Hear Music Made by and for Real People
The basic unit of the Music For Dozens experience is the track. Punk songs, slow jams, free jazz freakouts, old school ukele hip-hop joints, hyper-prog epics, political podcasts: whatever fills your iTunes library or your mp3 player can find a home here.
There's plenty of places to find these types of things on the web: from band websites to online music stores to file sharing services. But MFDZ is none of these. We're a musical community. Our secret ingredient is that all the tracks you'll find here are made by people just like you. Our artists are regular people making and recording music. This makes for more eccentric, more exciting content produced and consumed in a profoundly personal context. And as part of our community, you can legally listen to all our tracks free anytime and anywhere you want.
In this age of the increasingly affordable and ever easier to use digital home recording technology, all kinds of people are making exciting and diverse music like never before. While not every one of these newly empowered artists makes music destined to be worshipped by millions of adoring fans each of them has the potential to be the beloved favorite of dozens.
Keep Current on Your Favorite Artists
For a music fan, there's no more exhilirating experience than rushing out to the local record store at a quarter to midnight on the night before the release of an eagerly awaited new album, tripping out to the car, hungrily tearing the CD out of its (infuriating) plastic wrapping, popping it into the CD player, and cruising through the night listening for the first time to a future favorite record.
With MFDZ podcast subscriptions, you can get this same thrill every day while sitting in your pajamas in front of your computer. We offer podcast feeds for all of our artists and users, so when you find someone whose work you really like, you can get their new tracks straight onto your mp3 player with no hassle and no delay.
We think podcasting is so cool and useful, that we have integrated podcasting throughout Music For Dozens. In addition to feeds of all our artists, we also offer feeds of all the tags and groups at Music For Dozens, so subscriptions are a great way to take advantage of the listening habits of your fellow MFDZ users in order to discover something new. Just subscribe to tags and groups related to your areas of interest (the "PDX Pop Now" group or the "metal" tag, for example) and you'll automatically hear tracks that other folks think fit those categories.
Speak Your Mind and Be Heard
With mass market music today, the closest you can come to personal contact with the artists is to buy a T-shirt for $35 at a concert, or perhaps tack up a poster of your favorite pop diva on the wall. Yet, in addition to the impersonal flash and glitz of slick pop hits made by inaccessible celebrities, music can be about simple human communication.
Remember the last time a song got you through the week? You know, the week when you lost your job and your dog died? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to write a note to the songwriter to tell them how much their music means to you?
That's why every public Music For Dozens track features a section for listener comments. Let someone know you liked their song, ask them how they got that particularly cool laser sound in the bridge, suggest a new lyric with a snappier rhyme, offer to record some cello overdubs, whatever. Your feedback will make them feel appreciated and who knows, you might end up playing on their next track.
Spread the Word about Great Tracks
Sometimes, when you're really excited about a band you recently discovered, you've just got to tell the world about it. Music For Dozens makes it easy to post any track on the site to your own blog, any discussion board, or even to put it in an email, all without any slow downloading or uploading of mp3 files.
All you've got to do is click "Blog it!" when you're looking at any indivdual track, copy the HTML that appears, and paste it wherever you want to post the track. Voila! The track will play directly from MFDZ no matter where you've posted it and without anyone even having to leave your site or discussion board post.
This way you get to share music that you love with the people that you want to hear it without becoming a "criminal" or hurting the artists whose work you so appreciate. Instead, you'll be providing your friends with an opportunity to hear great songs while simultaneously giving the artists new chances to make sales, get feedback from listeners, and make new fans. Rather than being simply a thief or a consumer, you get to be a participant in the diverse and ongoing conversation that surrounds music and makes it a community instead of just a product.
Your Music on Music For Dozens
The iPod, iTunes, Amazon, Bit Torrent, Grokster. Almost the only time you hear about the music industry nowadays it's some story regarding our changing habits as music consumers. Will file sharing cause shrinking sales? Has industry payola and station consolidation ruined radio? Will technology and the internet save us? You begin to wonder if the only way anyone ever interacts with music is by buying it, stealing it, or listening to it for free.
But what about all those people who played in high school grunge bands, or took violin lessons in elementary school, or make their own laptop glitch pop while sitting in coffee shops, or host Irish jig play-alongs on St. Patrick's day, or even just sit around strumming that acoustic guitar that's hidden way in the back of their closet when they're by themselves and no one else is around? Not to mention all the great local bands, dilligently performing and recording, who haven't yet received wider acclaim!
Music For Dozens is an outlet for this music, a way of sharing it with other people who might like it. At MFDZ it's free to upload your music and make it available for other people to listen to and buy. No matter how few or how many people might want to hear your music — just your friends and family, all the world's Irish jig jam sessions enthusiasts, or everyone with eyes, ears, and a computer — Music For Dozens helps you find them.
If You Love Something Set It Free (and Still Get Paid)
Despite all of their whining about illegal file sharing, a lot of the power of the big record labels comes from their own ability to give music away. They send free promotional copies to radio stations and music critics (often with illegal payola to encourage preferential treatment) just so that we'll be able to listen to their songs for free and decide we want to buy their albums.
By putting your tracks on Music For Dozens, you make it easy for anyone in the world to find your music and listen to it. Just like radio, we offer free and easily available versions of your songs with DJ-like intros, so no matter where people hear your music, they'll always know who you are and where they can buy your songs and CDs.
There's a cliche that says, "If you love something, set it free." Well, the same thing goes for your music. Once you've put your tracks up on Music For Dozens, it's easy as can be for other people to broadcast them out to still more listeners. Through the embedded MFDZ player anyone can let people on their own site (or blog, discussion board post, or email), hear and buy tracks of yours they like. Before you know it, your music will be showing up in the most unexpected places and people you've never heard of will be coming to MFDZ to check out and buy your songs.
Find People and Make Them Your Fans
Even in the age of laptop hip-hop and one-man midi-orchestras, music is still a social medium. When you make something that you're proud of, you want other people to hear it and get excited about it too. For musicians at all levels of success and professionalism, it's the possibility of finding someone, anyone, as many as people possible, who like the music they're making that keeps them going.
That's why Music For Dozens gives you lots of ways to find people who are actually likely to enjoy your music. With our convenient portable flash player we make it easy for you and your fans to publish your songs anywhere on the web. With all of our social networking tools: like contacts, groups, and artist subscriptions we help you find MFDZ users who might like your music and we make it easy for them to keep up with your new releases once they have.
Make Money Off Your Music (Finally)
Now, it might seem that selling your CDs for $5 and your tracks for a buck (not to mention helping you let people listen to your music on your website and blogs everywhere free) undervalues your music. Maybe you think that you can get $10 or $15 selling your mass manufactured CDs.
But, as the big corporate record labels have long learned, giving music away is the best way to get people to like it. They've used radio payola to put whatever they want on the air because they know it drives sales of albums. The same thing goes for your music: the more people who hear your music (paid for, downloaded for free, streamed off of a blog, however), the more people who'll buy it.
What the record labels don't know is that even while people want to pay back artists for music they appreciate, keeping CD prices sky high just pushes people to download their songs illegally for free. On the other hand, at Music For Dozens, in addition to selling your CDs and tracks for a reasonable price, we provide you with lot's of ways to get paid back. All our users can donate money directly to the artists they like. With our player, they can buy your songs from anywhere your tracks get posted on the web.
