Filthy Noises Online Live Music Cafe

Live music has energy. Not that there’s anything wrong with music radio, downloads or CDs, it’s just live is… well, live, edgey, seat-of-your-pants performing. You make a mistake, the audience hear it… and because you recovered by repeating it and resolving the dissonance, they LOVE IT!!!!! It’s what they know from your CDs or downloads, but it’s wilder, more raw, animalistic and FUN!

The downside of touring, especially for an independent, unsigned artist, is that it’s expensive, time consuming, hard work. Services like Tunecore and CD Baby make selling your recorded music easy. Cafe Press and Lulu make selling merchandise and real album art easy. Software like ProTools, Logic, Garage Band or even the free packages, Audacity and Traverso makes setting up a home studio to record your CDs as easy as it could possibly be.

There is one part of the online music puzzle that’s missing. How do you perform live without loading your car with a ton of gear and driving long into the night, and the next, and the next?

This is where the Filthy Noises Online Live Music Cafe comes in. Planned for formal launch in January 2009, but with informal test performances scheduled over the next few months, it’s a virtual, online music venue. It’s a rock pub, a folk cafe or a jazz lounge on the web.

It fills the last gap in the online music industry. It’s nothing new, the streaming technology is the same stuff used for live internet radio, but your studio is a stage for the whole world to see. We hope it might become the CBGB’s of 21C, but if it’s only a favourite haunt of a few hundred people worldwide, it’ll still be a big success.

How It Works

The idea is a band or solo artist would book to play here and a date would be set. Filthy Noises (and the artists if they want) would promote the date using social networks and a mailing list, encouraging people to plan listening parties and hook up their computer to the stereo at the time of the gig. On the planned time and day, the artist sets up to perform, feeding their main mix to their computer, running an Icecast server, passing the details to the Filthy Noises server operator, then they play. The listeners tune in using the main stage web link on the page for the event, listen using the embedded player, add comments to the shoutbox next to the player and turn the music up loud - it’s an instant party!

If the artist has a PayPal account, they can even be paid directly from the player, with audience members being able to click a donate link if that’s set up. (There will be two links, one for the band, “Pay The Piper”, and one for Filthy Noises, “Tip The Staff”.) The real pay-off, of course, will be an audience fired up to buy your CDs, downloads, t-shirts and posters, right there, while you’re playing, and links to your online stores will be provided. If the artist’s Icecast client feed supports archiving, they’ll have an instant live recording to sell or give away online from their own website, too, and Filthy Noises will also link that in their own archive pages, should the artist choose.

So, no more hectic touring unless you really want to. Just set up in your home studio, feed the desk to your broadband-enabled computer and stream to real people in real time. Welcome to the world of bedroom touring!

For the listeners it means they can have a live band at their party for very little cost. Listeners can also choose direct artist booking from our A&R lists for a little more, having an artist from Australia play at a wedding in Utah by arrangement for example.