The Hippodrome

Woohoo! I’m proud to announce the first of many international music festivals present by The Hippodrome! That’s right, several of The Hippodrome’s illustrious features have a few shows coming up, so if you live in North America, you don’t have an excuse to miss out on any of them. Some dandies:

Boy Crisis:

10.20.07 – New York, NY – CMJ Orchard Bar
11.16.07 – Middletown, CT – Wesleyan University
11.17.07 – Troy, NY - Renaissslaier Polytechnical Institute
12.1.07 – New York, NY – The Annex

Ross Brown:

11.3.07 – Kansas City, MO - The Roasterie

Bruce Peninsula:

11.9.07 — Toronto, ON - Lee’s Palace
11.16.07 – Ottawa, ON – Barrymore’s
11.24.07 – Toronto, ON - Horseshoe

Pale Young Gentleman:

10.20.07 – Chicago, IL – Stasiu’s Place
11.5.07 – Chicago, IL - The Hideout
11.9.07 – Madison, WI – Wisconsin Pop Fest
11.10.07 – Minneapolis, MN - Bedlam Theater (Clapperclaw Music and Arts Festival)
12.20.07 – Chicago, IL – Cobra Lounge

A bunch of our favorite artists don’t have any dates planned, so as a poor substitute, we have a couple live videos to hold you over until they do.

Zak and His Unhappy Guitar

Va Va China

See you there!

For the inaugural edition of our weekly site review, I decided to investigate a little known social network by the name of Project Opus. After I got by the laughable obstacle of pronouncing the site’s name (I was getting fond of pro-ject-ti-pus), I found out that Project Opus is a solid engine for the aspiring musician.

The concept is hardly groundbreaking – Project Opus allows artists to sell their music at a 50-50 rate and gain access to all the site’s services without paying anything to get “special features.” Things do, however, start to get more interesting as far as artist support goes. In the incorporated blog, the staff posts interviews with veteran musicians on the site in a very Hippodrome-esque fashion. The guilt-trip attempt news stories about the illegality of downloading music are a little bit irritating, but forgivable due to the site’s interest in the starving artist. A nice sidebar of concert listings is an eye catching way to promote the artist’s shows, and rounds out the front page nicely.

A closer look at the infrastructure of Project Opus proves that the site holds its water pretty well. Registration was easy, although I didn’t like having to pick just one genre to put my music under. Networking capabilities are straightforward and intuitive, although like any lesser known social network, the lack of traffic is an obvious problem. Trafficestimate.com estimates that Project Opus receives a paltry 70,000 visits a month. In comparison, Trafficestimate.com suggests that Purevolume gets about 2 million visits per month.

Another disconcerting aspect of Project Opus is their monetary policy in relation to their traffic. According to the site’s FAQ, Project Opus “only makes money when the artist sells a song. We will never benefit at the expense of artists or fans. We use our share to actively promote Project Opus to a broad fan base and generate exposure for the artists, to invest back into the development of technologies that will improve the site for bands and fans, and to cover our administration costs.”

This is a tough fact to swallow when you consider that Myspace’s Snocap music service puts your music in front of roughly 1500 times more fans at virtually the same payout. Still, you can’t fault Project Opus for being small, and the good nature of the staff and community members should be more than enough to earn your membership.

In the last few weeks, a few readers have noted that The Hippodrome’s “The Business” section has done nothing but disparage other websites, pointing out their faults and just being generally pessimistic. While I can’t disagree, especially with the craptacular nature of so many current online social networks, I do have a bit of good news for the optimists.

I’m proud to announce the addition of a new section to The Hippodrome. Starting tomorrow and continuing every week until our eyes fall out, we’ll have a review of a different music networking/distribution site. These reviews will outline the pros and cons of each site, and let you know if it’s worth putting your music or signing up as a fan on the site. All reviews will be filed under “Site Reviews,” so keep a look out kids!

Driving Is A Full Time Job Download
Cardinal Download

Photograph by Carlos Lima

You wouldn’t know it, but Ross Brown began his musical career with Ska. Brown aspired to become a master of the genre, one of those legends that comes to mind whenever we think of those three letters. But things rarely turn out the way anyone intends, and Brown’s latest album, The Human Condition, places the ska sound pretty far from your mind. Instead, the entire experience is reminiscent of a drive across the highways and freeways of mid and south-western America. This doesn’t come as a total surprise, considering Brown’s hometown of Olathe, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City.

While this may make sense from this music, Brown’s stylistic evolution doesn’t merely jump from Ska straight to Americana folk-rock. With the help of the ubiquitous Ableton Live, he has compiled two complete albums of electronic music. These pieces, each available for download on Brown’s website, prove Brown’s ability to create lush and complex pieces single-handedly. The Human Condition utilizes these practices while still taking a pronounced detour from the electronic world. Instead of working through solely digital means, Brown begins with a guitar track and builds from there. “Typical instrumentation is guitar, bass guitar, drums, tambourine. Sometimes I’ll play horns or mandolin or some sort of keys. I usually play it all myself because I don’t know what I want to do until I’m actually recording it,” says Brown.

Ross Brown’s The Human Condition is available to order from his website, along with two other albums that are free to download. This recording-on-the-fly attitude may seem somewhat alarming, but it all plays into Brown’s philosophy concerning musicians. “I really just admire people that seem legitimate about what they do. It’s something that you can sense almost immediately about them, through their music and how they present themselves.” What better way to represent legitimacy than recording something so natural and organic?

I recently received an email from a lady by the name of Benaz Hossain, who wrote to let me know about Jango, a music social networking site about to launch. After checking out the beta link that she sent along in his email, I was intrigued by the idea. In a nutshell, Jango is a Last.fm type custom radio site that utilizes a fairly impressive internal music catalog. This allows the user to listen to any artist on the site, and then build a social network of friends who are interested in the type of music they’ve been listening to.

This all sounds great until you realize that you’re limited to what Jango has online. More annoying than the available music is the fact that no unsigned artist has any chance of getting their own work on the site, because unless you’re already on Allmusic.com, which is unlikely for even the moderately well known artist, Jango doesn’t want to hear it.

As far as Jango’s launch catalog goes, it’s quite a bit less than impressive. I was able to find bands like The Microphones and Animal Collective, but nothing I hadn’t come across before. Jango seems to be a good idea realized poorly, and although I’ll be keeping tabs on it, I doubt it’ll be worth your while.