Its been over a year...Walking Dead starts tomorrow..and I've got plenty of work to do!

Well it has def been a while since I felt like posting but you know what? I’ve got plenty to say and there are plenty of interesting things going on right now. So where’ve I been since April 2012? Hmm… Right now I’m working for a startup. My title is Social Media Director but as we have yet to launch our website (but should be doing so in the next two weeks) the job description includes a lot more than that. Its very, very cool to be part of something literally from the ground floor. Around this time last year I was still hopeful that a different project, opening a Music Venue in Hadley, MA, was going to get off the ground and be successful. That particular project was dead on arrival and truthfully, I knew that going into it. But I wanted to bring my knowledge to the table with the people who were trying to make that happen, and it’s a goal that I’ve long had in the back of my head anyways. Still hope to one day get a venue up and running in the Pioneer Valley that can go head to head with the Iron Horse Entertainment Group.

But working on IDYL Music (pronounced “Ideal”) has been a much different journey. The platform itself is nothing too original. It’s a music distribution platform and ours will be peer to peer. The difference between this and iTunes or even Spotify is that with IDYL, the users get a percentage of the profits when distributing songs. The goal is to encourage sharing rather than try to stifle it. There is a kind of moral imperative operating at the core of the program: We want to see artists get a fair wage for selling their intellectual property, and the concept of eliminating the middle man and making the users and fans into a direct sharing network who are then paid to help promote emerging artists speaks for itself. Its cool because it turns your music library into an investment portfolio. I can forsee a platform where power users try and scope out the best new bands and buy songs early on, gambling on a particular song’s popularity and turning that into an opportunity to make money. Plus the whole concept sort of steers users away from piracy because yeah, you can download music for free. Everyone does it (the latest facts I’ve heard are that only 1 out of 20 songs shared on the internet are paid for, even in the current iTunes era) but if you buy the rights to share a song with IDYL, there is literally a potential to make up to 100 bucks if a song reaches its full viral potential. The founder of the company, Jay Stevens, wrote some interesting books a few years back. One is called Storming Heaven, its about the advent of LSD and its impact on our culture. Another is called Drumming on the Edge of Magic and it was co-written with Mickey Hart, one of the original drummers of the Grateful Dead. He’s got a certain gravitas about him and I can tell, having worked closely with him for a few months now, that he is a Believer. I’ve always strived to work in environments like this: I stay away from big corporate gigs and try to work for people who started from scratch so that hopefully if I learn enough one day, I’ll be able to start something from scratch. In a lot of ways, I’m doing it right now. Anyways, Jay refers to IDYL as the first system of “monetizing virality” and that’s a good way to look at it. Hopefully, by the end of the year, we’ll have a lot of people talking about IDYL and putting some energy (and hopefully money) into out crowd funding campaign to get this project off the ground. Apart from that, I can never get away from the restaurant industry but I’m lucky to be back working for a company I’ve always liked, Amherst Brewing Company. I spent the first 6 months of the year working there as the banquet captain but also starting up a distribution arm. At this point, we’ve got distribution running so well that we were approached by a company called Williams Distribution to handle the sales and transport. It got big fast because it’s a good product. And ABC is independent, so that works for me too. But in reality, my energy and my hopes right now are behind IDYL and trying to make this platform a reality. I’ll keep you posted here and when the time comes, if you like what you hear, I encourage you to throw a couple bucks at the thing and see if we can’t build a really cool system that not only helps artists get paid, it’ll help YOU get paid. Can’t beat that. That’s all for the main page… As usual I’ve got science fiction really on my brain so I gotta put some thoughts down about William Gibson, Cyberpunk as a genre and the life and style that imitates that art, and also the concept of the “Neural Handshake” talked about in the Giant Robot vs Giant Monster movie “Pacific Rim”… So I’m gonna go write some other stuff and put it in the side bars. This is where you will find IDYL MUSIC. Right now its just a coming soon site but if you're game you can input your email address and be updated as soon as the site goes live.