Interesting concept. I'd opt for a slighty less colorful background, this one is a bit too trippy for my taste.
There is one thing that I would like to know before I'd sign up. Do you have any special access to A&R people? Can you guarantee that, if my music gets to the top of the list, it will be heard by record lable people?
Thanks for the reply Dirk! Point noted on the background. It's been a bone of contention with us. I like it, my co-Founder less so but we will test it on the masses and get their feedback.
Regarding your other questions:
We have special access with A&R from Sony, Atlantic, Columbia, Warner Bros and more. We guarantee that if your music gets into the top 5 it will be heard by the most appropriate A&R person for that genre and feedback from them will be provided.
You learn by doing, reading tutorials on the internet, by asking questions on StackOverflow and by making mistakes. Start out small with some basic web hosting, or play around with a VPS. Get comfortable with using Linux. Or tinker around with Amazon Web Services (free for the first year!)But really, don't worry about scaling too much. You don't just start a big web app, even Facebook took a couple of years to get to a size where they had to worry about scaling.
There was a show on the radio about BASIC programming, with programming samples. You'd have to record the show on a cassette tape, because the code was transmitted as audio output. You could do the excersise, and then check your code by playing the tape on your Commodore 64. I still think that was a pretty ingenious thing, sending code over the radio!
Ah, and the BBS'es of the early'90's... So much time wasted there!
Why for heaven's sake is the new macbook pro €2279 when it's only $2199 in the US? It's a beautiful machine, and I'm used to some price differences between the US and Europe (USD = EUR, right, Apple?) but this is outrageous! That's almost 500 dolars more...
Presumably because the € price includes VAT (which is usually 20%+ in the EU), and the US$ price does not. The real US price would vary by state, and they usually don't show the amount of sales tax on the purchase price. This is a tax thing, not an apple thing.
Do keep in mind that PR is something different than marketing or advertisement. Those people running around, dropping names and 'generating spin'? That's just a very tiny part of PR. PR is about shaping the public opinion, not just one person's mind.
On a side note, I wrote my thesis on wartime propaganda. I found out that the strongest motivator for people to take action is fear. The fear of losing something, missing out, or a common enemy (think Apple-Android!) is very powerful.
On a second side note, I read another comment about lying. Lying isn't right of course, but there are several degrees of lying. And imagine if know how to sell a lie, how easy it would be to sell righteous truth...
Drop me a line if you need some help or advice. I'm by no means an expert on PR in Silicon Valley, but I know a thing or two about PR.
I was looking in the PR book you suggested and also in many others I have found. Let me be straight, I find all of them dry, boring and useless.
I had little idea about PR, and I still have little, but I start to realize it is a different animal from what a startup would need. It feels like something mysterious and don't believe in mystery.
You did actually help me to the conclusion, that I will just skip learning PR now and focus on marketing, like rmATinnovafy said. I did need your input, thank you.
Anything from Duke Ellington to CCR and from U2 to Top 40. When I'm "in the zone" progressive or trance work really well (Armin van Buuren, Deadmau5, or more dance oriented such as Mike Snow).
I have one more itch to scratch: please let me pay with me debit/credit card! The other day a shipment from GLS arrived. This actually was the second shipment, because they claim I wasn't home when they tried the first time. Even thou i WAS home, sitting in the kitchen all afternoon to intercept the GLS guy so that he wouldn't wake up our little one...
When GlS came the second time I was at home. I just don't have a couple hundred bucks worth of cash in my pocket. I mean, come on! Cash only? Really GLS?
I tried a couple of them and sticked with CodeIgniter. Sure it has some quirks, but it's powerful, easy to grasp, not bloated (hello, Zend!) and more than capable to satisfy your web dev needs. Plus it has a great community and lots of tutorials.
But really, my advice is to spend a day or two trying several of them out. Create a simple project with each of them (the ubiquitous blog for exampe) and see what works for you. Good luck!
I know what you mean. A little while ago there was a thread about how many milions you'd had to have in order to be "rich". I tried to explain that richness does not equal money, but they didn't get me. It's the little things in life that make you happy, and I feel very fortunate for knowing this at my age (30's) instead of when I'm old.
Thank you for your post, because it's one of those little things that make my day!
I've always used CI. I know a lot of people tend to look down on it, but it's easy to use and suited my needs. Can't you install both Yii and CI and decide which one you like best?
The biggest problem I have with CI as a specific application framework is the insistance of being extremely backwards compatible (PHP 4 support was dropped less than a year ago, and they only very recently stopped supporting 5.1). I understand why this makes sense for Ellis Labs (the developers of it) since Expression Engine is designed to be deployed by clients. If you're picking a framework to use, pick one that allows you to take advantage of all the improvements made to the language (PHP 5.3/5.4 bring a huge number of improvements over even 5.2). I also have a number of fundamental disagreements with how CI is built - no proper autoloading system, a weak routing system (no URL helper/parameter mapping), no request/response objects, odd controller instation and library/model loading (generally fairly disconnected from standard OO design)
If you want a full featured framework, Symfony2 is a good everything including the kitchen sink although it's a bit more Java-esque (which make sense since much of PHP's OO design is based on Java). http://symfony.com/
For something lighter weight, Silex is based on the Symfony2 components, so it's super easy to pull in more components as you need them. http://silex.sensiolabs.org/
Even if you're not using Symfony2 it's really modular and easy to integrate with other frameworks - we're running CI as our base framework due to legacy reasons, but all of our new work leans heavily on Symfony2 components.
There is one thing that I would like to know before I'd sign up. Do you have any special access to A&R people? Can you guarantee that, if my music gets to the top of the list, it will be heard by record lable people?