FT on OMD

The Electric Night of Dixiestock

Well, the Paltalk Concert for Dixie on Sunday was truly magical, at least a number of us thought so. The list of performers was large and all gave everything to the great crowd that turned out. "Dixiestock" was probably the most special event the OMD community has ever seen, and it was truly an honor to have been there. The day afterwards, the community seems different, like there is a bond that was never there before, at least amongst those who got to partake. You can make a monetary contribution to the Dixie Fund at www.zomala.com.

Mp3.com goes through more radical changes

The artists at mp3.com were recently subjected to another big upheaval as the design format was changed and with the change, a number of other things occurred that were not taken well by the community. First and foremost of these was the decision by mp3.com to remove whole genres off the new dropdown menu, of particular annoyance to the Blues, Folk, and Jazz communities. Also, the new design was heartily criticized by many, for instance, the yellow and black colors which were compared to football jerseys. Personally, I like a little more color but the yellow stripes on our artist pages sort of limit your options if you want to make your page fit a color scheme. Now, for our troubles, PAS members did get their own private bbs with their page but you know, I seriously doubt many will get much use out of those. It is hard enough to get enough traffic to the various EZ boards in the community, so yes, it seems like another half-baked idea by mp3.com and what strikes me about this overhaul, as the last one where they brought out Net CDs, a whole lot of energy was put into something that really didn't help anything and in some ways made things worse.

Artist Launch back online finally

Recently for a period of weeks, the site was down due to a hard drive situation, but they got it back going finally. It is described like this on their front page. Doesn't inspire much confidence, does it ?

"Our recent server snafu set us on our collective tushies and it'll take weeks, if not months, to get back to where we once belonged, Jojo. But it'll happen. Think Phoenix rising from the ashes if it's an analogy you crave."

Anybody using this place as their lone OMD would have to be frustrated by now, but I don't think there are many who do that, anyway. What strikes me about this community when reading their bbs is that a lot of the more vocal artists entrenched there, many from the original mp3.com crowd, are amazingly patient with this lame situation while the same folks were nearly always totally brutal about mp3.com, which at least mainly stayed operational even during some major construction. Anyway, the head dude there now, Paul Laginess is sincere and has good intentions, so they might get it all together at some point anyway. The prognosis is questionable from my vantage point though, cause some of the people he has to work with are very difficult and even if they were all on the same page, the task ahead of them (rising from the ashes) is pretty formidable.

1sound.com

The IX section there can surely be deemed a success by the sheer numbers of pages and the rapid activity of the bloggers, watching the blogtitles move up the side of the screen. Seems like a fairly young crowd and I don't know if artists are yet taking advantage of being at close proximity to these CD buying folks. Perhaps a boyband or a band of teenage girls could really spread like wildfire amongst this crowd. They have been working on structural things there to make the site work faster and there have been a lot of complaints on the tagboard. I sense in our community that enthusiasm has diminished somewhat cause all the big thangs promised have been slow in coming. I have great faith in Rod Underhill but they need to keep things moving along, this is not the way to make a buzz happen, though I guess in answer to that they would probably say they don't really care about the OMD crowd anyway.

Future Unity

We are at 492 members and recently I drafted a possible government structure which has gotten a good reaction. I also sent out the first mailing to members, working on gathering an operational Email list and the response was excellent. A domain website is beginning construction as well. A lot of people are gonna be surprised in the months ahead cause people really underestimate the membership, not to mention the depth of our commitment to what we're trying to do. A number of the artists on our list basically reaffirmed their commitment to unity and it's not long before we will be taking votes on issues and such. To join, go to www.mp3.com/futureunity.

Well, that's pretty much all for this week. I recently had my 50th Top 5 song at mp3.com. Hurray. Cal Ripken didn't have the kind of endurance I have. Then again, people come up to him and ask for autographs. Me, they want to know my hometown so they can burn an effigy in my backyard. ha ha

Well, always be ready to rumble, and FU ! :)

Any comments ? Post them here.

Scott (Father Time)

(FatherTime is an successful online artist and personality)