy on TV and radio and many people will only download their stuff for free. UNless you're a mega act, you will not make much if any money through music. The big boys are mostly using it as a loss leader to promote concerts and DVD videos etc. Those musicians here, like Gene, like Empire Day, etc who go out and play live regularly and maybe sell a few copies of their CD at their gigs have my total respect. They have their own freedom, no record company owns a piece of them (or mos of the pieces), yet they make great music and have earned themselves a good reputation and for Gene, a living, even if that means playing in some pretty dire locations to hostile crowds. And what does Dmusic do for them lately ? The same as for anyone else - not too much, but the more involved you are, the more you will get out of it in a personal and spiritual way, not just as a promotion vehicle.
rico	Date: March 16, 2008 @ 1:05 AM woof ty for the update. Personally I'm not someone to hold onto dreams of being a rock star. That was never why I came here. Just looking for a place to share my music with others who had the same idea. Working together on rifts, or finding a singer to sing on my stuff. I've even bought cd's off others, like marc salmon. So I respectfully disagree that an online music sharing site can't work. You just have to change the approach, innovate. Why continue to try something or a method that isn't working? By your own admission, things have been progressively getting worse in terms of memberships , no? The hardware faliure is forgiveable. If its one thing I know about hardware is that it dies. But I know of no successful business model, that tells you to keep sailing into the sunset while your taking on water. When google first realized that the internet search model was never going to be fruitful, they found a different way to do it. Now, where are all the other search engines? Just because they can't do it either doesn't mean you can't. Isn't it kinda good to lose all that music on the drives anyway? There was a lot of junk in there from way the hell back. Don't you want active people and their music around as well?
leflaw	Date: March 16, 2008 @ 2:02 AM No, it wasn't kinda good to lose those drives.
Woof	Date: March 16, 2008 @ 3:02 AM First off, I'd like to thank the participants in this thread so very much, for spelling "lose" correctly. That's been one of my pet peeves since forever. What a relief! And I agree, it was not good to have this awful meltdown. You mention artists that you've come to know and love over the years, Rico, and don't forget that their music was jeopardized along with anything that you might think of as "junk". There was no benevolent quality control spirit separating the wheat from the chaff. Everything suffered. This is indeed a good time to open discussion on the type of features and services that DM will be providing. Nothing can be implemented yet, but it always takes a while to arrive at some sort of agreement as to what's really gonna be useful, and what isn't. Personally, I've always felt that the real strength here, was exactly what you mentioned, Rico. The ability to connect with other artists for the purpose of collaboration. Even with DM being in the state it's in now, it stands head and shoulders above a lot of places when it comes to offering the type of communication channels to make that possible. Then again, there are a lot of artists who aren't interested in this. If DM were to model itself with online collaboration as its' primary function, the membership would shrink even smaller. Curiously enough, most of the people who log on regularly now, are the people who have an interest in this. Those people stuck around! The fact remains, though, that even if you create stunning collabs, then you're stuck with the dilemma of who you're going to play it for. So as long as we have the time and willingness to toss ideas around, why not do that? As they said in the film "Thirteen Days", "There's no wise old man who's going to tell us what we ought to do. There's just... us." Define the target market. That's where we ought to begin, IMO.
LiQuidMetamo...	Date: March 16, 2008 @ 5:15 AM DMusic definately rules for collabs. The only other site I'm a member of where there's any level of interest is cubase.net, where believe me, you had better produce the goods in pristine form or they will shoot you some broad criticism on a public forum. Collabing here is less pressurized, because unlike the cubase forum where many people are pro or semi pro musicians with a bunch of expensive top notch stuff, we accept our limitations, technologically and musically. We collab with people with whom we've built up a trust, and from that freedom of pressure, some truly great works are produced (others less so, but in most cases it was fun at least !). Still, woof is correct that although some of us like collabing and are here, that's not the primary focus. I don't have much time for collabs, I don;t have much time for my own music, I work full time and even though I love music and playing, I am not going to risk a great career with a nice pension to sell the house and pack up a camper van with my amp and instruments and hit the road. I've been a member since Jan 2006. Even at that time, numbers were dropping off. I remember that the old Dmusic shop was buzzing, now it exists for Larry to sell his back catalog of oldies but goodies he has rights to. We had a large hip hop community which is no longer, attempts to revive it have not yet succeeded. We had lots of promising singer songwriters pass through like Kaythxbye and Sean Malcolm, who also faded away. This was before the redesign. We are underrepresented in many areas, including country, blues, jazz, americana and even folk. Why is this? many reasons. 1) Like woof said, the expectation of promotion and having lots of streams, comments and a working chart like Soundclick. 2) GUI/Interface - I like the site better since the redesign, but the fact that some features are more buggy is an expensive trade off. 3) Other sites have moved on and included extra features such as video. Fair point, but what % of us are making promo videos to go with out music. I recently did one just for the challenge. Customizable screens/fonts/etc. Well, MySpace allows manipulation of HTML and so it can be changed to a limited degree, although you need to know HTML or download an editor, many of which are vehicles for adware. Soundclick only allows subscribers to significantly change their site. I don't know what it is that some people (like Rico) are looking for. Whining and complaining is not going to fix this site. Positive comments and debate may eventually lead us to a better site with the features we want, if the infrastructure is there to host it. And let's start being positive. The forum is very present and indentifiable at this site, unlike Myspace and Soundclick, which are hidden within submenus, when people look at this site, they see all the negativity right away and think - I'll stay away. Well, other sites have problems too, at Myspace my password was hacked, at Soundclick, I found that by accident that I could log into some dudes account and change all his settings and he could mine, the layout at s/c has always been terrible and they haven't changed it yet, ArtistLaunch has been down 2 or 3 times for extended 'maintenance', including a 4 day spell where there was no warning at all, just a DNS error. Dmusic is not at full steam yet, but is worth caring about and fighting for.
rico	Date: March 16, 2008 @ 7:14 AM Well I didn't mean that everything in the archives was junk, certainly not. I just remember one time looking over the gobs of unmaintained songs/rifts/beats not even knowing where to start. There was an awful lot. As for the hip hop crash, you're dealing with a type of music where there is very little overhead to "try and do". No physical hurdle of learning an instrument. I wonder how many people over time have quit learning guitar because it hurt their fingers.... I think any big, popular website will become the target of hackers spammers, adware whores. I mean myspace is free too. Although I'd really hate to see ads on here like i do there... oh please don't do that...
rico	Date: March 16, 2008 @ 7:18 AM maybe the hip hop craze was/is just a fad
LiQuidMetamo...	Date: March 16, 2008 @ 9:35 AM Well, there are plenty of 'dope beatz' for sale at S/C and Myspace As a genre, we used to have good Battles here, now we can't even get a text battle going... This is only one element, but we used to have Dizeazed, Robert McDade, BIR, TDUBB, Mickey Breezy and K3 (among others) really active. Now we see Mickey and K3 from time to time only and the rest never visit. Even Flunky doesn't drop by so much anymore, miss ya bro ....

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