Bryght has been helping out with Deep Rock Drive so we're thrilled at the launch of this cool music-related Drupal web app. Join today and check it out! More later!

From Come in, we’re open!–The DeepRockDrive Blog:

QUOTE

Everything at DeepRockDrive revolves around the community of artists and fans, so growing that community is our #1 priority. With our doors open, we can welcome new music lovers from around the world, who can create petitions for the artists they love, and vote on the petitions that other fans have created.

Together, we want to get petitions to 1,000 votes so that DeepRockDrive can invite the artists to play a live interactive show. While we work together toward that goal, we’ll be doing some free promotional shows to help us ramp up the capacity and the interactivity at DeepRockDrive live performances.

Whether you like rock, hip-hop, jazz, country, classical, opera, folk, children’s tunes, or any other genre of music or live performance… we can’t wait to see you there!

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With Northern Voice behind me it's time to finalize preperations for my trip to Austin Texas for SXSW (thats South by Southwest for the uninitiated) 2007.

Last year SXSW was huge for us at Bryght. We had a booth, thew a great party with Raincity, Blue Flavor and NewsVine, and drummed up a bunch of great Drupal development and consulting gigs. Since last year we've worked on lots of online community projects including the one for Warner Brothers Records and are excited to mix it up again with music industry moguls down in Texas.

This year will be more of the same with the exception that I'll be speaking on panel this year. The first panel of the whole conference in fact! Alex Williams, Corey Dennis and I are working together to present the talk "Snakes on A Mother Fuckin Plane". Raincity will have a booth this year and Bryght will have a presence in it. Come find me in booth J5 during exhibition hours.

Here at Bryght we've been heads down for too long, kicking ass and taking names... but we've been too quiet about our activities. We have a bunch of fun projects that we're working on and now that things are settling down from the launch of our upgraded Bryght Hosted Service and the organizing of the Northern Voice we'd like to introduce some of the clients we've been working with.

Bryght is working with Ethan Kaplan and the Warner Brothers Records technology team to help them get setup with a best practices deployment of Drupal 5.0 to power many of their artists upcoming music and fan community sites.

Warner Brothers Records chose Drupal as an intereractive community platform where fans can connect with bands as opposed to more traditional flash based marketing sites.

Bryght and Warner Brothers Records are working together to define a base install profile using Drupal 5.0 to efficiently and quickly roll and manage band sites.

From the SXSW Music website:

Each March SXSW Music presents new opportunities to make your vision reality. Musicians and the companies they work with have used SXSW as a cost-effective way to promote themselves since 1987. They come back year after year because SXSW works! It's a potent method to connect with press, radio, and other music industry players.

Colin, Bryght's very own Music Czar, was there in full force in 2006 and organized a great geek lunch about The changing landscape of music. Bryght will be back for the 2007 festival of course!

I’ve been playing with Songbird recently (which I’ve talked about before), and although it’s still pretty rough around the edges (as in spontaneous crashes and lockups), I have seen the future. I just love the feeling of making playlists of web resources as I cruise through some of my favorite music blogs.

It’s great to be able to “collect*” songs for later as well, and I love how easy it is to schedule songs for download in Songbird. Like all good products it takes an activity that is normally time consuming and repetitive and makes it easy. I’m sure the RIAA is probably cringing, but with so many new companies tackling the music recommendation space, I think Songbirds real strength lies in music acquisition (although it also encourages exploration and discovery too, of course).

A while ago I grabbed a wicked one liner from Jeffery Veen that downloads all the mp3’s from a given URL:

wget -r -l1 -H -t1 -nd -N -np -A.mp3 -erobots=off http://a-url-goes-here.com

I’ve occasionally been using this to grab mp3’s from a blog, but Songbird may finally put my rudimentary tools to rest. I think this product will really change my listening and browsing patterns, at least once the Mac version is released ;)

And hey, Songbird even uses Drupal! Which reminds me… if any Songbird folk read this, and if they ever need a hand with any Drupal/music hackery, give us a call!