Last week a friend of mine turned to me and not so politely asked, “why are those twins still in the show, they can’t sing and they just sent home a dope group”. My response was simple, “it’s not a talent contest, it’s a popularity contest”, very much like the rest of the industry and all the other “talent” shows on Tv. How well you sing has little to do...

We tend to think of viral growth as something new and recent. But really the internet has brought us the future by returning us to the past. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we haven’t had recorded music all that long relatively speaking. Way back in the past when fire and the wheel were our greatest innovations, music and stories were spread from person to person, only through people’s...

Our Demo We recently came across a very talented singer on Youtube, Hannah-Rei. Unable to contain our excitement we decided that we had to work with her. Thing is, she is under a management contract and can’t work on any other recordings other than her own. Did that stop us from trying? No! In fact we fired up a unique demo and sent it to her management team. Now most people tend to send a compilation...

Quantity Few people in the western world have heard of Sripathi Balasubrahmanyam. He is an immensely successful prolific Indian singer who has recorded more than 40,000 songs in the space of 40 years. That is roughly 3 songs per day, every day for 40 years. Remember when we spoke of mastery? Imagine the rate at which he developed while writing and singing everyday. A number of other prolific artists we can...

Master Your Craft A ball park figure thrown around by various authors (Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers” and Csikszentmihalyi in a recent TED talk)  is 10,000 hours of effective practice. This is how much you should be ready to invest in your craft before acquiring the knowledge and expertise to really shine. That is 3 hours a day for 10 years! Are you hungry enough for such a commitment?...

The Game Has Changed The future economy is yours for the taking no matter how small you may be. As we keep on saying here at RMXPLAY, technology has changed the Game. The small players now have an equal footing with the big corporate players. In the music industry this is already prevalent with independent artists such as Ronald Jenkees amassing hundreds of thousands of fans and over 10 million views on YouTube...

Dead or Alive? I think it’s generally accepted that printed media is on it way out, and this trend is nothing new nor is it surprising. The ability for the internet to deliver the same news quicker and cheaper makes it hard to justify the value of printed media, let alone paying for it. Yet in 1999, the Metro newspaper launched, and by ignoring the generally accepted conventions of the industry has grown...

Ok here is something that might be fun. In the late hours of the night I decided to put together a quick beat and song. But since I am a horrible singer I thought why not get you guys to come up with something? Can we open source a song and write it like programers do software? I don’t know how it will work entirely but for now here is the song. Record a verse on youtube, and leave a video response. Leave...

To replicate an mp3, how much does it cost? To do a simple copy and paste, what is the “real” cost? And by real, I mean money directly coming out of your pocket as a result of pasting the file. Not the electricity bill or the cost of the computer you are using. Now compare that to actually replicating a cd, or doing a live show again. Get the drift? The marginal cost of creating additional copies...

The word wiki is actually a Hawaiian word which means “fast” or “quick”. The success and widespread use of Wikipedia has led to the word “wiki” now generally being defined as a concept (usually through a web site) which allows the collaborative editing of content by various users. What then is Wikinomics?  In a nutshell, Wikinomics is open global mass collaboration. Mankind’s...