Envisioning Toad

We’ll I’ve finally done and did it. Here is the posting from Barefoot Melt.

Barefoot Melt releases free music that explores the realms of ambiance. Our netplays cover the gambit of ambient music which could best be summed up by Bubba, come in Bubba:

Ambient is the fruit of the musical sea. You can listen it, compose it, make it, play it, be it. There’s, um, ambient dub, ambient drone, ambient glitch, ambient experimental, ambient soundscapes, ambient electronic, ambient noise, ambient space, ambient techno, new ambient, ambient . . . That’s, that’s about it.

We at Barefoot Melt consider ourselves first and foremost a fan-based netlabel. Fan-based? Fan-based in that we release individual artists as well as “mixed tapes” of other netlabel music we found interesting and intriguing.

We wish to release mp3s at a minimum of 256Kbps, but will publish FLACs of .wav files as well. All music will be presented to play on various portable listening machines. If you are interested in contributing please send original music to David at barefootmelt AT gmail DOT com. The max file attachment size for gmail is 20MB. We will pick files at yousendit.com. We are currently working on getting our anonymous ftp server up and running.

“you’ve got mail! air mail!” by bitzi and licensed under Creative Commons.

As I’ve been looking at many, many netlabels and downloading way too much music (if that is possible), I’ve had extreme difficulties in managing the influx of music. Prior to this netlabel project I embarked on, I just slapped the albums I downloaded into iTunes and my iPod.

The first issue, which is one I have always experienced, was the problem of Genres — so much music is too hard to categorize, but because of my North American upbringing, categorize I must. Here are some of the categories I try to focus on:

• Ambient
• Ambient Noise
• Downtempo
• Experimental
• Futurepop
• Midtempo
• Noise
• Postrock
• Unknown
• Uptempo

Most if not all pieces of music get labeled as “Unknown” when the come in the front door unless I am extremely familiar with the artist or label.

Another issue I ran into was how to add the name of the netlabel into the iTunes database in an manner that would allow me to “choose” to play a netlabel on my iPod. I tried adding the netlabel to the Grouping field and then creating a smartlist for the netlabel. The problem I ran into was that all I had was a list of songs; I could not choose by album. I then stumbled on to the Composer field which gave me the ability to look at a Composer on my iPod, but with the ability to play individual albums if I choose to. This was a breakthrough of sorts.

I now use Grouping to handle the netlabel index, ABC001, DEF002, etc., and Comments is used to hold the web address of the netlabel and artist.

The third and final issue I ran into was how to listen to all of this music. I tried to keep a list of new albums I added, I could listen to them in order of how I downloaded them. Soon enough, the list became to unwieldy and I was way behind in my listening. Apparently, I can download music faster than I can listen to it.

I then stumbled upon Charles Hannum Jr.’s Managing Your iPod With Smartlists (pdf). Though Hannum’s main premise is built upon Ratings, I just substituted Genres and/or Composers (netlables) for Ratings and I now have a good daily mix of music to listen to everyday. Hannum recommends building several different smartlists and bulding them one on top of another until you get a good mix of songs at the end. I’ve been using his method for a few weeks now and it seems to be working out fine.

Besides me playing with iTunes, how has this progressed the starting of my netlabel? By building the various Hannum-style smartlists, I’ve been able to begin to pin-point what type/style of music I wish to publish. This has been a great tool in really understanding what is the music I listen to day after day.

AZA - sys I from cosmo.sys on Audio Tong

“The Gift of Groove” by mwboeckmann and licensed under Creative Commons.

Taking Eldino’s advice I’ve been scouring the internet and examining netlabel websites for ease of use, content and aesthetics. As a fan of netlabels, I probably ignored most of the problems I found in the past, but as a soon-to-be netlabel curator, what I’ve found is depressing.

I don’t mind that some labels stop almost as quickly as they start, but it is the established label’s websites that seemingly have shown little foresight or care on how they present the artist’s music. (I am not reference all netlables, only a few.) These labels tend to make it difficult to download releases, multiple website clicks for no apparent reason, inability to listen to music on the site, no description of the music let alone the artists, rar files instead of zip files, no covers, and ogg files along crappy mp3s just to name a few issues I have found.

Not surprising, the labels who care (boy, this might open a few wounds) tend to have more interesting music; they seem more cohesive in their presentation and they appear to publish a more dynamic and entertaining music as a whole, IMHO.

It is becoming quite clear to me that presentation is almost as important as the music one releases. Good presentation seems to breed good submissions which breeds great releases, which in turn breeds better presentation and even better submissions, and so on. Yeah, I don’t know if that ‘rule’ actually works, but it seems better than going into this thing half-assed.

But it is not all negative. There are plenty of labels out there who care for their presentation; I’m discovering new labels all the time; and my iPod is getting filled with some great music.

Latex Distortion - Ijjoojji on Celebration Compilation #2 on one bit wonder

“HI FI” by jbushnell and licensed under Creative Commons.

After giving the Creative Commons licenses some thought and looking at what other netlabels do, I have decided to go with the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license for Barefoot Melt. I’ll probably lose some submissions with this license, but if the goal is to share and share-alike (like the photos in each of the posts), then sharing is what it will be.

Simon Wetham - Another Chance from A Dark Light - Winter Lights Edition on Earth Monkey Productions

“Speed, Size, Function” by Maggie T and licensed under Creative Commons.

My final reinterpretation of Eldino’s great series on how to start a netlabel ends with Part 3 of Come aprire una netlabel.

15. Pace yourself, or more to the point, pace the releases of your netlabel. Just because you have 10 releases ready to go, don’t put them out all at once.
    

    Moreover, in times of “lean” have something to be published and you can maintain a pleasant frequency and regularity in publications, rather than, for example, publish 10 releases immediately and stay three months without publishing anything.

16. Don’t feel force to publish a release as well as this will lead to a distinct lack of quality.
17. If you begin to lose interest in your project, think of a new way to reinvigorate your interest in the netlabel whether through website redsign, start a contest, etc.
18. Have some knowledge of English. Okay, this won’t be such a big problem for me, but the counter to this if you have only a knowledge of English, force yourself to visit German, Italian, Russian or Spanish sites. Use Google Language Tools, though not exact it will assist you in understanding what’s going on in foreign language sites.

A big thanks to Eldino for writing out this great roadmap on how to begin a netlabel. I only hope my “translation” did his original posting justice.

R. Nüske - Sentmental Digital Cells from Chemistry Between Androids on bumpfoot

“Shure White Label” photograph by ronrag and licensed under Creative Commons.

Part Two of Eldino’s Come aprire una netlabel covers the techincal aspects of operating a netlabell from web design, audio, graphics and creatività a 360 gradi that I take to mean being well rounded, a Renassiance man who can handle the techincial side as well as the aesthetic side. (You can read Part One of my “translation” at Getting Ready To Drown.)

8. Make your website usable, i.e. a little mouse clicks as possible to download the mp3 and artwork. Eldino brings two netlables to task for not being user-friendly. A no-brainer, no? I’ll definitely keep this in mind that the netlabel website should be programmed for anyone over 50 can use it. (No offense to those of you over 50 who are tech-savy.)
9. Decide upon a Content Mangement System (CMS). It appears that Eldino does not recommend using a blog platform like Blogger or Wordpress due to the fact that the history of releases is hidden. One way around this that pops into my mind is to create pages for Releases and Artists so that there is one-stop shop for listeners.
10. Next, Eldino moves onto covers which also happens to be my Achilles’ Heel. He has noted three different styles: Consistent Covers, Inconsistent Covers and No Covers. Well, No Covers is not an option for me as I find it disconcerting that release doesn’t have a cover. I would really like to have Consistent Covers, but I believe I might need to find a graphic artist to help out is this area.
11. What type of audio format will you distribute in? Eldino’s Perché la musica libera dovrebbe preferire l’mp3 ad altri formati audio covers this, but once again it is in Italian. This question is one that will take much more study to determine how I will proceed.
12. At the end of the technical section, Eldino writes a good summation of a go/no go decision for a prospective netlabel curator.
    

    I conclude paragraph with the sottolinearvi, even if it did not understand that open and manage a netlabel need of considerable creativity, open-mindedness and ideas. It is not something that is based on formulas or principles, but it’s something that evolves by means of skill to give / receive / reprocess stimuli of those driving.I f you feel that you have everything and an omnivorous interest to everything around you, probably your netlabel is ready to 50%, but if it does not possess these characteristics, my invitation is to devote your time to another.

13. Time is similar to the Planning item from yesterday’s post. A netlabel, in order to be successfull takes a lot of time: you need time for your website, time to promote your netlable, time to communicate with artists, time to listen to music, and time to publish releases. Eldino recommends at least 1 hour per day in the beginning, though I wonder if 7 hours is a bit on the low side and just to be clear, this is the area that scares me the most.
14. Eldino also recommends that a netlabel curator become knowledgeable of the copyright aspects of netaudio. Obviously he recommends looking at Creative Commons.

Next up, Part Three of Eldino’s Come aprire una netlabel.

±•¬.¬ - Ground from CYP3A4 on Clinical Archives.

“Your Hi-Fi Sound” photograph by MrBill and licensed under Creative Commons.

For some bizarre reason, I thought it would be a good idea to start a netlabel. Let me retrace my steps here for a moment and say that although I’ve been listening to electronic music for 10+ years and many of that was at archive.org, other than I think it might be lots of fun, I have no freaking idea what is possessing me to do it. I’ll probably need to think through that a little more.

In the netlabel forums, there was a recent thread Netlabel CMS? (Content Management System) which talked discussed what a curator should use for his/her netlabel. Over the years I’ve notice that many use blogs such as Blogger and Wordpress and I didn’t want to write too much code, so I thought I’d stick with one of the pre-packaged blog platforms.

More importantly, the thread let me to Eldino’s post entitled Come aprire una netlabel or “How to Start A Netlabel. Even though it was written in Italian and all I know are Italian vulgarities, with a lot of help from Google’s Language Tools, I made a stab at trying to understand it. So, here is my basic understanding of what Eldino was getting at. Apologies to Eldino if I’ve butchered it.

1. Eldino’s first states not to do it alone. Good advice, but it really depends on what your definition of alone is. Is alone one man at a keyboard? Or is alone one man with the internet at this fingers? Though I’ll be doing most of the work myself, I cannot see how I’ll be doing it alone considering the artists that will be involved, the infrastructure at archive.org, and the vast information out in the internet through interviews, articles and just plain websites — I really don’t think I’ll be doing it alone.
2. Elidion writes:
   

   Although the music distributed through netabels is a free product, though does not mean that it should not be presented in a professional manner.

   More on this later, but I’d agree with his theory and I would even take it a step further in that the perception of order and professionalism is even more important than actual order and professionalism.

3. Plan, plan, plan and plan. When you think you are done planning, plan some more. Here Eldino takes the measure twice and cut one axiom to another level, say measure four times and cut once. As a project manager, I can definitely agree with this thought: the more one plans and designs the easier it will be to execute. So taking a page out of my professional life and no matter how eager I am, I need to take a few steps back and plan out what I will be doing.
4. He writes that a netlabel should decide on immediately what musical genre they will be producing. Eldino recommends 1 genre and its derivatives, even though there are many netlabels out there that span many genres.
   

   Experience teaches me that netlabels of the mono-kind are those with a greater and more consistent quality over time.

   Eldino writes that by a netlabel staying “mono-genre” listeners will learn what to expect form your site as well as your netlabel will be able to tie in better with the like-netlabels

   This definitely stopped me in my tracks since I was envisioning the gauntlet of electronic music forms, maybe even some Country music. Worse case scenario in taking Eldino’s advice here is that I would just add new genres in the future. However, if I disregard his advice, the netlabel could become thin and wandering in its presentation.

5. He also recommends that a perspective netlabel curator should spend some time looking at what other netlables are doing and how they are doing it. Well, that is probably so, and even though I’ve wander about to a great many netlabels, maybe it is time that I look at netlabels from a student’s perspective.

Wow, and this is just Part One of Three. I guess for homework I have to go and visit as many “good” netlabel sites as I possible can and start looking at them. Eldio has a few listed in his post and I know a few as well. Should be interesting. Next up, Part Two of Eldino’s Come aprire una netlabel.

Three Souls - The Drone from Webbed Hand Presents String Ambient

“funky chicken” photograph by AndyMc73 and licensed under Creative Commons.