Minitek Festival Flyer

The summer is just about over. What’s one to do?

PVD on the pier is history. Ibiza is shutting down. Burning Man is kicking off, but we certainly don’t have gas money for the RV this time around. Our prodigal American DJs are returning stateside to residencies that pay them 1/4 of what they’re actually worth; to a battered economy and and a country frozen by fear-factoring Republicans.

Where can one find inspiration and creative dose of liberal relief? Minitek! That’s where!

Perfectly situated at the end of summer parties on the Hamptons and the influx of thousands of NYU students returning for the Fall semester, the first ever Minitek festival kicks off between September 12 and 14th at various venues and locales throughout New York City. Home base, where all the exhibits will be on display, is Penn Plaza. If you don’t know Penn Plaza, think Madison Square Garden and the surrounding streets

The festival organizers are on an ambitious effort to organize a celebration of elecontric arts, culture, technology and music. Innovation Pavillion is the epicenter, where the festivals installations, exhibits and vendor booths for companies the digital media and music spectrum will be contstructed.

According to the festival organizers, projects on display will “explore new technologies to create sounds and visuals, with emphasis lying on interactivity. The pavilion will be present at the day site and the original creators have been invited to present their work to you live; sometimes you will even directly or indirectly become part of the art presented.”

DJ sets will take place at various venues throughout the city. Confirmed are Richie Hawtin, Magda, Audion, Heidi, Tiefschwarz, M.A.N.D.Y. and more. Record labels will also have booths set up to promote the latest electronic beats.

For more information on installations, vendors, DJs and locations, visit MiniTekFestival.com. For tix, visit ResidentAdvisor.net.

We’re looking forward to this event and are planning to provide some coverage here. So stay up with Netmix and we’ll bring you a little slice of the Minitek Festival.

Netmix Global House Podcast

We’re back with a new podcast, Global House Sessions - August 2008. All tracks are available through Beatport.com. Subscribe to the podcast to download.

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Track Listing:

• Rock To The Beat - Kevin Saunderson - Christian Smith & John Selway Remix
• Reynosa - Emilio Fernandez - Original Mix
• Diablo - Oliver Huntemann & Dubfire - Original Mix
• Chime - The Shapeshifters - Martin Ten Velden Remix
• Born Slippy - DJ Joe K and Beto Dias Remix
• I Begin To Wonder 2008 - Jean Claude Ades - Jerome Isma-Ae Remix
• Solid - Sweno N - Original Mix
• Space Time - Deadmau5 Vocal Mix - Mike Di Scala, Colin Airey
• Get Wild - Sharam - Steve Agnello Remix
• Deep Down feat. Shirley Davis - J Nitti - Original Mix

Please note, the Audio Jelly player is not displaying correctly, because it is a mix of CSS with HTML and Flash that is not playing well with Wordpress, the CMS that runs this blog. We have contacted Audio Jelly for a solution. The good news is that the Flash embed still works and you can listen to each track. Click on any cover to go to Audio Jelly to purchase the tracks.

Ringtones have been all the rage in recent years, generationg tens of millions of dollars in revenue for a music industry seeking new ways to squeeze water out of a rock. Okay…just kidding, of course.

Ringtones really have become an important sales tool and revenue driver for both artists and labels alike. Once considered a fad, master ring tones can sell upwards of a million units as over-the-air, direct downloads to mobile phones. Because the mobile service providers networks are closed, it’s pretty hard to share ringtones, which makes these digital shorts of popular music an attractive, legal revenue opportunity for labels being hurt by p2p over the web.

At first, ringtones were predominantly the domain of major label partnerships with mobile phone companies. However, over the past few years, we’ve seen a rise in software that allows anyone to create a ringtone and some phone companies are allowing users to add ring tones to their own phones.

The software to create these ring tones was rudimentary at first and desktop based. You could create a ring tone, but if you didn’t have a phone that could connect to your computer or  one with a flash drive, it was pretty difficult to get what you creatd onto your phone. Fast forward a few years later and now with better web technologies in place, companies like ToneMine.com are enabling aspiring DJ/Producers with the ability to create ring tones right in the browser window using DJ-Tutor, an Adobe Flash (or is it Silverlight? I’m not even sure), browser-based mixer (as shown below).

Tone Mine have partnered with Blackberry to host a “Battle of the Ringtone DJs” contest on the site, which can be accessed at http://www.tonemine.com/djtutor. Anyone can access the contest, download the pre-selected sample packs directly into the DJ-Tutor mixer and create unique ring tones. Once your ringtone is posted, you can tell your friend to come listen and even download. Winners of the contest will receive Blackberry smartphones.

Beatportal.com, the daily blog journal run by the folks at Beatport.com, where kind enough to run my latest Netmix Global House Podcast in the Community feed section. You can check out the posting here.

Many companies are now looking to users to generate content for their blogs. Hiring bloggers is an expensive proposition against revenues. If you’re traffic doesn’t cover the cost of the hosting and content production, then it’s smart to look to the user community to develop content for a web site. We may be doing that ourselves very soon!

On another note, we’re moving away from Podpress for Wordpress as a Podcasting plug-in. It seems the developer is no longer supporting the application since 2007. As far as we can tell, Podpress has become extremely problematic, conflicting with more recent plug-ins, to the point that it breaks the plug-in repository in your Wordpress admin. We found the new Podcasting plug-in. When used in conjunction with a Feedburner_Feedsmith plug-in, we think it works quite nicely.

Podcasting supports iTunes, but it does not have links to the other podcasting web site featured through Podpress. It also does not host a download link with its player, nor does its player show the number of downloads. A bit disappointing, yes, but do I really need to tell people how many podcasts have been downloaded? Or, is that just a bit of ego on my part? I’ll go with the ego and forgo displaying the number for now. As long as I know what it is and that number is in overall subscriptions, I’m going to say that’s more important to Netmix growth over the long term.

That being said, my workaround was to simple. I added a text link under the Podcasting player provided by Feedburner to allow anyone to subscribe to my podcast feed. That way, it will ping users who have subscribed to the podcast with updates, in the same way that Podpress functions.

In a nutshell, I think we’ll be better off for the time being. Feedburner is quite a powerful way to organize and distribute feeds. For Netmix, that’s another great analytics tool, which compliments our Google Analtyics and GetClicky accounts.

If you’ve stumbled across this post, Netmix Media is the parent of Netmix.com. The company consults to media & entertainment organizations on web strategy, including blog and site development, rich media application development, Internet marketing and promotion and a host of other services. Contact Netmix Media if you need help with your web site or blog.

Okay, so the last few days have been slow on the Netmix front. Reason: I’ve been finishing up some homework for the end of the semester at NYU, where I’m taking classes towards a degree in Digital Communications and Media. Trying to consult to clients, get my DJ career back on track, go to school and be a great boyfriend to my girlfriend, Missy, certainly doesn’t leave a lot of room for much more. However, since I’m enjoying the independent freelance life and am between projects, it’s given me some downtime to think through some new ideas I’m putting in the pipeline.

First, I launched a splash page for my Product Development consulting company, NetmixMedia.com, which will also develop internal projects that I’ll cover to follow. NetmixMedia will specialize in Information Architecture, Usability and People-centered design of Web 2.0 sites and applications. I’m working with a LAMP, Flash, Flex and Ruby developers to execute exciting media projects for our clients. We just finished up a blog-a-zine project for a major media company and wrapped up a fix for a project for Pepsi Cola. The next project starts up in a few weeks and we’re fielding calls from a number of other organizations. Feel free to contact me with your RFP at info@netmixmedia.com.

Going out to Web 2.0 in San Francisco was incredibly inspiring. I also just joined a new Facebook group, Ultra Light Startups, which held its first meeting this week at the offices of Rose Ventures, a angel investment firm that operates Angelsoft, a web site that helps angel groups organize and search for new projects to invest in.

I’ve been working lately with a great group of guys who manage an offshore team and we’ve been discussing the opportunity to work together to build some cool applications for the DJ market. I’ve got a couple of things in mind that I’d love to launch in an “ultra light” kind of way and I’m looking for DJs, developers and other web savvy DJ culture oriented individuals who want to join in the fun and work together to bring this project out in a “Twitter-esque” manner. I’m already talking to some friends in San Francisco and a few here in New York. It’s exciting to have that bug again and I’m gearing up to bring the idea to market.

The domain I’ll be launching that will service the DJ market is DJGig.com. It’s not live yet. It’s in the planning stages now and there are a few hurdles to jump over before I get it up and running.

The second domain is EroticDisco.com. That’ll be a web site featuring the world’s hottest (as in looks and sex appeal) DJs. I may keep it all female or I may decide to open it up to men as well, to serve the both the ladies and the gay market. It’ll be tough because men who love to look at women won’t necessarily want to see male DJs on the home page, so it may have to have a dual entry page so we can keep things separate and cater to both audiences.

So, all you hot (looking) female and male Djs out there who want to submit photos or video, the rules will be no nudity (want to keep this clean as I can possibly keep it while pushing the envelope, of course) and the shots must be highly stylized and be in a nightlife environment. It’s about DJs and nightlife, so it has to be in that setting only. No bedrooms, no street shots. Nightclubs and lounges are the only acceptable environments.

As the blog grows, I will be producing a calendar and possibly a digital movie release for download. All entrants will have to sign agreements and once we select the top photos or videos for the calendar and digital movie release, we’ll negotiate licensing fees.

I’m just waiting on the designs from a young, talented designer from New York, Ann Li. Once those are approved, I’ll be integrating the theme into Wordpress and off we go. Stay tuned for more on this and other news.

Peace,

Tony Z.

Are you shopping for that suit for your trip to Ibiza? Need something sexy for Goa, Rio De Janeiro or the French Riviera? Want to catch the eye of that superstar DJ mixing it up, while you dance on a bass bin? I think Insight definitely has the suit for you.

Like any respectable DJ blog on the Internet, we’ve got to cover (or uncover) just about anything that has to do with DJ culture. Surely we’d be neglecting our readers if we didn’t at least show important advances in fashion (yeah, right!). As we’re an equal opportunity blog, we’ll hit you with some men’s suits over the next few weeks. For now, we’re pushing the female Lycra.

This morning, I was thinking that we here at Netmix would dread it if we were deemed as being (a) irresponsible to our readers, and (b) catering to Neanderthal males who care more about tweaking tracks in Abelton, sequencing in Logic and arguing over why p2p should be legal, than sipping Coronas from a beach chair at the pool at The National while checking out the glistening skin of girls with names like Bianca and Alexandra getting in their morning swim.

Of course, my girlfriend, Missy, is going to ask me, “is this all really necessary? My answer to that would be, well…YES! I just hope she doesn’t show her new boss this blog today. Doh!

Okay, enough of the preparation. These bikinis from Insight are a great example of street wear with bright color palettes gone sexy. They are available at Karmaloop.com.

Before you run out an buy two iPods to DJ with, you might want to wait a few months until Pacemaker, a revolution in the way DJs mix their music, hits American shores. Created by Tonium AB of Stockholm, Sweden, Pacemaker is the first all-in-one device to store, mix and record your DJ sets. From the the looks of it, it’s about to about to change the world of DJ culture forever.

After doing a bit of research, I found out you can switch between tracks 1 and 2 by the touch of a button. The unite comes standard with 120GB of storage, which is needed for DJs who prefer 320kbps downloads. Load track 1 and listen to track 2 in the headphones. The unit beat syncs the tracks for you while you control the volume level, EQ, and the touch sensitive cross-fader. The unit records your mix as meta-data for archiving on your laptop. Using the free, accompanying software to play back your mix or even add to it or subtract from it as you would with a software like Ableton Live. Tonium plans to open a web site for DJs to upload their finished mixes.

Plan are to launch in Europe first and then allow orders from the U.S. in February. The unit and software are both Mac and PC compatible. It’s said to retail for approximately $780 U.S., but that figure could change. I’d say it’s going to be the talk of the upcoming Winter Music Conference.

The product has been reviewed on a number of web sites, including:

• DJBroadcast.com
• Endgadet
• Digital Lifestyles

In December, we sat down for an interview with David Porter, CEO of a new online radio service, 8tracks.com. The company provides music fans, amateur DJs or seasoned professional DJs and music programmers alike, tools to create their own, unique Internet radio stations. Users who register with the service can upload any track they wish, sort and create play lists, and then publish those play lists to a streaming radio player. The Flash-based player can then be ported to a blog, web site, or social network like MySpace. One of the best features is the ability to attach other users play lists to your own, creating a viral opportunity for great programmers to have their mixes heard across the network. Initially, listeners will be able to purchase tracks through Amazon’s download service (when available), but the company hopes to integrate with independent and niche download stores as well.

At this point, the service is in its Alpha testing phase. A beta launch is planned for late Q1 or early Q2 of this year. Netmix has partnered with 8tracks.com and will be switching streaming radio services at the end of the month. For the time being, you’ll be able to listen to both until January 31, when the switch will be complete. Netmix will also be advising 8tracks on adding first-to-market innovations for professional and amateur mix shows DJs to incorporate into their stations.

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