I'm the founder of Amazing Radio & amazingtunes.com. Frankie alerted me to this thread - I hope you don't mind me jumping in to answer.
Some background first. I'm a musician - well, a drummer (I play professionally part-time, and have done since I was a kid). I've been a BBC radio & TV Producer; I co-founded the TV company that makes 'Grumpy Old Men'; and I've been setting up and running businesses since 1989. I guess I'm an entrepreneur. Although I mainly feel like a drummer. I'm not clever enough to write songs, and I have immense respect for people who can. In my 'career', both playing music and doing media stuff, I've seen a lot of musicians get ripped off. I wanted to try to change that. That's why I started amazing.
In 2004 I started thinking about how digital technology makes it easier than ever before to capture music ... but it's still hard to get people to know about it, or to make money from it. I thought we could try to help musicians find an audience, in a new model. It was and is incredibly important to me that we do this in an ethical way, being straight and fair with our deals and honest about our plans. It was ambitious and idealistic, for sure, but I thought it was worth worth trying.
To make it happen, we needed money. You can't launch a national radio station and build a complicated web service on fresh air. I'd made some money at dotcom time. I invested that and worked for nothing for three years to get it off the ground. It was a bit scary. In fact, it was a lot scary. Then I managed to persuade some rich people to help, taking risks with their own money alongside me. They did this because they could afford it, because they thought it might work, and because they agreed with the aims of it.
I'm immensely proud of what we've achieved so far, bringing new music to new ears and doing innovative things in broadcasting. But the thing that makes me proudest of all is that we're doing it ethically, in a deal which is deliberately and overtly the opposite of all those rip-offs that record companies used to stuff musicians with in the past. Like, we don't have a binding contract. Like, we don't try to take copyright of their music. Like, we give 70% of the download revenue to the artist (with no small print to make that turn out worse than it sounds).
Underlying the idealism of this was the hope that, if you give most of the money back to the artist, it will motivate people to buy music instead of stealing it. And by God that works. Not long ago I had an email from someone saying 'I heard and loved a song on Amazing Radio and went to amazingtunes.com to buy it. I noticed it was a free download. Please can you get in touch with the artist and ask her to change it to 'paid-for download'? I want to give her some money'. That's a bit removed from stealing music, isn't it?
Equally exciting are the Tweets and emails we get literally every day from bands incredibly buzzed because their music is on the radio and people are finding out about their talent; and from listeners who think we're fresh and different and like the variety and the democratic nature of the output. People get this. For every critical or suspicious message board posting like some of those above, we get a thousand from people who like it and want it to work. Literally a thousand.
So in that context, it's always disappointing when someone who doesn't know much about what we're doing, disses it. Check us out first. If we're lying, then we deserve to be shredded.
To Mark's questions -
If airplay is decided by the highest rated bands on amazingtunes.com wouldn't that mean that the bands that are going to get the airplay are the ones with the most facebook friends/twitter followers, I would also think it leaves you wide open to people deliberately rating crap just to see if they can get it on air?
I agree: that would definitely be a problem - if we were very stupid. If we were smart, we would have spotted that risk in advance and built a system that prevented it. Guess which one applies.
In the FAQs it states ' The company is supported by a small number of high net worth investors, ...who believe amazing should become a global brand.' that sends shivers down my spine, investors don't finance projects like this for the love of music, my guess is that they are using public interaction (voting/tagging/rating etc) to raise it's profile and drive enough traffic to the site so it can be sold off as a global brand to someone like Global Radio at which point it'll be flooded with adverts?
So we're only interested in money and would sell at the first opportunity to some geezer in a suit who will then ruin what we've built - right?
Wrong. For 3 reasons.
1. We've already had the first opportunity. In 2008 we had an offer from A Large Global Business. We turned them down. We're in this for the long term. You can't change the world with a fast buck.
2. We're not motivated by money; we're motivated by trying to do something different. If it works (and only if it works), we'll make money. The ambition to change the music industry for the better is what drives us, not the love of money. Money, if it ever comes, will be the consequence of our ambition, not the cause of it. My investors, being smart and successful people, understand this. If they were after a fast buck, they'd invest in a Hedge Fund.
3. Why would A Large Company buy something that had been successful because it had a different approach ... then change the approach? We don't need to take adverts. People like this. (Me too - it makes me laugh having a commercial radio station with no commercials). If we don't need adverts, and people like their absence .... why would anyone add them?
I hope this helps. Do email me direct (
pc@amazingradio.co.uk) with any more comments or criticisms; I'll answer them all personally. Or post some Hard Questions That Reveal Why We're Mad/Lying and I'll do my best to address the concerns. I don't expect to persuade everyone that we're honest and trying to do the right thing - I may be idealistic, but I'm not naive - but I hope you'll at least give us a fair hearing.
More importantly, I hope you'll give the music on amazingtunes.com and Amazing Radio a fair hearing. That's what it's about. Not money; music. Weird, huh?
Paul Campbell
amazing founder
Twitter @drumpaul
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