RootJam is an experiment in online community which is dedicated to music and interactivity between artists and fans. Our three founders have been active in social media since the mid-90s, and have been collaborating on RootJam and related side-projects since 2008. Two of our founders are musicians and the third is a huge music fan.
The initial idea behind RootJam is quite simple:
We will provide music listeners with a music player which will allow them to ‘focus‘ more on a specific element in a piece of music and mix that music the way they want to hear it.
Behind that idea are several other powerful notions:
* The player is socially interactive – if an enduser likes the sound of song with the drums a bit louder, or radically changed, they will be able to save, and more importantly, to share that version of the song. The player will present the songs in such a fashion that it encourages commentary and interaction between listeners and musicians, just as we tend to do with our friends when we listen in our living rooms.
* Musicians will be able to upload different versions of each instrument (stems) for themselves and other musicians as well as see how others have contributed to their music. A new means of collaboration is born.
This leads to so many other options for musicians like real-time online jamming, online auditioning, etc.
There are more ideas than that. In order to function at this level, we will have to consider ourselves to be a publisher of sorts. We have observed the failures of the traditional publishing entities, and recognize that the entire music entertainment industry is rebuilding itself within context of a connected, digital, mobile world. We are part of that change.
Licensing will be managed through Creative Commons and every artist will be able to choose exactly how their music can be shared. We strongly urge musicians and bands to upload as many stems as possible for greater end user experience and band promotion, however, if you have “That one song” you don’t want anyone to mess with, we respect that too.
RootJam recognizes the need to build a lot of sub-structure to keep people involved, and that we will reward people for participation, both fans and artists alike. Our payout structure will provide anyone who has contributed to the end mix a piece of the pie. If someone gets paid, everyone who contributed gets paid.
Currently, RootJam is in an alpha phase. We have created our initial proof-of-concept applications which allow us to store and retrieve songs from a ‘cloud computing’ environment. We have also developed two small applications which use those stored songs in different ways.
Right now, we are looking for artists who wish to work with us in our small network and who also would like to see something slightly different in online music marketing and promotion. We also want to focus on artists who see this as an opportunity for a different type of collaboration, one which invites them to shape the form of the collaboration itself, and which aggressively seeks input and creativity from its own audience.
This is a video we created last year that will give you an idea of what craziness we are up to. ENJOY!
