Tag: community

First Contact with Galactaron

Girl meets synth-rock band from Outer Space; animated weirdness ensues. Well, that’s the elevator pitch, anyway. See for yourself:

Galactaron were dreamt up as an art/music project by Owen Dennis, a recent graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation, and are comprised of Singer (centre right), Bass (bottom left), Guitar (centre left), Synth (right), Drums (top left) and their human friend Emily Wong:

Galactaron Album Cover
Album Cover as featured on iTunes

The virtual band have a presence across Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, SoundCloud and iTunes, with each platform offering new information and imagery to enrich Galactaron’s back story:

Drawn by radio waves, Galactaron focused in on Earth and they traveled a great distance to learn about us. When they finally reached our planet, they landed their massive, red, egg-shaped ship on a frozen lake in the upper Midwest of the America. There they met Emily Wong, a young Chinese-American woman who lives with her father. Emily quickly befriended Galactaron and decided to give them a personalized tour of planet Earth. That’s when they started to discover what earth is, what humans are, and what we have to offer.

A ‘sighting’ of their ship forms one of several on their website.

It’s an admirable project: the band have a truly unique sound, a strong visual identity, a cool backstory, and they’ve even sold a few albums.

Their creator shows real ingenuity, having formed a small yet growing community around snippets of content such as cosmic ring-tones; science-themed status updates; user-contributed artwork; merchandise and not forgetting the music itself.

But despite being an excellent case study in transmedia storytelling, their single ‘First Contact’ has reached a surprisingly low 20,000 plays on YouTube, and far fewer elsewhere. Mission aborted? Or as I suspect, are their thrusters still warming up?

Music is the Virus

Airborne, a potentially disruptive start-up in the music sector, hopes to “cure the music industry of its sickness” with their upcoming launch.

Their cloud-based music sharing platform places fans and artists in direct symbiosis. It’s an interesting model, so take a look:

Beyond all the virus metaphors (they even go so far as to call songs ‘strains’)  the core idea is quite simple:

  1. Cut out traditional distributors
  2. Enable artists to monetise via a system of micropayments
  3. Give fans distribution rights instead, and empower them to share as much as possible, thus helping to secure further micropayments

It’s a model that I think could work particularly well for electronic music, whose artists tend to release one track or remix at a time, as opposed to a band who might release one album a year. Airborne will work best when artists can trickle content to their audience to keep them subscribed.

Looking on SoundCloud, my current favourite producer/DJ has 3,934 followers, which would net $3,934 per month on Airborne. Give those early adopting, high-class listeners some viral functionality and the impetus to share with friends and that figure could easily grow to $10,000/month – a healthy supplement to any unsigned musician, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Airborne have an interesting blog, The Music Industry is Sick, which looks at the challenges faced by listeners, musicians and labels today. In an ecology where artists need their stuff streamed four million times just to reach minimum wage, it’s platforms like Airborne that’ll help the system fix itself.

Welcome To The Future

I’ve been promising this to friends, fans and followers for a while now, but I’m finally ready to reveal this year’s big Digital Cortex project (last year’s was this).

It’s a series of blog posts under the title ‘The Future Of…’ and I’m really excited about it, because as well as spanning some fascinating topics, I’ll also be tapping up several guest bloggers from the Digital Cortex community – and if you’re reading this post, that most definitely includes you!

Lets look at some of the upcoming areas of exploration:

Architecture available
Beauty available
Books/writing taken Lindsey
Cooking taken Tom
Earth taken Richard
Family available
Fashion taken Laura
Film available
Food available
Gaming available
Healthcare available
Hobbies taken Ian
Housing available
Interfaces available
Love taken Lindsey
Mobile taken David
Money available
Music available
Politics taken Ben
Religion available
School available
Social Media taken Matt
Society taken Ben
Sport taken Nils
Theatre available
Travel available
Television available
University available
Web available
Work available
Your Topic Here get in touch

Based on my interactions with many of you, and the sheer breadth of expertise amongst this blog’s readership, I know there is limitless potential to curate a truly great piece of work. Of course, there is plenty of scope to add/modify/remove topics from this list, so drop me a line on the contact page to register interest.

And for those who aren’t looking to contribute, but want to stay in touch as things unfold, here are the usual subscription options:

Web Discoveries for January 4th

These are my del.icio.us links for January 4th