Our blog and parts of our site have been experiencing downtime recently. We are working on doing some major revisions to the site so please bear with us.
We will be relaunching the site in the summer and send out an email blast to let everyone know when it happens.
It’s been nearly a month since we’ve launched and we’ve had a really good response from the site. We’ve had a lot of feedback from some loyal users and we’ve been listening. So today we’ve updated the site with lots of new changes. Heres an overview of whats new:
We’ve added streaming mp3 previews to the album pages. This is easily the most requested feature and we agree its an essential aspect when finding new music. You can see a preview of the new players here:
Band of Horses - Is There a Ghost?
1990s - Arcade Precint
Atmosphere - Sunshine
We’ve cleaned up the profiles and added a list of albums submitted by the user. The biggest addition is private messaging between users. You can also preview your own profiles before/after editing.
We’ve completely redone the new releases section and made the release dates more prominent so it’s easier to find out what’s coming out.
The album view pages (with comments, audio etc) has also been redone to make the contents easier to work with.
The albums that get on the front page will be much better and live up to its name. Too many albums kept reappearing in this section after it was already on after a week. This has been fixed.
Too many changes to list here. The notable changes are the improved logo. There’s also icons on the albums listings that show if the albums have audio, youtube, links etc. without having to click on it. For people in design you might noticed the typography has been completely redone and now follows a grid layout.
The site will now work much better in older browers. Anyone using older version of IE can now use the site.
There’s an option to have your password reset incase you forget your password.
Today we’ve reached our 80th album and we’re working to add those audio previews to most of them.
If you have any other feedback or suggestions just post in the comments or in the forums.
The site is finally open to everyone after a successful month of being invitation-only. With the great response and feedback we’ve decided to launch the site earlier then expected.
Since we’ve opened our beta we’ve been featured on Techcrunch, CNET/Webware and lots of other blogs. Some links to the article are below.
We’ve also added some features and improvements:
Welcome to the open version of Contrastream.
Articles:
Techcrunch - Contrastream To Join Social Music Sites
CNET - Contrastream gives indie music a boost
Scopetech - Find music with Contrastream
The old ways of the music industry are slowly breaking down in our highly connected and social generation. The vital cause of this is that the internet has brought the power of democracy and choice into the hands of the music fans. We can now easily recommend movies, share photos, and meet friends online. With the barriers of communication cut down the music we listen too no long has to be selected by a small group of people who value profit over quality.
In the past the only way for artists to get their music out was through well-established distribution channels (record stores & MTV). Those who knew the right people and had the money to back it up were the only ones with access to these channels. Recently those people are known as the “big 4″ music labels (Sony, Universal, EMI and Warner)
The first step in this shift, triggered by technology, was the demise of the traditional distribution channels. The effects are easy to see with record stores becoming non-existent and with MTV’s airtime filled with reality shows. From all this, the easy target would be to blame it all on downloading of music. But there’s a bigger picture that’s not as easy to grasp for most people. The Internet created the opportunity for new ways of distributing music and platforms that can provide”:
This recent movement parallels a large shift roughly 100 years ago when cars’ where becoming common and the railway was becoming irrelevant. Trains were stuck on a set track that went in one direction at a time and could only stop in places which had enough people to satisfy the high cost of laying that track down and keep the engines running. Where cars allowed for transportation that went exactly where you wanted and could be personalized through style and individual needs.
Mainstream music much like trains can make the most money if it takes a “shot-gun” approach by trying to satisfy everyone. Usually by sticking to formulas that worked in the past like boy bands and sex. This mindset ultimately sacrifices creativity and innovation. It is also constrained, like trains on a track, by only allowing a certain amount of artists at one time. Industry insiders frequently speak about good albums getting shelved to make room the next Britney. This has consistently provided mediocre (although accessible) music to satisfy the masses.
Independent music shares the freedom of cars and can be suited the listener’s tastes. It has the ability to be satisfying the listener at a much higher rate through numbers and having few constraints.
There’s nothing wrong with mainstream for the casual fan who doesn’t take much interest in music. But for the people who know what they like and look for it the major label approach falls short in many ways. The essential question becomes where would you most likely find music that suits your tastes? In a selection of thousands or a select few designed to satisfy everyone?
This new opportunity that the internet presents has a few barriers we have to overcome to benefit from this movement. How do we find the music that we like if there’s so much to choose from?
This is one of the problems the current music industry faces that’s increasingly being solved by social sites online. Now that digital music can be distributed effectively the problem becomes separating the good from the bad. The labels traditionally acted as a filter to what music reaches the world by hiring A&R’s to scout for the next platinum hit.
Now the Internet can open up the filtering process to the music fans, whose intentions are finding the musicians who make the best music instead of most money for the label who hires them. The more we use these social tools we can bring democracy to music and hopefully raise the standard of what we consider successful music.
I hope to take some steps towards this direction with Contrastream. I know this post opens up many unanswered questions and I plan to continue posting more on this soon.
After months of labor and love the site is finally ready to be released to a few people before we launch. We set up this blog to let everyone know what’s happening with the site. We’re also going to post about the independent music culture and our thoughts on how independent music will is benefiting from technology. We want to keep this site constantly improving and any feedback is appreciated. Sign-up for an invite on the login page.
Blog RSS