Awopbopaloobop.com:Mission Statement

Awopbopaloobop.com

Mission Statement

If you’re not already a member of the group Awopbopaloobop.com on facebook then please join for further updates.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=119517624611&ref=ts

 

Hi,

 

Well now we’ve had more time to ruminate and ruminate some more, we can give a clearer picture of what Awopbopaloobop is intended to be all about.

I first got the idea when talking to an old friend of mine Tony Michaelides, whom a number of you will know. Tony was writing a blog (which is now a book by the way and well worth buying from him!) and whilst talking about ‘back in the day’ we thought it might be nice if I made some contributions as our paths had often crossed, thus giving a different angle on a similar period. Within a week I was swamping Tony’s blog with my own tales and so thought it would be prudent to start my own blog, which became Scott Walker or The Man Who Ruined My Life (join the facebook group if you haven’t already, it is absolutely brilliant, although I would say that!). http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=119517624611&ref=ts#/group.php?gid=68107084504

We then started talking about doing rock & roll interviews on the internet in a sort of laid back, chat show kind of way. Whilst thinking about how to tackle that in an interesting way, to give it some sort of marketing edge, my thoughts started burgeoning and I thought why not do a whole rolling music paper, but on the internet. Like many of you, I grew up on the NME and the Melody Maker and remember the days when they formed my social bible most fondly. Times change, things move on and I am no longer interested in the music press; Why not? Because now it seems like all the so-called music press is just Hello with guitars. To be fair to the publishers involved, I acknowledge that music no longer occupies the same place it did in the list of priorities which apply to the average young person, so there would be little point in continuing to cover it in the same way. In many ways music has now shrunk back into the general tapestry of ‘showbiz’; exactly where it was before the flood, in those dark, distant, pre-Moptop days. I realised if I was going to achieve anything at all, I needed to get back in the link and thought that Facebook would be a great enabling tool with this aim in mind.

Over the ensuing months I managed to get back in touch with a load of people I hadn’t been in contact with for years and to ‘meet’ a whole load of people I hadn’t met before but maybe should have! The more I trailed Facebook, the more I realised that an awful lot of artistes whom I had worked with and admired during the 70’s and 80’s, were still out there doing their stuff, the only difference is that now the bulk of them are not in the mainstream. This obviously means that what they are doing now is of little interest to the conventional elements of national and international media, but what became very apparent is that it is still of massive interest to their original fans and people of a similar vintage to myself. This realisation made me think that maybe what we needed was an internet based music paper which concentrated mainly, but not exclusively on pre-90’s music, but had as it’s main target the sort of person who began listening to music in the 60’s and 70’s.

Technological developments also meant that in many cases we could cut out the middleman and allow artistes to contribute their own pieces, rather than always view them through the third-party eyes of an interviewer or reviewer. Having said that I feel a good interviewer can still bring an awful lot more out of a situation than would always be forthcoming from an artiste, so there will still be a very important place for written, audio and visual interviews.

In short we are simply taking up at the point where the conventional media did a runner and concentrating on gathering together all events and news surrounding the musical artistes with whom you grew up.

Why internet based and not just a conventional but retro music paper?

Pretty obvious really. It is becoming increasingly difficult to produce hard-copy publications which are financially viable, so why go down that road? Also the internet opens up a whole realm of possibilities which were not available first time around. Gig guides can give you videos of the band in performance and virtual tours of the venue, giving the punters far more choice in evaluating where they spend their hard-earned cash. Live reviews can provide footage of the actual event. Record reviews can provide samples of the items under review and purchases can be made right off the page etc., etc., etc. Also through various columns artistes can interact with other people involved in the business giving them the opportunity to almost manage their own careers, within the confines of the paper.

To clear up any potential misunderstanding, this will not be a social networking site. There are already plenty of those and I feel that whilst the whole idea of the internet was to extend horizons, those extensions have become so vast that it is time to pull in the opposite direction. Anyone is free to submit anything they wish for consideration, but it will have to go through the editorial process in terms of quality, appropriateness and suitability. In keeping a strict control on this aspect we intend to maintain a very high quality content and specifically focussed site, which will give people access to what they want without taking them on a wild goose chase over a myriad, largely irrelevant outside sites. Yes we will have links to other sites and will have business partners, but they will all be extremely relevant and carefully chosen so that nobody ends up wasting their time.

But doesn’t Myspace do all the above?

Myspace was a great idea, but I feel it is now well past it’s sell-by date. Have a look yourself; it is disjointed and incoherent and is basically a webspace full of largely unconnected ‘Want Ads’. The idea of Awopbopaloobop is to provide everything you can get on Myspace and a lot more, as well as providing it in a far more coherent and user-friendly format. All the facilities on offer will be free to use for artistes, although there will be modest fees for business users and some parts of the service will be on a subscription basis, but again with a very modest fee.

Are there any jobs going?

Yes there are hundreds and they are all unpaid for the moment.

Obviously we need to get the site up and running and that will take a lot of work. It is the intention to launch an invite only working model of the site next year and to run it for six months or so until we are satisfied that we have just about everything we need there and that it all works! Any help we can get would be much appreciated. Ultimately we hope to earn our income from sponsorship, advertising and subscriptions and once we start getting money coming in through that, we can look at paying people. It has always been my philosophy to look after people who look after me so any jobs going will first be offered to people who’ve contributed the most. I realise that this is an on trust thing, but an awful lot of my friends in this business date back over thirty years and I doubt if they’d still be friends if I’d made my way through life by ripping people off and behaving like an absolute shower (roll over Terry-Thomas!)

Please get in touch as soon as you like with anything you think may be useful. Any young, whizzo, website builders in particular, would be most welcome. View this as an online internship which could well land you a plum job for life, a year or so down the road; just get in contact.

Any artistes, journalists or technicians who would like to write a piece or suggest anything then please feel free. I would be happy for you to write on any music-related subject you like, but obviously we need to make sure that people aren’t writing about the same thing. Just to repeat, any music technicians then yes, your contribution and any comments would be warmly encouraged.

I already have a number of ideas about which sort of people we ought to be approaching for advertising, but again would welcome suggestions. I’m even concocting a way to get sponsorship from mainstream record companies, which would be a bit ironic bearing in mind the likely consequences to them, if Awopbopaloobop becomes as successful as we’re all expecting.

Anyway thanks for reading this. We are just about ready to go with a working demo of the site to take to advertisers so the sooner we hear from you with any ideas the better.

Regards, Richard

PS and please remember, if you’re not already a member of the group Awopbopaloobop.com then please join for further updates. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=119517624611&ref=ts

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~ by richardpearson on August 8, 2009.