movementsixtyone.com

movementsixtyone.com was allowed to interview Uvumi’s founder Marshall Stokes, who provided very interesting and thorough responses.

M61 has been wanting to learn a little about Uvumi’s Marshall Stokes ever since former thesixtyone.com members began flooding Uvumi in late January. Stokes and his crack team of people have been hard at work, coping with the influx of traffic, but he found time out of his busy schedule to answer five questions  posed to him.

The questions were chosen to get a better idea of the past, present, and future of Uvumi and what influenced its creation. Stokes graciously took the time to write very thorough responses, and M61 thanks him. And with that, the “interview.”

1.) What role has music played in the course of your life?

When I was about 11 years old I got hooked on heavy metal and spent a lot of time listening to Iron Maiden, Megadeth, and Metallica. As a teenager I fell in love with classic rock and bluegrass music, and spent countless hours listening to Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, Van Morrison, Pink Floyd, CCR, and other classics. When I was 13, I starting playing guitar in my spare time and learned my favorite Petty and Zeppelin songs by downloading tabletures from the budding internet. A couple years later, my closest friend in high school exposed me to underground hip hop, and I became infatuated with the beats and brilliance of Kool Keith, The Pharcyde, and of course the groundbreaking Beastie Boys, to name a few. When I got to college I suddenly had access to insane amounts of music I had never heard, via high-speed networks, and I explored a lot of electronic music, which I found to be great for studying.

Listening to music was life-changing, and was a critically important component of my youth, but what really gave me a solid appreciation for musicians and music in general was playing guitar and my experiences recording my own songs. I experimented with home recording as often as I could for about eight years, and when I finally realized the kind of skill and talent it takes to produce a quality recording, I developed a very deep appreciation for the amount of work and artistic ability that goes into great songs and great recordings.

(There are four more questions behind the cut. What are you waiting for?)

2.) Where do you see the music industry (from major corporations to independent artists) ten years from now?

I don’t see the major labels going away, but I do envision continued growth in the indie market as more and more artists figure out how to make a living without signing a major record deal. In the past five years we have seen platforms like MySpace and CDBaby put artists in a position where they can connect directly with fans and earn real money from their work. I think it is inevitable that nearly all recorded music will become more of an advertising tool than a money-making commodity. As more and more artists realize that it is more important to connect with fans than it is to collect royalties and seek payments for song downloads, they will focus their energy on getting their songs heard far and wide as a means of creating new fans. Once you get connected with a solid fan base, there is money to be made in giving them a reason to buy merchandise, limited-run CDs, licensing, and convenience downloads (iTunes, Amazon, etc). For example, you increase the odds that your next biggest fan, or a movie producer putting together a soundtrack, will hear your work in the first place by making it freely accessible. By removing barriers that stop people from hearing your music, you can seriously increase your exposure, which has real potential to pay off.

3.) What inspired you to found Uvumi.com?

Home recording. In high school and college I spent a lot of time trying to record my songs. I really wanted to share my work, but I had no intention of making a living as a musician. I just wanted to have a place where hobbyist musicians could post their songs and share tips on recording, songwriting, and other related topics. So I tried to build it, but I just wasn’t ready, I needed a few more years of programming experience under my belt. As the years passed and I worked other jobs (mostly freelance tech support and network services), I watched as the landscape changed and as big businesses reeled in millions of musicians and music fans without ever giving them real freedom or control. And like many others, I also noticed that it was becoming increasingly obvious that the old business model of the music industry was doomed. I thought about the CDs I was buying, and how just about everything I purchased was a direct result of discovering music via file sharing or other means. I never paid for anything until I knew I liked it, and why should anyone? It seems more valuable to artists to develop real fans who care up front rather than try to charge everyone to become a fan from the very beginning.

I also found MySpace to be severely annoying and offensive. The colors, the ads, and especially the limitations. It’s great to be able to look up a band and hear some songs, and MySpace continues to be a good platform for that, but the enjoyment ends there. I just wanted to be able to land on a band’s page and start playing songs while I explored their profile, but every time you click a link, the music stops. You could say it lacks cohesion, but what really influenced the Uvumi project was that it didn’t give visitors any control over their experience, other than the ability to browse from page to page.

So Uvumi had two specific goals from the beginning: To provide a platform to help artists connect with fans, and to give visitors control over their browsing experience by allowing them to listen to whatever they want while they browse the website, without stopping the music.

4.) What long-term plans do you have for the site?

Uvumi wants to be THE de facto platform for connecting artists and fans in a meaningful way. Ultimately we wish to provide a realistic means for artists to get real exposure for their work, to help them make a living in this ever-changing market. While we do have some Really Big Plans for the future, we have to figure out how to grow and maintain a larger user base before we can pursue the tactics that we think will actually shake up the industry and make a difference in the way the music industry works.

5.) How do you plan to keep Uvumi.com funded? I’m sure the bandwidth isn’t cheap.

We started testing our new advertising system this week. We are currently running in-house ads to confirm that the system is stable, and to gather feedback from the community before we forge ahead and seek out major sponsors. We believe that by running a single ad on each page of the site, instead of multiple ads, and by forbidding animated and distracting advertisements, we can provide a better browsing experience for site visitors. We can also offer great targeting to advertisers by keeping the ads relevant and tuned to the visual style of the website. This traditional advertising model has been successful for other websites, but we also have a couple other ideas up our sleeves that we’ll keep to ourselves for now.

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Again, huge thanks to Marshall Stokes for taking the time to talk with us. Until next week…

Shawn Douglas movementsixtyone artists, fans, industry, listeners, Marshall Stokes, movementsixtyone, music, musicians, MySpace, thesixtyone, uvumi, uvumi.com