The Hippodrome

Outlaw Download

Can’t take much credit for finding Outlaw Con Bandana, since Lazy-i located OCB nearly two years ago. The band is a rotating collective with Pearl Loveioy Boyd, Brendan Hagberg, Matthew Rooney, Dave Socha, and John Kotchian at its thrown-back folk core. Omaha, Nebraska is the place they are from.

I bring up OCB now, almost two years after their last record, because it seems that the band is nearing completion of their sixth album, “Faeries and Rewards.” I’ll let you know when and if I get anything from the upcoming release, but for now, dig “Outlaw,” which I officially proclaim as OCB’s theme song, if it hasn’t been done already.

With social networks coming in every variety and flavor these days, it was really only a matter of time before the feel good hippies of yesteryear carved out their own niche. I came across Zaadz while working for Calabash Music, and even though I was doing a very specific type of work, I got a good sense of who’s on the site and what it’s all about. What I found was pleasantly shocking.

Aimed at the non-2.0 generation, Zaadz is a genuinely wholesome network that invites each “zaadzster” to explain how he or she (or ze) is going to change the world. From the marketing campaign that I worked on for Calabash, the responsiveness from users is incredible. There are no mass promotion tools, and virtually no spammers because Zaadz hand approves each user for the site. Of the 300 or so users that I painstakingly contacted about Calabash, the vast majority replied warmly and have since supported the site.

So what does this mean for music? Well, beside the major setback of no onboard music players or mass promotion tools, it means you have a user base of the most creatively inclined (though healthily sheltered) people on the net. Zaadz is more geared toward the individual, but so was MySpace back in the day, so don’t let that stop you. If you’re ready to screw time efficiency and build up a genuine fan base, Zaadz might just be the best way to do it.