Jukebox Jive

Okay, so you've accepted that you've got to give stuff away to get attention but where do you put it? Something that springs to mind, especially if you are a gigging ensemble is to get yourselves on the various sites of the venues that your outfit has performed at. Take for example the London venue of the Bull & Gate . Now in the dark distant past one of my old outfits played there, and as is the norm, we asked the sound guy to record the live performance. This was before the net had really impacted on every day live & recording to a CD was the height of technology

Now, what if you played that venue today and agreed to make such recordings available to the venue to put on their web presence in a sort of jukebox of bands that have played there?

You would get increased exposure, and the venue would have a growing showcase to pull in the punters.

The band plays “live” at the venue which supplies a soundman to record the performance and let the band have a copy.

The venue itself may not have the hosting capabilities to store all the mp3's that would invariably end up on the proposed jukebox, so why not put your recordings in the Internet Archive with a Creative Commons license attached. In return for giving the venue the right to broadcast the tracks free of charge, the band could then have them featured on the venues on-line jukebox.

The venue gets to show its credentials in terms of the past acts it has hosted, and the acts get further exposure.

Extrapolating from this the venue could use this as a means of gauging which bands to re-book by capturing the hits each act gets via the jukebox. If they are so inclined it should also be feasible to produce charts – let’s face it we all like our names in lights.

Likewise with a little clever meta-tagging the bands could exploit the “showcase” to point punters in the direction of their material and/or website- naturally it would only be right to include reciprocal links back to the venues site.