BeatPick Blog on music licensing, creative commons music, gigs

Here at BeatPick, we are always on the look out for interesting contacts to publicize our artists even further. Working with Radio DJ’s is a great way to get our new artists out there and create a more diverse fan base, making a musician from the United States popular overseas and visa-versa. Freies Radio Kassel is a non-profit German Radio station that has a monthly show to promote free music, also known as “Open Source Audio”. This past June 5^th 2007, four of our many artists were chosen to be broadcasted by Freies Radio. These artists’ works were also aired the following night June 6^th and will eventually be available as a podcast download.

Freies Radio broadcasting will build a new German fan base for the chosen artists, something that -even through a non profit radio station- should be taken advantage of! So Congratulations to Autobam, Cato_six, Kingbastard and Cooler for their amazing selected beats!

Here is the link (its in German!) http://www.freihoch2.de.vu/

The Podcast Download is Here!!

(short)

http://www.archive.org/details/freihoch2-2007-06-05-FRK-1900

http://freihoch2.nerdbox.de/2007/06/intelligente-musik-bei-freihoch2 (in german)

Congratulations to one of our many artists Sean Haefeli, on being a part of Mercedes newest Mixed Tape compilation CD 17! The Mercedes Mixed Tape combines 15 brand new artists from all around the world into a unique collection of jazz, pop and electronic sound. Mercedes is continuously on the look out for new exciting artists so it comes to no surprise to us BeatPickers that Sean Haefeli’s song Off Speed, was chosen to join the many other artists on this compilation. Not only will Off Speed be on this promotional CD, which is sent out to hundreds of influential journalists, but it will be available for download for free off the Mercedes website, www.mixed-tape.com. What is really amazing is that within 24 months this site had more than 20 million downloads! Think of all that free publicity for our artists like Sean Haefeli!

This is just the beginning for our BeatPick artists! Every six months Mercedes creates a new compilation of songs from their mix tapes called the “Best Of Mixed Tape” which is uploaded onto the iTunes store. If selected for this collection, our artists will receive a sales compensation for every compilation bundle or single download that is made. Wow, tons of free publicity and potential financial gain…and here I thought Mercedes just made cars! So once again, congratulations to Sean Haefeli for a well deserved spot on the Mercedes MixTape collection, CD17.

Download for free and let us know what you think. Who knows, maybe your music is next!

Last week we were contacted by a representative of a Southern Italian cultural association called RadioKreattiva.

RadioKreattiva.net is an online radio station that was developed in order to tackle corruption and the Mafia and the need for children to express themselves and create their own identity through communication and exchange. The station is run by children who are between the ages of 9 and 12 and who come from the southern city of Bari. The episodes are introduced by a grown-up but are otherwise entirely hosted by the children who get to discuss many topics that are important for them. The issue of the Mafia and corruption is one of the most discussed and tends to overshadow a lot of the shows’ different themes.

It would seem obvious that a project of this kind not only benefits those involved but also those who listen to it and most importantly the regional government whose job it is to fight the mafia and corruption. As a result it would appear essential that a not-for-profit radio of this kind be given as much support as possible including, for example, a possible subsidisation or agreement with the SIAE (the Italian Royalties Collecting Society) to allow the radio to play music free of charge or at least at accessible prices. After all what kind of a radio is it if it doesn’t have music? You will at this point have guessed that this is not the case. The association was stuck with a great idea, the desire to get it off the ground, the means to kick start it into action but an inability to access any kind of music that could soften it around the edges and attract listeners from far and wide. That is until a quick search on the internet brought fourth the word BeatPick and they discovered that after all not all was lost….

For their first episode, the kids at Radiokreativa chose to use the music of our Municipale Balcanica who they were glad to discover come from exactly their neck of the woods. For their next one who knows… I’m, sure I’m going to tune in and find out, you should too!

BeatPick has been closely following the ORG since it took off last year. We are happy to announce that they will be hosting this very important event next month….

This is a chance for ORG supporters to meet each other, chat to volunteers and staff and celebrate how far the ORG has come since it started. There’ll be ‘public domain’ DJs, remixed visuals and free culture goodie bags, as well as a special guest speaker to be announced.
Beneath all this revelry lies a hidden motive. We need you to bring a friend, colleague or family member who doesn’t yet support ORG, but who you think would like to, if they knew more about our work.
The party starts at 6pm on Wednesday 11 April at Bar Kick, E1, and lasts until 11pm. See you there!

Event details
Support ORG! (and Party)
Date: Wednesday 11 April
Time: 1800-2300
Place: Downstairs @ Bar Kick, 127 Shoreditch High Street, London. E1 6JE

Signup and info page http://supportorgandparty.eventbrite.com/ 

More info: info[at]openrightsgroup.org 

Beppe Grillo is an established comedian who has been satirising the Italian political establishment for well over 20 years. You’d be hard pushed to find an Italian who hasn’t heard of him.

Back in 2006 our very own Leo Pari sampled Beppe Grillo’s voice to use it in a humorous bootleg he was composing. The tune was an overnight internet success and before long it had reached the ears of Beppe Grillo himself. Instead of reacting indignantly and threatening with copyright legal action, the comedian decided he thought the track was hilarious and that what he wanted it to be the theme tune to his new v blog “Pillola Rossa” and consequently as the songtrack to his DVD out on general release.

You have but to type the words “Pillola Rossa” onto youtube and you’ll see that the videos have hundreds of thousands of hits. So here it is for your very own enjoyment here on the BeatPick blog! Unfortunately the video is Italian so for those of you who cannot exactly understand Italian this might be a bit problematic. I am perfectly happy to explain what it means if you so desire, otherwise maybe it can be an inspiration for you to pop down to your local language school and sign up to that Italian class you’ve been putting off for ages!

Enjoy…..

Just to let you know that our miQue’s album “La Petite Morte” will be released in Japan through imagined records & scilli disques on April 21st it’ll be distributed through ULTRA VYBE.

Those of us not currently in Japan will either have to corrupt one of our Japanese friends to send it over, or alternatively will just have to content ourselves with listening to our favourite album here on the website.

Also I have posted his new video Chikubi on our myspace page so when you got a chance go check it out cuz it is really really great and hilarious too!

The word is out on the streets and there’s no stoppping them now! We’ve been approached, officially and unofficially, by various different artists who have expressed a desire to collaborate with our musicians on their album covers, portraits and video clips. Below I am reporting two such requests (both from UK-based people) but if I see that our musicians are interested and are taking up the collaborations, I will be happy to encourage more artists to approach us with similar proposals. I am not, for obvious reasons, posting their contact details on this page but just drop a line to info@beatpick.com if you think this might be exactly what you need!

1. Karl Rooney is a video maker who wrote to let us know that he would be extremely interested in shooting a music video, free of charge, for one of our artists (they would have to cover any travel expenses though). He is based in London but it will be possible for work from Liverpool too. Shooting will take place in March, so if you are interested you’ll have to get in touch with him pretty rapidly…
2. Gilda Louise Aloisi is a fashion and portrait photographer based in London. She has already collaborated with one of our musicians and posted a portrait of him on his BeatPick page (www.beatpick.com/enreset). You can see more of her work on www.myspace.com/gildina. She has expressed an interest to do photoshoots with out artists which they can then use for promotion/marketing purposes (again it would be free of charge but the musician would have to cover any expenses).

Last friday (23 February) we suffered a malicious attack on our dedicated server in the USA. Almost 100 servers hosted by cari.net were attacked. Root was compromise and pretty much everything stopped working for just under three days. It was thanks to our tech guys, in particular Frank who who worked flat-out all weekend long to resolve the problem, that we are now back online.
Fortunately we do not keep credit card details on our server as we use securehosting to accept payment via credit card and paypal. Because of this, you can be confident that no personal details have been misappropriated…

Yes indeed, our very own Bob Rifo has won this year’s Italian Nokia for Music best video category!

I strongly recommend you watch his fearsome video (Be warned though, it is not for the faint hearted!)…

Today is the 2nd of February and we are celebrating a year since BeatPick first went live!!

We thought you might like a little update on the State of the BeatNation. We are currently quite satisfied with how things in this experiment of ours are going, but we definitely do not feel it is enough. We see 2007 as being an extremely crucial year for BeatPick and are gearing up to really push through with all our different projects we have launched.

During these last few months we have had the pleasure of receiving more than 2000 music submissions and as a result we have incremented our roster from 30 to almost 100 artists. Our thanks go out not only to the artists we have signed up to the label but also to the ones we did not select. Music is at the core of our business and without submissions we would not be able to exist.

Furthermore our team has grown from two people that we were (David and Frank) to four (Katy, who you already know, and Curzio) and we are now looking at becoming five or six once we hire our new programmer and sound engineer.

We have had a variety of different success stories in the last six months or so. We closed some licensing contracts with clients like Ralph Lauren, Scott Winter Sports and Mercedes. Mainly though it has been the small and mid-level businesses that have really been helping us get out there and spread the word.

One of the main things that we have been doing has been an intense online marketing offensive that has really helped to get the notoriously fickle Internet community talking. We’ve been interviewed on more than one occasion (see djmag, openbusiness, creative commons for example) and have had our site linked to thousands of others, thus helping us move up the google ladder until we reached the first page for the searches “music licensing” and “license music”. On top of all this our myspace profile has been growing and growing attracting both talented musicians and interested music-lovers.

One of our more positive developments has been that we have opened a new office in Rome, Italy, from which we are now working towards acquiring a position on the Italian music market. This was made possible thanks to an Italian software house that bought part of the BeatPick Ltd Company. Don’t worry though, we have not sold out: our new partners are deeply pro-open source and fair trade and jumped at the opportunity to be part of our Creative Commons project. This partnership will allow us to create an entirely new beatpick.com website in the coming months (we do realise that at the moment as it stands the website does indeed have quite a few glitches).

The new BeatPick.com will have numerous new features and will try to aim to be more user-oriented and also to factor more video content into the equation. The new Italian office is also helping us to work on a whole series of interesting offline deals: music for gyms, music for mobile phones and music for hotels. With this we are hoping to begin to build a more solid economic foundation, from which we will be able to grow and develop but importantly to significantly raise our artists’ profiles and that of creative commons. We are currently really trying to drive home the point that it is possible to create a sustainable business under the creative commons system and that it is increasingly possible to distribute music without being part of a collecting society.

We are beginning a collaboration with one of Italy’s most famous Universities (La Sapienza in Rome), to run a series of seminars and conferences on creative commons, collecting societies and exclusive relationships with artists. On top of that, we will be conducting a series of lectures and tutorials to help university students to start-up their own Internet companies (the plan is to pick two promising students from the tutorials to come and work as interns for us at the end of the course).

So there it is. It looks like we have exciting times in store for us and so we’d like to once again take the time to thank all the people that have been helping us to run this company and develop its core ideals. We hope that this is still only the very beginning.

The BeatPick Crew.