Jujitsu was excellent last night. Did more excapes from garotting, though now I have rope burns on my wrist and a couple of scratches on my back. Hmmm. Sounds dodgy but was all in the name of getting my blue belt. Bit battered and stiff today though. Decided to join a gym as I'm eating too many pies.

Although we have sent the message out that we don't accept physical submissions, they keep coming in. I asked the postroom to forward them onto me so I can send them a message getting them on here. However, I've not had time for a couple of weeks and now they've mounted up. I've got loads to get through. It's going to take me ages. I'm going to have to do a pile a day or something as there's too much to sort out.

Ok. The media player, the first and easiest idea to start on. The spec I'm working to so far is:

1. Sidebar embeddable
2. 30 Track Playlist (20 Playlisted 10 Wildcards - changed weekly - best of get added to playlist)
3. Can Be embedded on other sites
4. Each track has link to artist's Vox homepage
5. Artwork window at top
6. Play/Pause/Skip/Random Play Buttons

That's the spec. I'm going to approach our digital creative dept to start work on it unless there's anything screaming out at you that needs adding?

Artist services - Well the gigs thing could work. After all I've already started working on my own thing. So if that works out maybe it could be taken larger scale? We'll have to see how that works. The distribution thing is a whole other matter which will need a lot of talking about.

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Gigs 31/10/2007

Busy one tonight for Hallowe'en, you doing it in fancy dress?

Worldview is doing an acoustic set @ The Purple Turtle (Oxford) from 6pm

Our friend Susie Wilkins is returning to the Troubadour tonight, though the actual stage time has been sketchy. I'd say get there for 7 and you'll be fine.

Angular Electro Pop outfit Molloy are celebrating Hallowe'en at 93 Feet East which should be a good laugh. 8pm.  Be sure stop by Beyond Retro. It's one of my favourite bits of London around there.

Right, I'm going for a quick sit in the carpark whilst it's sunny then onto the mountain of demos, emails, letters etc.

Hope all is well with you.

IB

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Hello,

Was at the Metro on Oxford street last night to see Absent Elk. They weren't on till 9 so I hung about Puntey for a while, had a walk about, had Katsu curry at Wok Wok. Katsu curry is the best thing in the whole world, bar chocolate waffles. I must admit, I've had better but it did the job.

I met up with one of the other A&R chaps at the venue and had a look. The place was fairly packed which is great to see on a Wednesday. I stood over by the right PA stack with my beer and had a horrible realisation. I've been doing this pretty much every night for a while and every night I'm stood near a PA drinking beer. Which means eventually I'll probably end up as a deaf alchoholic. So I'll make sure I drink pop and might get some of those noise reduction plug things, they don't block out the sound, just reduce the intensity. I had nasty tinitus this morning, sounded like my head was on standby or something.

Anyway, for those of you that don't know the Metro, it's a venue in a basement. You enter through a staircase, mirrored on one side which can be disconcerting after a couple of bevvies into a small seated area, then through to the bar and venue. I've been to a couple of good club nights there but it was the first 'official' visit I'd made to the venue.

I submitted a review of Absent Elk on the RCA blog a while ago so have a look if you get chance. I have to say they're quite a handsome bunch and had a strong stage presence. No shy shoegazing. I recognised a few of the tracks from their blog and they were really well performed. There all really good musicians and I thought their set was really tightly played, must be a fair bit of rehearsal or gigging going on with them. I don't know whether it was the sound, or the something else but there wasn't one song that really jumped out at me. I've listened  to all their submissions so was able to spot them but I guess I was waiting for a really strong tune to hum on the way home. Although it wasn't there that evening I'm sure it's in the band somewhere, I look forward to hearing more from them as it develops.

There was some crazy woman down the front, inhabiting the usual 5ft no go area in front the stage, dancing the night away. I think she may have had a couple. She danced like she was keeping her balance on a dingy in high wind, it was great. :-)

Ok, next thing. I want to develop the pages a bit and I think a few tools/embed thing is needed to make the music more accessible and perhaps give you more information on what's happening with your music. If you could get any info possible on what's happening in here with your account, traffic, other people etc what would it be? Would you like to see a Vox chart? Or perhaps a better media player that gave more details on the artist playing, more tracks, the number of hits/neighbours for that track and the ability to embed that player on your myspace/facebook etc? Perhaps the label blogs could be more of a centralised hub of the data generated by you. What about being able to distribute your tracks? Would you like to see more video involved in this process?

I don't know what's possible yet but if I get an idea of what would suit the community I can start investigating in the right areas. So have a think, apart from recognition and a record deal, what would you like to see here? Perhaps think along the lines of functions which would help promote the better tracks within the community more easily. Currently we're just short of 3k accounts, I can happily say I've pretty much listened to every single artist that has submitted tracks to the A&R group. When we get to 10k+ it's going to be important to be able to have great music naturally grow and highlight itself. I already have a couple of concepts for tools which should help with a more organic process but I want to be sure these would be inkeeping with what you want to see. In the early days I suggested a chart system and got several messages saying that was the last thing they wanted to see. So I leave it with you, what do you reckon?

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