Music Kickstarter Puts A Record Label In The Cloud | Hacker News Reader

Music Kickstarter Puts A Record Label In The Cloud

arcticstartup.com

29 pointsbergie16 comments

Where's the recording studio? That seems to be a big part of what makes a record label a record label.

Will musicians still have to pay for studio time, production, etc? If so, this seems more like music promotion in the cloud, rather than a label per se.

Still, it's a great idea and I hope it is successful.

We have one studio of our own in Helsinki (see http://letgostudios.com/), but otherwise we're partnering with studios in different places.

Traditional labels don't always pay for studio time either, but at least we can provide different options in that area...

You're right, a lot of times studio costs come out of the artist's advance. And there are plenty of local studios that musicians can pay to record in.

But still, one of the big things (in my mind) labels have going for them is state of the art record studios and top-notch producers.

Maybe in the future you could consider fronting money for studio time and having a list of freelance producers?

Most of the local bands I know (wrongly) feel like they could manage promotion themselves through Facebook and email. But they get really excited at the opportunity to record.

...even a good engineer is useful. Playing music live is very different to recording music in a studio.

Knowing that you want a bit of echo on that and you want this to sound a bit crunchy is good, but knowing which buttons to twiddle to get that is tricky.

Records labels hardly pay for studio times these days. And forget that if you are a new unsigned band. And that is what they are targeting, right?

They forgot to include the kitchen sink!

I've been working on something with a tour creation focus for the last few years but for them that's just a footnote.

Superb effort or "jack of all trades, master of none?"

We certainly won't implement everything ourselves, instead partnering with other start-ups in the area. You could call KickUp a sort of service mash-up that in addition handles the rights management etc. for artists.

Tour creation is very interesting, so probably we should talk?

Yes of course.. the site is http://bopgig.com

I manage a small music label and that was a glaring omission for me too. That part of the industry is brutal for newcomers, which has some serious paradox business problems.

Maybe if you're funded enough, you can just pay a booking agency.. but for a big group of unknown talent, I just don't see it working.

Touring is the single biggest PR problem for my artists, the technical services are easy in comparison.

http://monofonuspress.com/ Our website if anyone is interested.

Interesting. Bopgig has the facility for one user (such as yourself) to manage multiple artists on the site. There's a feature release on its way (public stats and demographics) to allow booking agencies and venues to come in and find artists and approach artists that interest them, but now that I think about it, tour creation should ideally be automated or semi-automated, probably the same way airline and truck routing is - but it'll take time to reach that point.

It's an intriguing problem for sure. If I wasn't so busy with everything else I'd work on booking full time. I've considered branching off a new company just to focus on that.

I am in the process of writing a how-to doc, and releasing a couple of features that should make research and booking using BG fairly straightforward and effective - let me reach out in a few weeks. You'd have to have your artists ask fans to signup (to make the most of it), thus I'm shaping the site up to be as compelling as possible so that can happen. It'll hopefully give you an edge.

Great, I can't wait!

We're building the service itself on Heroku and Node.js. I'll try to write a story next week on how the technical side of things works, including coordinating business workflows with NoFlo (http://noflojs.org/)

Cool name, bros

The real service name is KickUp, not Music Kickstarter. Arctic Startup has the company name in the title, unfortunately.

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