Music and the Welsh go hand in hand, there’s no doubt about it, with distinguished and diverse artists and bands ranging from Tom Jones to Katherine Jenkins, from The Stereophonics to the Fron Male Voice Choir emerging from the valleys. Now 28-year-old Blackwood born Chris Maguire is thrusting Wales into the digital-music-download age with Altsounds.com: a Cardiff-based online music shareware website. Altsounds was founded two years ago and now boasts over half a million hits a day from 10,000 users internationally. It is fast becoming one of Wales’ most popular websites, and is the only site of its kind in the area with more than 200 acts online and uploading music. “Altsounds is an international alternative online music community,” states Maguire. “By ‘Alternative’ we mean…Alternative to the mainstream. It’s about having choice, both in music and where you go to hear it.”
Maguire originally piloted the site in the US, where he was working as in IT specialist during 2005 and brought it back to his homeland to fill a market gap. “Altsounds was inspired by my little brother’s need to have tools to promote his band The Story So Far and Altsounds.com has been an integral part of their success to date.” There are, of course other music hosting websites out there, but Altsounds.com stands out from the likes of MySpace as it’s completely music (but not genre) specific and provides a service to the listener, the label and the artist. “Altsounds is committed to providing the best possible service to artists, labels and especially fans by making the site wholly interactive and constantly fresh. We encourage fans to express themselves through the site by adding the content that THEY care about. We bring the fans exactly what they want, and gather it into the most functional and visually appealing music site on the internet.” Listeners are encouraged to create a user profile that allows them access to news, reviews, interviews, games, and music videos alongside new music. However you can still listen to full album streams and a selection of alternative radio stations from the homepage as a ‘guest user’ with no login necessary.
Membership to Altsounds.com is free to all and artists can sign up for a basic account that lets them upload four songs and create a homepage. They will also be included in the Altsounds.com site search engine, and can be rated by listeners for inclusion in the Altsounds.com charts. “The serious bands” have an opportunity to upgrade to the fee-based Altsounds Premium Profile, providing uncapped bandwidth and the ability to upload much more material. Other premium tools include music video hosting, image gallery hosting, gigs calendars and the opportunity to sell material in the online store. One of the most impressive features offered, reflecting Maguire’s entrepreneurial flair, is the band’s ability to view detailed statistics of which songs are being played most each day and the enhanced promotional services such as inclusion on one of Altsounds radio stations and the chance to be a ‘spotlight artist’ featuring on the front page. The artist and band profiles included in both accounts “are laid out more like EPKs [Electronic Press Kits] acting as the ‘ultimate fan page’.”
Music sharing websites promoting new bands outside of the mainstream are often branded as “industry-free” yet Altsounds makes no secret of also servicing the labels. “For labels, we have designed an inexpensive promotion and advertising system that allows them to reach a large focused audience with incredible ease,” Maguire explains. Finding, signing, building and marketing new talent is an expensive business the labels too often tell us, but sites like Altsounds allows the industry to find new talent without many of the associated costs, with many artists having an already established fan base. It’s certainly a time of sea change for the music industry, with the power being returned to the artists who are in turn becoming more technically and business savvy. One of the biggest success stories to emerge from this trend has to be the Arctic Monkeys, achieving their success through a mix of fan-made demo tapes distributed freely at gigs and their MySpace site created by fans. ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’ became the fastest selling debut album in UK chart history despite many of the songs being available on file-sharing sites.
There are many in the music industry against file sharing, and when everything is offered for free it’s hard to see where and how money is being made. Chris Maguire cross-subsidises by offering additional services to the artist, opening a recording studio in Cardiff Bay last year. “We have been working with about 25 new and unsigned artists…providing them with song writing and production advice and recordings of a standard that record labels expect. In 2007 we will be expanding again and opening up a CD replication arm and Green Screen Video / Photography studio and will be doing more promotional photos and videos for unsigned bands. We will also be offering signed bands the opportunity of performing live for an Altsounds session where the audio and video will be recorded. These sessions will be aired on Altsounds.com and on local Welsh TV. The CD duplication will be aimed at the unsigned artist market too by offering high quality yet inexpensive CD duplication services.”
With such big plans for the future, and with sites like MySpace and You Tube being sold to parent companies for millions it seems like file-sharing is here for the foreseeable – and as Laurence Bell, founder of Domino Records who signed Arctic Monkeys said “The success of the band [Arctic Monkeys] has already proved that the internet is nothing to be scared of.”
