The Hippodrome

Worse than the fact that so many music networking and distribution sites limit the amount of material you can upload is the fact they seclude the musician in a music-only environment. Self Portrait, still in beta form despite its launch last year, does its part to unite photographers, filmmakers, writers, visual and performance artists, computer artists, fashion designers, architects, and yes, even musicians. If managed correctly, this conglomeration could mean the most exciting artistic social networking site yet to hit the interweb.

While co-creator Theo Wenner may not be the most popular dude in the art world (see the Gawker article for more details), the site is a solid resource for anyone looking to network with enterprising artists of any medium. Self Portrait stands out not only in its variety of media, but also in the quality of its content. Unlike creep-spacers, the small number of artists that already know about the site have some pretty solid stuff up. It’s nice to see a site where people seem to care more about their work then their friend count. It’s even nicer to see a place where the majority or artists are unsigned. (I won’t disclose who, but we’ve already found a few upcoming features here!)

The mechanics of Self Portrait are not parsimonious, but rather a partly good/partly bad barrier against the impatient clientele that saturate neighboring giants like MySpace and Purevolume. There are lots of fun (and time consuming) details to fill out, as well as friends, networks, playlists, and events to sort through. It’s hard to tell how Self Portrait’s infrastructure would withstand a huge influx of users, since the site is relatively clean now, but like any growing network, will inevitably need new forms of policing in the future.

As far as actually selling goes, the visual art ranges from average in price to highway robbery. Music is either sold or not for download. Both these distribution techniques are dubious since it seems unlikely that much of anything is getting sold on the site. But despite the lack of financial possibility, the fact that so many different interests find a home under one domain name is a great start in uniting like minded creators who had, until now, been unfairly separated on the electronic market. This all demonstrates one of the most overlooked and invaluable lessons an aspiring artist of any medium can learn. You’re not alone.

To pop my cherry as a writer for The Hippodrome, I reviewed the UK based music website, Arkade.com. At first, I thought that perhaps “arcade” is just spelled with a K across the pond, like they usually spell color or favorite with a U, but I it seems that Arkade’s creators only had edginess in mind. Crazy kids. Anyway, Arkade advertises themselves as the “new ‘Online Stage,’” an independent service that enables artists to sell their music. Out of Arkade’s options, (of which there were many) I found particularly interesting the groups for Christian Gangsta Rap, Chamber Music, Euro House, Euro Techno AND Euro Dance, and Porn Groove. Later I found out that the only artist listed under Porn Groove, Dane, found his biggest hit in a song called “Bombs and Hummus.” If that’s not Porn Groove, I don’t know what is.

After I signed up for the service, it was pretty simple to figure out. The side navigation bars make it easy for you to browse, search, read artists blogs (my favorite to peruse), study the charts, and connect to the industry directory. There are some problems with searches for new artists however, as with so many genres, it may be difficult to find an artist quickly and easily. Also, discovery of a new artist is otherwise hindered by the additions of production companies and mix tapes within the collective searches. Once you find an artist you’re interested in, you may preview a clip of any song offered, like iTunes. After listening to a few artists and reading comments, I realized that the preview is often significantly different than the actual song downloaded. The preview sometimes has an extremely rough feel to it, as if the song was recorded on a TalkBoy (that portable recorder Kevin had in “Home Alone”). Undoubtedly a disservice to the artist, it should be mentioned that not all the previews suffer from lack of quality, but nearly half were seriously altered.

As an artist looking to sell some music, Arkade is a solid option, as you get to keep 100% of the money as well as set your own price for your music. There are four packages available; single pack (free), EP pack (10 pounds), Album (20 pounds), and the Distributor pack (30). Basically, the bigger package you get, the more songs you can upload and the more someone can download (unfortunately even with the biggest package only 300 of your songs can be downloaded, the free pack is a mere 50). As far as actually getting paid, Arkade credits your paypal account up to five months after the sale has been made. Not quite the best case for those struggling artists who need that money in the bank. As a buyer, purchasing music is as simple as adding something to your shopping cart and checking out (with helpful tools to convert prices to the pound, the euro, the dollar, and yes, thankfully even the Yen).

Overall, I feel that while Arkade has its benefits, including a very accommodating help and troubleshooting section, the problems in previewing music and arduous task of finding an artist take away the magic for me. As an artist, I feel that it wouldn’t hurt to be a part of the Arkade community, but the hassles with choosing a distribution package may not be worth the trouble. The site has definite potential, and it’s a source I’ll be perusing every now and then, especially when I’m looking for an addition to my growing Porn Groove collection.

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.

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.