Author Archives: Emilio Pérez Miguel

Groovebug – Like Flipboard, But Only That For Music

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Name: Groovebug
URL: http://www.groovebug.com

Groovebug is based on a great idea, namely doing for music videos what Fipboard does for social network feeds. In case you’ve been locked in a cupboard for the last couple of months, Flipboard is an iPad app that can take care of collecting all the information that is otherwise distributed all over your favorite social sites, and have it presented as a magazine. This magazine can include everything from pictures to videos, and it can be flipped using the kind of hand gestures that make one feel like a character out of Star Trek.

Well, Groovebug does pretty much the same, but only that for the music you love. Groovebug takes a good look at your iTunes library, and then it uses what it finds there to assemble the pages of a magazine 100% suited to your tastes.

Groovebug is mainly powered by YouTube and The Echo Nest, with a custom aggregation engine also being used in order to retrieve these videos that are going to be displayed. The Echo Nest, incidentally, is one of the hottest new names around – it’s a music intelligence platform that is employed both by heavy-hitters like Spotify and Rdio. Continue reading →

Jonas Brander (Restorm) – Interview (Part 2)

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Part 2 of the excellent interview with Jonas from Restorm. Enjoy, and share!.

PART II

MUSIC & YOU

When did you become interested in music? What was the first album or single you ever purchased?

I became interested in music just when my brain started to work inside my mother’s belly. She often sang to me, that’s why I wanted to stay inside and they had to cut her open to get me. It was really comfortable. Since this day I often became angry and could channel all this emotion with Sonic Youths “Daydream Nation”.

Are you in a band yourself, or have you been in a band in the past? Is there a clip on YouTube or elsewhere we could watch?

The most people working at restorm.com are playing in bands or have a really strong passion for music. I have various projects. The main project at the moment is a German rap project and is called son kas. Continue reading →

Jonas Brander (Restorm) – Interview (Part 1)

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Believe me, you’re surely not wanting to pass on this interview with Jonas Brander from Restorm, the platform for licensing music online I reviewed last month on MusicKO. I praised the service quite extensively back then, and the conversation I was fortunate enough to have with Jonas simply exemplifies the way of thinking of those with the vision and the skill to create revolutionary digital services.
You can read Part 1 of the interview below. Part 2 (“Music & You”) is right here.

Full Name: Jonas Brander
Age: 25
Startup: restorm.com
Position: media & communication

 

PART I

THE STARTUP

 

Tell us a little about your startup. How was it conceived? What are its most distinctive features in your opinion?

We built an artist-based music platform that offers solutions for the challenges of the music industry. There should be one place for everyone who loves music, one meeting point where artists, labels, promoters, media representatives and music lovers can connect to share their music, offer gigs and tickets or talk about music.

At the moment we focus to build professional and completely free tools to help artists to earn more money and create more attention while saving time. For example restorm.com allows bands and labels to sell music directly to their fans. It only takes a few minutes to set up a personal download shop, which can be embedded on their homepage or on Facebook. 90% of all sales go directly to the artists. Another feature is the connect tool that allows you to synchronize Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Soundcloud, Youtube and large Eventdatabases with each other at once. With the so-called Minipage you can embed the entire restorm.com profile anywhere on the web. Just to mention a few of our tools.

What was the original launch date?

restorm.com was launched in 2007, but it had another focus back then. Our CEO Philippe Perreaux became the main shareholder of the company in 2008 and in the course of this change we had a big personal and conceptual shift towards the vision we represent now. So the real starting point was at the end of 2008. The following two years were mainly programming to get a unique profile and stand out from other music platforms.

What has been the response so far? In which countries has it been more successful?  

Since we have a clear profile, the feedback has been really good. For example, just recently there was a huge survey from a university and the biggest German independent music association. They analyzed 13 music platforms in eight categories and restorm.com won far in front of well-known services such as Bandcamp, Spotifiy or Soundcloud.

As we started in Switzerland its consequence was that we first had the most members in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. But since we are available in five languages and have a global approach, we daily get more and more bands form all over the world. So this discrepancy should be history soon. Continue reading →

Playing For Change Cover Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground”

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Playing For Change

Playing For Change is a collective devoted to bringing music and arts education to underprivileged children in the furthest corners of the world. It became a global phenomenon on the strength of its first release, a cover of “Stand By Me”.

And to mark the very first Playing For Change day ever, this collective has now recorded a cover of Stevie Wonder’s classic track “Higher Ground”.

This is the clip. It features the joint talent of vocalist Clarence Bekker (from the Netherlands) and percussionists from countries as distant as Mali, Senegal, Brazil, Colombia and Jamaica. A 21-string West African bridge-harp is also in evidence.

September the 17th has been designated as the annual Playing For Change day, and the theme of the first one is “Power To The People”. It’s supported by no other than Yoko Ono, and the aim is to raise $250,000 to be able to subsidize the collective’s operations for 2012. Music festivals and personal celebrations have already been announced in all five continents in support of this special day.

The Bear Season (Uruguayan Independent Artist)

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The Bear Season: Ale Nario, Fela Magnani, Santiago de Souza, Dave Lazar, Manuel Curiel and Álvaro de León.

You know what? I’ve had it with these stuffy folks at Oxford. They’ve sold us a language that’s nowhere as limited as they’ve always claimed. They’ve shown us nothing but these sides of words they wanted us to see. Period. Take the verb “shock”, for instance. I’ve recently become aware such a verb isn’t as one-dimensional as they have told us all our lives. It’s dawned on me that it’s equally possible to be shocked positively and negatively, that you can be shocked both in good and in bad ways. Hesitant? Read on…

Definition of “something that shocked me in a bad way”: the day a friend gave me a copy of Anal Cunt’s “40 More Reasons to Hate Us” album as a birthday present, on the ostensible grounds that I love collecting rare CDs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, at around that time this wondrous friend had the chance to buy Led Zeppelin’s “Remasters” for the price of a single CD and add it to his personal collection, and he chose to buy a studio album by Wang Chung instead.
Despite the fact that I changed my address twice and that now I sleep ensconced in the middle of an underground labyrinth, I still have nightmares from time to time.

Definition of “something that shocked me in a good way”: the day I listened to The Bear Season’s debut EP (“Do It“) for the first time. Despite being Uruguayan, the guys sounded so Californian that I couldn’t help thinking if they had long blonde hair and big breasts then they’d be Athena Lundberg.
They’ve always been one of these bands I was more than eager to feature on MusicKO, but for some intricate reason or the other (like being busy listening to Pixie Lott’s debut album) I could never get around to doing it. Until now. Continue reading →

Songspin.fm – Discover And Share The Latest Sounds

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Name: Songspin
URL: http://www.songspin.fm

Songspin.fm is here to cater to all your music discovery needs. With its ability to let you pick a genre and produce a random tune after the other for you to go through, it does remind me a lot of Chatroulette. Only that Songspin.fm has no unsavory aspects to damage the overall experience of users (or to enhance it beyond belief – I guess both vantage points can hold true).

Rock, Pop, Metal, Indie, Dance, Electronic, Hip Hop, Rap… all these genres are already supported. You simply pick the one that makes you go all noddy, bang the “SPIN” button and squeeze your headphones with your mitts if you like what comes in. And if you don’t, then you simple hit “SPIN” again. Ease of use? Up there, with Odin and Thor.

And Songspin.fm also has a social dimension to it, for those who are really popular on sites like Facebook and Twitter. They can share the best selections that they come across when using the site, and start influencing their counterparts in a way not possible ever since Yahoo! insensitively pulled the plug on GeoCities.

How Does REM’s Michael Stipe Use Tumblr?

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Pretty much like you and me, that’s how. Just take a look at his personal Tumblr, “Confessions of a Michael Stipe”. He abides by the same rules as any old Joe. The frontman of the “fathers of alt rock” has no special privileges or treatment of any kind when it comes to the creative work he makes public there.

"Confessions of a Michael Stipe" Is The Official Tumblr Of REM's Iconic Singer

Stipe has recently remarked that his personal Tumblr actually represents the “real” him – it’s not subject to people’s preconceptions, and no record company exerts the slightest influence on what he decides to publish.

Stipe also says he picked that name because of its ironic value. “This might not be the Michael Stipe that you think you know,” he said, “this is actually me”.

Freddy Mercury Gets One Of The Most Remarkable Google Doodles Ever

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Freddy Mercury Would Have Become 65 Years Old This September

The candidate for the most impressive Doodle of the year became available earlier today as the Google homepage paid homage to Freddie Mercury on what would have been his 65th birthday.

Set to the music of “Don’t Stop Me Now”, the Doodle (embedded in its entirety below) references some of Mercury’s most emblematic moments. These include him dressing in drag for the “I Want To Break Free” music video, and there are subtle nods to “A Kind Of Magic” and “Innuendo”, the last Queen album to be published in Mercury’s life.

He died on the 24 of November, 1991, less than 24 hours after issuing a statement in which he confirmed the barraging rumors that he was HIV positive.

Willie Nelson Covers Coldplay’s “The Scientist”

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Willie Nelson Has Just Covered Coldplay's "The Scientist" As Part Of An Awareness Campaign For Chiplote

Ask people in South America to name some emblematic country artists, and one they’re sure to mention is Willie Nelson. His long, unstoppable career and his cross-genre collaborations (sometimes with best-selling Latin artists like Julio Iglesias) have made him one of the better-known country musicians in Spanish-speaking countries. And as far as Uruguay is concerned, the composer of “Red Headed Stranger” must be one of the most popular country performers ever along with Johnny Cash, Kenny Rogers and Alabama.

I think the video embedded below does nothing but underline the versatility which has made Nelson so popular worldwide. It’s a cover of Coldplay’s “The Scientist”, recorded as part of an awareness campaign for Chiplote.

The video (which depicts a farmer who regrets turning his organic farm into a factory farm) has clearly been created to highlight the importance of sustainable food, and also to emphasize the focus on natural, organic products in Chiplote’s restaurants. It’s interesting to point out how this clip (which has been named “Back to the Start”) is similar in approach to Coldplay’s original video, in which everything is told in reverse order.

Willie’s version of “The Scientist” is being sold in iTunes, with $0.60 of each download going straight to the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation.

Month In Review – August 2011

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The best post of the whole month was undoubtedly the review of La Medio Siglo’s debut EP, “Altos Con Rulos”. La Medio Siglo is an emerging Uruguayan funk/rock band, and (as evidenced by “Altos Con Rulos”) they seem to have quite a bright path ahead of them.

I also managed to upload the newest videos of two artists that were previously featured on the blog: Laura Chinelli’s “Si Me Pierdo” and The Blueberries’ “London Eye”.

On the startup front, I covered the following five services: MPlayr, Nogeno, JamCloud, Restorm and MuseSpring. And while I only managed to conduct one interview in the whole month, it was a really enlightening one with Jason Grunstra from JamCloud.

And those of you who are always wondering in which ways music will be marketed and presented in the future might like to check the first app album ever, as released by Bjork.