Qbox Story

Courtesy of MySpace Page

Listen to PARIS!

Courtesy of MySpace

Continuing with the dance beat of Britney, LADY GAGA is a fun, young girl from New York who gets you in the mood to get pretty and go out with her album “The Fame.”  Her beats and features with Colby O’Donis and Akon make Just Dance the perfect song to get you in the mood for a Thursday night out on the town…and Friday and Saturday.

Courtesy of MySpace

Britney’s highly anticipated CD is out today on her birthday.  A documentary on MTV just aired on Sunday.  There’s lots of hype going around….what do you think of her comeback?

Courtesy of MySpace

With the release of his third studio album, Gossip in the Grain on October 14, 2008, Ray LaMontagne has received notable press and reviews in the past months.  He trademark rich, raspy voice and Americana folk style reminds me of Otis Redding and Bob Dylan, but he is able to distinguish himself  from the pool of emerging artists.  LaMontagne has an upcoming 2009 European tour with Dublin, London and Amsterdamn dates already sold out.

His songs have been previously heard on television shows such as Bones, One Tree Hill and ER.  His song “Meg White” has received good reviews but I am a fan of the track “You Are The Best Thing.”

Photo courtesy of MySpace Page

Love, LOVE this song “Falling For You” by Seabird.  Lyrics, melody, all of it.

They may sound familiar because not only has this song appeared on a Grey’s Anatomy episode, but their song “Rescue” is the theme song for the tv show “Pushing Daisies.”

Photo courtesy of MySpace Page

I am a big big fan of artists who incorporate instrumental sounds with vocals.  Devotchka combines Eastern European influences with various instruments and the sounds are perfectly defined in the song “How It Ends.”  This song was featured in the “Everything Is Illuminated” trailer, a movie starring Elijah Wood and most recently a “Gears of War 2″ tv spot.  In addition, Devotchka’s music can be found on the soundtrack for “Little Miss Sunshine,” which was nominated for a 2006 Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack.

They’ll be making stops in Seattle and Portland at the end of December and will come to the Northeast at the end of January.

Also check out The Clockwise Witness and Transliterator.

The simple genius of the Google search algorithm based on the PageRank algorithm is that it “derives from human-generated links.”  The idea that the importance of a web page should be determined primarily by the human-perceived importance of the pages that link to the web page is simple and powerful.  The audacity of scale that Google set out to build early on is another key differentiator.

Likewise, Qbox believes that:

• One should be able to search for all the world’s music at Qbox
• One should be able to search for and listen to all the world’s music at Qbox
• One should be able to find even the music that one does not know exists - i.e., discover new music that is likely to be liked by the searcher

These thoughts keep us on our quest for the ultimate online music experience.  Furthermore, in order for fans to enjoy all the world’s music for free, artists must be compensated fairly for their work.  And this keeps our passion alive for music and the creators of the works.

With the rise of MySpace Music a few years ago, low- (or no-) budget indie bands have found an effective online channel to publish their work and reach their fans at virtually no cost. We have been accustomed to think that MySpace represented a disruption to the traditional value chain where bulk of the value was captured by mighty labels.

More recently, however, it seems that artists with presence on MySpace are starting to realize that they “forgot to read the fine print” when they opened shop on MySpace. What they agreed to unwittingly is that their profile page actually belongs to MySpace.Some artists are indeed starting to establish their own presence on the web, maintaining full control over their site, away from or in parallel to the large hosting platforms. Startups, in turn, are starting to provide easy-to-use tools for artists to quickly and easily market themselves online. One of the presenters at the

SanFran Music Tech Summit held last month, Bandcamp, is one such startup promoting the rise of band blogs. Bandcamp founder Ethan Diamond calls companies like iMeem and MySpace “online sharecroppers” because they do not give artists full control over their works.

As the number of artists establishing their own sites increases over time, demand for services that aggregate, filter and search through the band blogs will rise. Qbox, we believe, is naturally well-positioned to benefit from such trend, as we are a pioneer in aggregating the musician profile pages across the social Web. The more fragmented the market becomes, the more effective our approach will be.