All about alonetone

alonetone is a place for small label, do-it-yourself and everyday musicians and bands to upload their music and freely share it on the internets.

If you make music (and own the rights to it) then this site is something you should know about!

Yes! You can think of it that way.

There are all sorts of music making folks here - from rock bands to electronic musicians to trained classical artists to your guitar strumming next door neighbor.

We would be honored. Go sign up.

If you didn't make the music, and just want to share it, then no...go elsewhere!

You are right, there are plenty of websites for musicians to upload their music. Why alonetone?

Well, most of the 'free' services you'll run into elsewhere are running ads, funded by investors, or actually owned by media conglomerates. In general, they are hoping making money off of your "content"...erm...music. Most music communities are overly obsessed with genres and popularity, and we're just not turned on by that. Time for something new, don't you think?

alonetone was started to provide a non-commercial alternative. Something useful, something different, something that the musicians can feel like they own.

Beyond that, we want to do it right. Clean, only the essentials. Not too dorked-out. Easy to get around.

alonetone is conceived and built by Sudara

The visual look and feel (layout, navigation, icons) is designed by Samo. He is also been responsible for setting Sudara straight when Sudara starts bubbling incoherently about what might be needed next.

Artist features are currently written by Ben

The forums are moderated by Another Cultural Landslide

The musicians and listeners themselves are responsible for steering the ship. After the initial launch most features were inspired, recommended by, and build to please alonetoners who spoke up and helped by providing their valuable feedback in email conversations with Sudara or via the alonetone forums

As long as alonetone exists.

Nope.

We believe in giving our music away. There are many places where you can try and sell your tunes, if you want to take a crack at it.

Selling mp3s really won't bring the average musician anything useful - you'll waste tons of effort, get your hopes up, and....Well, if you have a marketing machine behind you or already have 1000s of fans,
this is another story. Go for it. Otherwise, focus on making great tunes and connecting to people.

We certainly understand that.

Selling mp3s is a short-term and short-lived last ditch effort on behalf of the changing industry. Radiohead and NIN get away with it (though they are also moving to a more free model)...but you? At this point, your best bet is to play live, or get your music into as many hands as you can. We can help with the latter.

As far as other 'new' methods, I've got a couple ideas along these lines, some of which play off of alonetone. In time, you might see some of them appear!

I love to talk about this topic and figure out solutions. alonetone exists because of this. If you have ideas or want to hear mine, email me at sudara at alonetone dot com

That is the most important bit, but there is more.

You can create and organize playlists of your music or the music of others.
You can track who is listening to your music, andfrom where. You can put your music on any website, and we handle all of the traffic. You upload it once here, then use it wherever you want(facebook, myspace, etc)

Anywho, nothing to lose, so stop reading, take 45 seconds and sign up.

There are some costs, primarily the storage costs, which are currently under $100 a month. If the site grows much larger, they will be significant, but not unmanageable.

I pay these out of pocket for a few reasons: I want to promote independent music and display the wonderful amazing fact that the music distribution model has changed. One average person can singlehandedly float hundreds of musicians, thousands of mp3s and hundreds of thousands of downloads. Incredible - it points to pretty crazy and amazing future world of music.

Oh yeah, and with current industry turbulence, I want to make sure the average kid and professional has access to free online distribution. They deserve it, and it costs next to nothing.

That would be a good problem to have, now wouldn't it!

Seriously, though: In the event that the I can no longer afford to singlehandedly keep alonetone up, the popularity of the site and the sheer volume of users needed to produce the cost would likely ensure that it would be kept afloat by other like-minded do good-ers.

I have no current intention to pollute the site with advertising, even to break even.

With love.

And Ruby. And Rails. And the help of 1000s of Open Source programmers who have made various pieces of this site without even knowing it themselves.

alonetone is about 2800 lines of rails code and about the same amount of javascript and css.

You bet your sweet programming butt it is. It is available via git at the alonetone git repository

We are looking for development help, so go ahead and email me if you are interested.