1. Full name
| Tarek Amr |
2. Global Voices sections to which you contribute
| GV in English |
| Lingua |
| GV Advocacy |
3. Publication date of your latest post or translation
| Date: – 10/1/2012 |
4. Title of project
| GV Music |
5. Project representative (person who will sign award agreement and receive funds)
| The Appointed Editor |
6. Describe the proposed project as clearly as possible in five sentences or less
| Doing to underground music what Global Voices has done to blogs. Discover, curate underground music, and present it to the world. Comment on discovered music and put it in its cultural context if possible. |
7. What aspect or need of Global Voices does your project address?
| The need to discover new music, especially underground bands that are normally ignored by mainstream media. Shed the light on them and make them more searchable by genre, location, etc. |
8. How would the project further Global Voices’ mission?
| I believe this will add to GV message, as music is part of the culture of the countries we cover. It will help building bridges between different cultures. And finally, it will help us reach now audience with different tastes. |
9. What is innovative about your project?
| There are many music blogs all over the internet, but normally they are managed by one member or few ones, and they are not able to cover the whole globe. Also more importantly, those blogs are not easy to search into, and music is not well tagged, or geo-tagged. Adding to this, they normally share illegal music via Megaupload et al, which makes this music not accessible forever. In brief, normal blogging platform aren’t meant to be used for this. Other sites like Lastfm and Hypemachine are automated, they just aggregate what people listen to or share on twitter, which makes underground music get buried under mainstream one, and normally, the music there is not downloadable, in lastfm, you just know about the band, but need to go download the music somewhere, mainly because it is copyrighted. What we are going to work on is underground music not licensed, or licensed under creative commons or similar copyleftis licenses. On one hand authors will discover the music add it to a blog-like platform, tag it with its appropriate genre and location, but also there will be a map so you can find music by location. We also can bind it to Lastfm API to see stats about how many time that track was played, we can also find away to get reactions on twitter and tie it to posts. I am not sure whether we will rely or Soundcloud or Youtube ot something else to embed the music in posts. |
10. Which section of Global Voices would your project most benefit (if applicable)?
| GV in English |
| Lingua |
11. How would the wider GV community utilize and/or participate in your project?
| GV Music will work in a similar way as GV, there will be Editor(s) and and Authors, they all we do the discovery of the music, aggregating and commenting on it. And where else can we find a more diverse them than the one we already have in GV. So generally, they team will be composed of GV members, however outsiders are welcomed to join any time. |
12. List the other GV community members, if any, who will be actively working on the project. Please specify what role each person will play in the development of the project.
| I recommend Debora Baldelli to head the GV Music team as she has strong academic music background as well as passion. However we can call for whoever want to join as Editor and select the most appropriate one(s). I will also handle the technical issues from setting the platform, doing the integration with whatever needed web services, etc. Other than that, we will call for all GV community to join and participate. |
13. What additional resources or expertise, if any, would you need to complete the project?
| No Response |
14. Describe the prospects for sustainability/continuation once the innovation grant funding ends
| Not really sure if Google Ads or any other Ads service will be sufficient. But we may reach for agreements with local radios, so we discover the music for them, and they do co-branded shows with us and pay us some fees in return. We may also make agreements with Soundcloud as we will be getting them more traffic through our portal |
15. Please specify the timeline for the project, from start to finish
| The first phase we last for 4 months, and if things went well and we were able to do more deals with radios and online music services, we can give ourselves the chance to keep experiencing for 4 more months and during this period we will be planning the long term evolution of the project to last for indefinite time |
16. Provide a detailed budget of up to US$5,000 for project costs. (Please try and present as accurate a budget as possible: applicants are encouraged to submit budgets for less than the maximum amount as smaller grants allow us to fund more projects)
| We need an incentive to keep the project going and the team active. I imagine a group of 1 Editor and 8 Authors paying them $400 and $200 respectively, to do about 4 posts per months for the first 4 months, then if things went well, we can extend it to 4 more months. Later on if we can generate more money for the agreements and Ads revenue mentioned above we can increase the team members and may be re-structure the incentive as well. |