Welcome and About Us: under construction
When told in 1983 that several major music labels were organizing a festival to celebrate their power to create and market "music for millions", the independent rock band Sonic Youth instead declared their intention to continue producing "music for dozens" - they would go on making the music that they wished to make and their loyal fans wanted to hear even if it meant reaching a more limited audience.
Now, there is a way for every person to find exactly the music he or she wants to hear, and for artists to reach their own enthusiastic fans, whether there are a million or just a dozen.
Music For Dozens provides recordings from diverse bands at the lowest possible prices. Our aim is to help music fans and independent bands find each other. Anyone can sell their recordings; anyone can buy.
At Music For Dozens, we offer a number of ways to get the music you want. First, you can always listen to full length mp3 samples of every song available on the site. We keep these samples in low bit rate mp3s so that we can store all of the songs uploaded by our artists. Once you find music you like, you can buy high quality mp3s of them with just a couple of clicks. Finally you can order real, legitimate full quality CDs of albums selected by the artists that we will manufacture and ship out to you for just five bucks, shipping included.
Tags, Playlists, and the User Experience
When you sign up as a user at Music For Dozens, whether to buy other people's music or to upload your own, we create a space for you where you can keep view and organize the music you've listened to or bought, and where, if you make your own music, you can upload your tracks and organize them into albums.
What are Tags?
As you browse around Music For Dozens listening to sample songs and reading about bands you will come across songs that you like. Some of these songs you will want to buy immediately and some, while you may not want to buy them right then, you will want to make reference to later to tell a friend about or to listen to second time, or whyever. Tags are how you keep track of all of these songs. Everytime you listen to or buy a song, you can attach multiple keywords to it to help you find it again later. For example, if you listen to "Welcome Home" by At Dusk you may want to tag it with "indieRock trombone Portland lastTrack". Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati are all examples of other websites that use tags to help users find websites, photos, and blogs, respectively.
Playlists and RSS
On the surface it might not appear obvious why you would want to tag tracks. This is where playlists come in. All of the tracks you've bought and/or tagged will appear on your personal playlist at mfdz.com/play/yourusername. There, you, and anyone else, can sort all of the tracks by the terms you've used to tag them. So, continuing my example from above, on my playlist, mfdz.com/play/atduskgreg, "Welcome Home" will now appear in a list of songs tagged "lastTrack" (as well as "indieRock", "trombone", and "Portland"). You can think of this list as a mix that I'm making for myself, and anyone else who's interested, of last tracks of albums. You can also look at combinations of tags that I may have assigned, i.e all the songs I tagged both "Portland" and "indieRock". So, I'm also automatically making new mixes to go back and listen to as I'm tagging songs.
But wait, there's more! Where tags get really useful is when you're looking for new music. Everyone always wants to hear music that they'll really like that they've never heard of before. Fulfilling that need is one of the main reasons we started Music For Dozens and tags make it easier than ever. There's a bunch of ways you can use tags to find new music:
- You can find other people who've tagged music with similar tags to yours. If you like Portland indie rock, you can go to mfdz.com/tag/indieRock+Portland and you'll find all the music other Music For Dozens users have tagged as "Portland" and "indieRock".
- You can subscribe to tags. If you always want to find out when new Portland indie rock gets uploaded to Music For Dozens, you can subscribe to the RSS feed at mfdz.com/tag/indieRock+Portland/rss.xml and you'll get song announcements delivered straight to your RSS reader. If your reader can handle enclosures, you can even get the songs themselves (Learn more about RSS). You can also get RSS feeds of all new tracks added to the site (on the main page or all new tracks by your favorite artist on their page.
- You can tag music not on Music For Dozens. Even those of us most committed to independent music sometimes listen to music by popular artists on labels; we also listen to independent bands that just haven't yet found their way to Music For Dozens. On your playlist page, you can add links to your favorite music around the web, even on the iTunes music store. You can organize this music with tags just as if it was by Music For Dozens artists. That way, when you find another Music For Dozens user with common musical interests through a shared tag or two, you'll have a window onto all of the great music they've found and tagged from around the web.
Using this combination of tag-based features you can really make MFDZ your home for music online.
How To Signup
For users
Signing up to buy music on Music For Dozens is easy, painless, and free. Simply go to the user login page (or click to it from the top of the main page), type in a user name, and create a password. You'll now be at your home at Music For Dozens. From here you can click to buy trackpoints so that you can start buying songs. Now that you're logged in, you can start listening to free samples, tagging them, and using this user area to edit and organize your tags.
For Artists
If you want to upload your music, first create an account just like any other user. Next, you want to add an artist, so click the link, name the artist, fill in the url for your blog's RSS feed and other details, and then you can start uploading tracks and adding them to albums. Be sure to indicate some tracks as free high quality samples so users can really hear your stuff. If you're an artist, you'll probably want to be sure to spend some time exploring and tagging our other artists. The more you're connected into our network of artists the easier it will be for users who might like your music to find you.
Prices and Policies
Disc Versions
Since we employ on-demand production processes here at Music For Dozens (i.e., we don't have a bunch of CDs sitting around here getting dusty), we are able to make rolling changes to the content of albums. Consequently, our artists may occasionally decide to alter their albums, often by improving the recording quality, by adding tracks, or by making other improvements. We indicate the current (and past) versions of all discs on the ÃíMore Information About This AlbumÃì page, so you will know when the album has been altered during the production process.
Unfortunately, we are not able to offer any upgrade path on discs you may have already received (all current purchasers will, of course, receive the latest version of the disc, since we don't make it until you order it) Ãë but, then again, each disc only costs $5, so if you really want the latest version, just buy a new copy and give the old one to a friend!
Note that albums at Music For Dozens occasionally go out of print, as we are a distributor, not a cruel and domineering record label Ãë if one of our artists wants to withdraw a disc from circulation, that is entirely up to them. The upshot of this is that if you want a disc, it might be a good idea to buy it sooner than later! We cannot guarantee it in every case, but we will make every effort to give at least a monthÃïs notice on our News and Releases page before withdrawing any album from circulation so you can get it while it is here.
Prices
All discs at Music For Dozens sell for the basic price of five dollars ($5) each.
Music For Dozens, as an Oregon company, never collects any sales tax on anything sold! We intend to maintain this policy as long as we can, but if states begin charging tax on internet purchases from out of state, we will be forced to pass along those charges in the check-out process. If this prospect upsets you as much as it does us, let your state legistature know how you feel about the notion of paying state taxes on products you did not even buy in the state!
Note that it is entirely up to the artist to determine the length of the albums they offer on Music For Dozens, so shoppers should take a look at the track listings (which display lengths) before ordering. Although we will make every effort to flag for your attention particularly short discs, Music For Dozens cannot accept any returns based on the customer's failure to note the length of the album.
All payment to Music For Dozens will be handled by our payment processor, Paypal. This service accepts credit cards, checks and money orders, as well as electronic money transfers.
To use these services, you will need to set up a quick account, which can be done in seconds at the time of purchase.
Contact us at payments@mfdz.com if you wish to make some other payment arrangment, such as sending a money order via US mail. Although this method of payment may slow things down, we would be happy to accomodate you.
Shipping
We will ship out your discs to you within four business days. Shipping to anywhere in the United States is absolutely free. All discs are sent via the United States Postal Service, and should take a few days to arrive (depending on your distance from our Portland, Oregon, offices).
If you require expedited processing and shipment, contact us at payments@mfdz.com to arrange rates and time tables. Once again, we will be happy to work to accomodate your special needs.
If you would like us to send your discs abroad, please contact us at payments@mfdz.com. We will figure out a way to send the music to you, charging an extra fee that merely reflects our actual postage and customs costs. For instance, a disc sent to Canada generally only costs an extra US$1.25 in postage, and usually arrives within a week.
Returns & Exchanges
We guarantee all of our products to be free of defects for 30 days. If you receive a defective CD from us, send us e-mail at customerservice@mfdz.com right away to arrange an exchange. All defects will be replaced with the same title.
All returns should be sent post-paid in their original packaging (with intact sleeve and booklet). Do not return anything to us without first receiving a return authorization via e-mail from customerservice@mfdz.com. You should receive your replacement disc, postage-paid, within a few days with our appologies for the inconvenience.
Media
All of our discs are mastered on high-quality CD-Rs using new equipment. Although we use varying media suppliers (we are continually searching for the highest quality discs to reduce the chance of defect), all have been verified on site to be free of recording errors. If this verification process missed a glitch in the disc, however, please return it to us right away for a quick replacement.
Please note that we cannot accept returns for non-defective CD-Rs that fail to play on older or incompatible equipment. Our discs are guaranteed to play on most newer (circa 1990s+) standard CD players of all types and brands. Let us know at customerservice@mfdz.com if you discover any incompatibilities between our discs and any CD player that claims to play CD-Rs.
Generally speaking, if one of our discs will successfully play on a given machine, they all should. If this is not the case, the disc may be defective and you should contact us for a replacement.
Privacy Policy
Music For Dozens is dedicated to protecting your right to privacy. We occasionally collect information about our customers to enable us to process orders, improve our web site, and provide better service to our customers. To prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, we have put in place appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.
Here are details about how this information is used:
When you surf over to musicfordozens.com:
When you browse Music For Dozens' web site, you are completely anonymous. We don't collect personal information, including your e-mail address, without your prior knowledge and consent. Music For Dozens' server does not currently employ any cookies, does not use pop-up windows, and only employs very simple JavaScript code to automatically load pages into the site's frames (for the Navigation Bar on the left).
Although our server does not currently use any cookies, we may implement this technology in the future. If we do so, we will only employ them simply to enable us to maintain custom settings while you browse. The cookie will be temporarily stored and automatically discarded. For more information on cookies, please visit: http://www.ciac.org/ciac/bulletins/i-034.shtml.
Music For Dozens will never, now or at any time in the future, sell or share your contact information with any third-party without acquiring your active, written consent. At no time will we send you unsolicited e-mail, product catalogs, or other spam of any kind.
If you choose to give us your personal information:
Although Music For Dozens does not normally collect any personal information through its website, you may choose to submit your name and e-mail address to us or to the bands we distribute to be included on fan mailing lists or to receive catalogs and other information. These opportunities to submit your information will be, of course, entirely at your own discretion, and will require you to actively submit this information to us (usually via e-mail). Once we have received this information, we will vigilantly safeguard it and share it only with the appropriate band.
If you send us information that you wish to share with any of our bands, we will make every effort to ensure that our bands will treat your information will the same care and concern as we do. Please note, though, that we do not physically control the bands' files and records, and therefore cannot be held responsible for any personal information that you ask us to share with any of our bands. If you observe any abuse by one of Music For Dozens' bands, please write to us immediately at a href="mailto:customerservice@mfdz.com">customerservice@mfdz.com and we will investigate the abuse and work to correct the problem.
When you contact us by e-mail:
Should you contact us via e-mail or otherwise specify that you want us to correspond with you, we will be happy to do so. We will not, however, use e-mail contact for anything other than response to your questions. And, once again, we will never send you unsolicited e-mail or other communications based upon your e-mail contact to Music For Dozens.
When you place an order with us:
To process and ship your order, our payment processor (Paypal) will need your name, phone number, billing address, shipping address and e-mail address. This information is transferred to their servers using SSL encryption (Secure Sockets Layer), a security protocol that provides communications privacy over the Internet. When you sign up with Paypal, you may be sent unsolicited e-mail from them. We encourage you to read their own privacy policies (Paypal policies), and to be vigilent in monitoring their compliance.
Upon completion of the order, our payment processor will transfer order information to us, which we will store in a customer database. Our database will not be accessible online, and will be protected from the Internet by firewalls and other security measures. We will store this information only for our own customer service tracking, so as to improve our order fullfillment procedures, and will never share this information with any third party without your explicit written authorization.
When you follow a link from our site to another site:
As discussed above in relation to our bands and our payment processor, Music For Dozens has very limited control over the privacy practices of sites outside our domain. If you follow a link to another web site, read that site's privacy policy and contact their administrator with your privacy-related questions.
A note to guardians of young children:
Music For Dozens strongly encourages parents and guardians of young web users to play an active role in their children's online activity. Children under the age of thirteen should not submit orders, application forms, service requests or other documents to Music For Dozens without the prior consent of their parent or legal guardian.
Our No-Weasel Guarantee:
Unlike many other web sites, Music For Dozens will not "bait and switch" our privacy policy. In fact, we guarantee that, if we ever alter our privacy policy in any material way affecting the confidentiality of your personal information, we will notify you (only if you have previously given us permission to contact you via e-mail, of course) of your right to opt in. If you choose not to do so, or simply do not respond to our e-mail on the subject within two weeks, we will purge any and all of your personal information from our own databases. Furthermore, if at any point in the future musicfordozens.com is sold or otherwise transfered from the ownership of the Music For Dozens Partnership, your personal information will be purged prior to the transfer, unless you explicitly tell us otherwise.
If you have further questions concerning our Privacy Policy:
Please e-mail us at customerservice@mfdz.com and we will help you in any way we can. And, naturally, you can rest assured that your correspondence will remain utterly private!
Copyright Policy
Our Bands and their Copyrighted Albums
At Music For Dozens, all copyrights to music (including downloadable samples), lyrics, and personal information about bands or band members belong exclusively to the respective artists. All albums distributed through Music For Dozens remain the intellectual property of the artists.
All artists distributing their albums through Music For Dozens encourage album purchasers to exercise all reasonable rights to back up or transfer onto other media or formats (including digitally recoding) the content of the purchased album so long as that use is in full compliance with the Sound Recording Amendment of 1971, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 (for more on these laws, see this article). Please do observe these laws' injunctions against sharing the artists' intellectual property with others without their permission.
We encourage you to contact the relevent artists if you have any questions about the proper use of their intellectual property. Contact information is provided on the information pages for each band.
At Music For Dozens, we make absolutely no use of any restrictive and draconian Digital Rights Management technologies to control your use of the music your buy. Instead, we actively help you reconcile the law with the technologies and opportunities of the digital era by offering you an electronic virtual license for your digitally distributed copies.
If you would like to make digital copies of our bands' music to distribute to others, we strongly encourage you to compensate the artist through a simple monetary donation or repayment, as offered on all of the band pages of the Music For Dozens website. We recommend one or two dollars per copy of each disc distributed (or a proportional fraction for individual tracks) as a reasonable, fair, and honorable compensation for the back-channel electronic or physical duplication and distribution of the artist's copyrighted music. The artist will receive this compensation directly, minus a small processing charge to cover our costs (most notably the transaction fees levied by our payment processors Ãë which will be proportionately reduced, of course, if you order several items at once), and by this indulgence you will be absolved of all legal and moral guilt! Not a bad deal for total absolution. And of course, in accord with our Privacy Policy, we absolutely guarantee that any personally identifying information about your contributions will never be stored, tracked, or revealed to any third party by Music For Dozens.
Our Copyrighted Website
The site design, layout, and format of the Music For Dozens website is copyright © 2003 The Music For Dozens Partnership. All rights reserved. The names "Music For Dozens," "musicfordozens.com," "Music For Dozens, LLC," "mfdz.com," "m4dz.com," "The Music For Dozens Partnership," and the accompanying graphic logo and slogan are all trademarks of The Music For Dozens Partnership. Trademarks of other entities referenced on the website are the intellectual property of the respective trademark holders.
All editorial content on the Music For Dozens website which does not belong to our artists is the intellectual property of The Music For Dozens Partnership or of its named contributors. All signed opinions and editorial comments are the responsibility of the contributors, who publish their commentary at their own discretion as journalistic content. As this material remains the property of the contributors, The Music For Dozens Partnership can assume no responsibility for its publication or distribution. If you find any of this editorial content objectionable in any way, that is to be expected, as it is offered in the spirit of free journalistic expression and review. We encourage you to share your opinions and concerns by contacting us at generalinfo@mfdz.com.
Editorial content on the Music For Dozens website may be distributed, with full attribution to relevent authors and to musicfordozens.com, under the principles of the United States Copyright Office's "Fair Use" Policy. For more information about intellectual property in the digital domain, please visit one of these useful sites: The Copyright Website or Grotton Public Schools Copyright Resource Page.
Intellectual Property Contact and Inquiry Information
The Music For Dozens Partnership makes every effort to ensure that these materials are the proper and true property of the artists, and contractually requires its artists to confirm that they hold the relevent copyrights (see our sample Distribution Agreement). Nevertheless, The Music For Dozens Partnership cannot be held responsible for any violations of copyright or other intellectual property rights. If you are aware of any violations of United States laws on copyright or intellectual property either on the website or on any album we distribute, please contact us immediately at generalinfo@mfdz.com.
All About Us
Greg and Jem formed The Music For Dozens Partnership in August of 2002 to help promote the distribution of music from bands we liked (such as Greg's own band, At Dusk). Disturbed (and annoyed) by trends toward corporate consolidation in the commercial music industry, we sought to create a space where unsigned musicians and bands could both form a community of mutual support and share their music with others.
In late 2004, Chris Anderson came aboard. Chris led an (ongoing) effort to migrate the Music For Dozens backend to a more flexible and open architecture in order to take advantage of a series of exciting new developments in web technology. Foremost, MFDZ 2.0 provides the ability for artists to signup over the web and for users to buy downloads through the website. Secondly, MFDZ 2.0 brought music into the evolving world of user tagging. Basically, tagging allows users to keep track of their favorite music by Music For Dozens artists in various different genres and allows others to use these favorites to discover new music for themselves that they might like. For more info, on tagging, check out our section on Tags, Playlists, and the User Experience.
We hope you will join our community of fans and bands, and we hope we can help connect you to new music you will like. Please feel free to write to me at jem@mfdz.com, Greg at greg@mfdz.com, or Chris at jchris@mfdz.com and let us know how we could improve this website to make it more useful to you. If you like what we are doing, you might want to check out our paraphenalia Ãë every cent we make goes right back into the PartnershipÃïs efforts to support and promote unsigned bands and their music.
Thanks!
Contact Information
General Information
generalinfo@mfdz.com
Information and comments about our company's policies. Please
use this link if you have any questions about our policies.
Customer Service
customerservice@mfdz.com
Problems with discs or other products. Please use this link if you receive a defective disc and need to return it to us.
Payments Information
payments@mfdz.com
All payments to our payment processors as well as remittances to artists. Please use this link for help on billing or to arrange special order handling.
Artist Information
artistinfo@mfdz.com
Advertising and relations with artists. Please use this link for help on site advertising and promotions.
Greg
greg@mfdz.com
Greg's contact information. Please use this link to get in touch with Greg directly.
Jem
jem@mfdz.com
Jem's contact information. Please use this link to get in touch with Jem directly.
Chris
jchris@mfdz.com
Chris's contact information. Please use this link to get in touch with Chris directly.
Site Webmaster
webmaster@mfdz.com
The website's technical operation. Please use this link to report any bugs you discover.
