Digimpro - Unlock Music 2.0

IE Music / robbiewilliams.com and Digimpro Announce Strategic Partnership

2006-11-24T12:43:00.000Z

IE Music and Digimpro announce today that they have agreed a strategic partnership. The partnership focuses on incorporating Digimpro's interactive music technology into the activities of all IE Music's artists including robbiewilliams.com.

Digimpro's technology was successfully tested in a promotional campaign for Robbie Williams sponsored by VISA in Germany; proving exceptionally popular with the fans and satisfying the marketing objectives of robbiewilliams.com. Following on from this success IE Music and Digimpro will also apply the interactive music technology to bring new levels of engagement and a significant increase in value to Robbie Williams' activities with consumer brands.

Tim Clark, MD of IE Music said:

“We are always looking for new approaches and ways to make it fun for fans to discover the music of our artists in the digital and mobile worlds. Digimpro's technology is particularly interesting to us because, not only does it engage the fans in new ways, helping us to promote our artists, but it also opens up new revenue streams for Robbie Williams and our other artists, by selling personalised mixes, as downloads or ringtones.“

Rupert Evans, MD of Digimpro said:

“We are delighted to have the opportunity to work with one of the most innovative and respected management teams in the business. It is also very exciting to have IE Music's artists and their music on yourspins.com, our web 2.0 community. We will shortly be announcing some new strategic partners in Asia and we look forward to bring these to our relationship with IE Music. This will enable us to reach even more fans in Asia for all of IE Music's artists as well as directing them to Robbiewilliams.com“.

Contact Details:

Contact :Rupert Evans,Digimpro+44 20 7524 7820rupert.evans@digimpro.com, ,

Digimpro mixing with Robbie Williams

2006-07-07T12:48:00.000+01:00

This morning at 08:30 local time we sent out a global press release over the wires to announce the launch of a new advertising campaign in Germany by Saatchi & Saatchi. Why did we do this? Well, because the main feature of the campaign is an online remix competition of Robbie Williams' new track 'Sin Sin Sin' - featuring Digimpro's unique technology.

The campaign, put together by Saatchi & Saatchi for Visa Europe, is the first to feature Digimpro's technology as its primary focus. The fact that 3 of biggest names in music, advertising and commerce are all turning to Digimpro to help reach out to fans shows the great potential of the technology we have.

Read the press release in full on the YourSpins blog.

YourSpins - open for business

2006-06-27T11:12:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we put out a press release 'over the wires' - which always conjures up an image of someone sending a morse code message from an underground bunker for some reason! The general message in the press release was that YourSpins is open for business and that anyone can now register, listen to what is already on the site and start making their own mixes. However, we also announced the launch of diMaker.

diMaker is the software tool which allows artists and producers to create di files - these files being the 'creative masters' which allow people to interpret their compositions in their own way. The idea is that independent artists can now enjoy the benefits of having their tracks on YourSpins. We even provide free support for artists if it is the first time they have used this.

We hope that this will inspire many artists to make more di tracks and connect with a worldwide network of music fans.

diMaker available here.

Through the 1,000 mark

2006-06-08T14:27:00.000+01:00

Today we pushed on through past the 1,000 membership mark. This is a significant milestone for the community. A key part of this phase of development was to check that we could do all the bits we wanted to without crashed and disruption. It’s gone better than we expected, and although there are still a whole lot more features we want to develop and offer, we now know we can do that in a scalable way and without disrupting service. We’ve got to this point because of a lot of hard work by the team, but there is one thing that has really been encouraging for everyone and helped a lot, and that is the enthusiasm of people who have seen YourSpins and wanted to get involved. This includes artists, members, bloggers: so, a big thank you to you all – you know who you are. Let’s keep welcoming new people and keep making the site a great place to spend some time. We don’t want to look too far ahead, but there are some great acts coming…. the more music we get, the more members will come and the snowball will continue to gather momentum. So, for everyone whose enthusiasm has helped get this going, we will be aiming to please you by making a great site with a broad mix of great music…. Thanks

YourSpins nearly there

2006-05-19T13:19:00.000+01:00

We are getting ready to open up YourSpins to the public and at the same time start working on the Robbie Williams di track which will be available in early July. It will be a fully interactive version of his 'Sin Sin Sin' single, which will hold special interest for German fans. More news on this nearer the time.

One of the things we have done recently is to improve the blog players from YS. The blog players (or mini-players) are ways to allow the users to embed their mix, or anyone else's, straight into their own blog or website - including myspace. Here is an example, with the ringtone functionality added and also the mixer's name.

Quick update...

2006-05-02T16:50:00.000+01:00

You may be wondering why the postings on here seem to have dried up of late. Well, the answer can be found on our blog at http://yourspins.blogspot.com

Yes, we have 2 blogs now. This one will remain the focus of all general Digimpro news, and the other will have specific updates and news related to the online community YourSpins.

Although there is much happening over there (we are nearly through with the redesign and will invite beta people in a matter of days) there are also great things happening over here. Not least of which is an exciting project with Saatchi & Saatchi and Robbie Williams. More news to come here very shortly, but this is a big one!

In other news, the BBC have launched something called a Musicube. Here is mine. it seems to me that this novel way of navigating around their audio archives could be applied to other sites too.

MySpacecide

2006-04-25T12:23:00.000+01:00

Another glum story about MySpace. It seems that not all the members on there are as active as others. In an article about people killing-off their MySpace personas and pages, there is a story about a weblog which lists MySpace members as they die. Makes for morbidly compelling reading.

Tom, again!

2006-04-21T16:45:00.000+01:00

After last week's T-shirts having a go at myspace Tom - a more forlorn T-shirt, also related to Tom's auto-friendship on myspace.

YS Server Outage tonight

2006-04-21T12:00:00.000+01:00

We will have a scheduled outage of the YourSpins server tonight from 20:00 GMT. This will hopefully be only for a couple of hours while we change servers.

The reason we are moving servers is so that YS users will have greater bandwidth, speed and reliability. The daily traffic to our poor, little steam-powered server is way too much now that Microsoft and others are sending large numbers of visitors our way.

We are upgrading to a super server with flashing lights and fans and everything. This should see us through the next surge in usage when we open for beta too.

Have a good weekend!

AOL's Myspace killer?

2006-04-20T14:47:00.000+01:00

When you spend enough time reading about social networks and online communities, you will eventually come across someone proclaiming a 'Myspace killer'. However, if anyone were to do this, then why not AOL?

AOL may be preparing to launch a Myspace-type social network called “Head On” sometime in the next few weeks, says Dave Winer.

This went from rumor to “confirmed likely” in posts and comments by Jason Calacanis and Jordan Running (also here) (both now at AOL). A comment in the last link suggests that the new service will be open to non AOL members.

Keep an eye on this, and MSN's promise to open up their Messenger service to allow some kind of social networking too.

Great paper on music communities.

2006-04-18T18:00:00.000+01:00

Not sure how long this link will be active for, but there is a good paper on Online Music Collaboration Communities which I happened across whilst kind of browsing through Google. Seems to be up-to-date too, worth a read:

This paper will explore online music collaboration communities, and the social interactions that happen within them. Collaboration is the act of working jointly with others on a common project, and is inherently a social act. For collaboration to occur there must be some type of communication channel set up to handle the shared information.

Easter holidays

2006-04-13T17:13:00.000+01:00

We've been allowed to bring our games into class today as it is the last day of term. Tomorrow we will be out of office and will return on Tuesday, after the Easter celebrations. But don't worry, we haven't really gone away, and when we come back we should have some good news for you people signed-up to beta testing.

Until Tuesday!

Plugging-in to Microsoft.

2006-04-12T17:46:00.000+01:00

A few hours ago the Digimpro Windows Media Player plug-in went live on Microsoft's wmplugins site. We are also a featured plugin on their homepage as I write this.

This is tremondously exciting for us as a whole raft of people are going to be able to discover us from here. Once they have downloaded the plug-in, they can also download free tracks in the di format and create their own personalized versions of these tunes.

Downloads seem to be coming through at the rate of 1 a minute. Sounds good, but at this rate the entire population of the planet won't have a copy until 2200! Not 10'o'clock, but nearly 200 years. Clearly if we are bent on world domination, we need to be quicker ;-)

Seriously though, it is a nice filip to have before we open YourSpins to the world.

Sasha/Spooky Winners!!

2006-04-11T12:27:00.000+01:00

Yes, at last! After many missed deadlines we have listened and re-listened to all of the entries for the Sasha/Spooky remix competition for 'Strange Addiction'. Apart from being surprised at the diversity of styles and even composition in all the entries - the overall feeling was how uniformally high the standard of entries was. It was truly difficult to pick a winner - but we have!

A shortlist was sent to Sasha for him to pick the winners, and the winners are:

First Prize:
Gilberto Cornejo Ramirez for his Gcr Remix

Second Prize:
Santiago Rionda for his Sasha vs. Lifeform Electro Rmx.

Third Prize:
Zack Dell for his MuZack Mix

All the winning entries are available as mp3s here.

Gilberto wins an iPod loaded with a Sasha back catalogue.

Future competitions will be held on YourSpins. Make sure you are signed up for when we go live!

Tom is NOT my friend

2006-04-11T11:10:00.000+01:00

Funny piece in this Wired News article about companies piggy-backing on MySpace's success. I particularly liked the end about the $18 T-shirts stating 'Tom is NOT my friend'. Order one here!

5-star award for Motel***

2006-04-06T10:27:00.000+01:00

Congratualtions to long-time friends of Digimpro, Motel***. They have just won the Quartz Electronic Music Award for best Electronic Track with 'Sofa'.

You can listen to Sofa here, and also check out the official website and blog.

If you want to make some of your own remixes of Motel***'s work, go to YourSpins and download the free di track and Window Media Player plug-in.

Félicitations!

Digital music tops the charts

2006-04-03T17:14:00.000+01:00

In the UK, the current number 1 is Crazy by US duo Gnarls Barkley. This hit the top spot in the charts on the strength of digital sales alone.

Maybe not so surprising, but this figure in the BBC news story brings home where the future of singles sales are. From a peak in 1997 of around 75m sales of physical singles, in 2005 that figure came down to just over 20m. However, digital downloads are showing very strong growth in the short period they have been counted by the charts' compilers, now overtaking physical sales for singles in the UK, at least.

Whither the CD single? It can't be long before those shiny discs are looked upon with the same fondness we show for 7" vinyl and cassingles.

People want their music instantly & they want it mobile. That means digital, baby! The next move seems to be from dedicated mp3 players to mobile phones that can do it all...

Optimizing music for sport

2006-04-03T12:36:00.000+01:00

The world of sport & fitness has long had its links with music. But it seems that this is attracting the interest of scientists now as well. Why not have a personalized music system that optimizs your workout? Indeed, why not make the tracks you like into more pumping versions for the gym and more chilled-out versions for when you get home.

It's another application of DI's proprietary technology that we can't wait to offer you!

Great mix on YourSpins

2006-03-29T15:49:00.000+01:00

'Lena' has made a great mix of Amb's Romeo which I have included here as it deserves a wider audience. Enjoy!

Argh! Deadlines...

2006-03-28T17:26:00.000+01:00

Why do we do it to ourselves? We won't make any rash promises again about specific dates for things happening! The Sasha and Spooky remix competition will be more of a remix saga by the time we announce the winners - but they will come. Patience, young grasshopper!

We are busy tying up the ends of various interesting deals which should massively increase our profile in the world. Obviously we can't say anything right now, but when we can, you'll hear about it first on this blog!

Due to spending a few days away from the office to relax in the Devon countryside, I have missed a few days of posting - but I'll make up for that now with some links which have really proved to be worth subscribing to recently:

Marc Canter's blog - never short of an opinion about the world of the web and social media!
Yahoo! Music blog - having fun and building a great user experience.
Digital Music Weblog - picks up great stories often not covered elsewhere.

Quick Update

2006-03-22T10:32:00.000Z

OK - just a quick update to let you all know whats happening on various fronts:

1 - YourSpins: We have conducted some internal testing and have also invited some specially-selected external people to give us their views. Further development is happening as a result - we expect an open beta in the next few weeks.

2 - Sasha/Spooky Remix competition: A shortlist of mixes is being listened to by Sasha and Spooky. Winners announced on Friday!

3 - Digimpro.com - our corporate website is about to undergo the first of a series of changes, related to YourSpins going live. Some community features and di track downloads will move from digimpro.com to YourSpins.com.

Thats it for now. More news when it happens. Back to the grindstone!

Sasha/Spooky Remix Competition Winners!

2006-03-16T14:49:00.000Z

Today's the day we announce the winners for the Sasha/Spooky remix competition. Or rather it was supposed to be. We were so inundated with submissions at the last minute that we are still listening and re-listening to mixes pretty much all day. Because of this we have moved the date for announcing the winners back another week to 24th March.

Sorry for the delay - but if you win, you won't mind!

Sneaky peak

2006-03-15T18:42:00.000Z

So, I've been having enormous fun playing with the site. I'm going to post some of the best remixes up here soon. But in the meantime I thought I'd give you a quick peak at how things look in beta right now. These are actual screenshots - but of course things can change and probably will by the time we open up to the beta-testing public. Just to give you a flavour of where we are heading...

Blog this mix

2006-03-14T13:22:00.000Z

A mix from a member of YourSpins of Roots Manuva's 'Too Cold'. You could be making mixes like these for yourself and your blogs soon too! Click the player to register for YourSpins now!

Today's the day

2006-03-14T11:12:00.000Z

So, keeping my fingers crossed and touching all wooden objects within arms reach, today we will launch YourSpins beta to an internal audience to check what is working and what needs to be fine-tuned. It has been a long journey, and we are by no means finished, but just getting to this first hurdle feels great.

I'm pretty sure that what we have now will be great in itself, but when we add the next raft of features, then we'll have one of the hottest music sites on the web, in my humble opinion!!

So, if you have signed-up for beta-testing, I expect that we will be inviting you to the closed beta next week at some point. And if you haven't signed up, get your email address into the appropriate box on this page.