Duke Special: waiting for your call
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Thanks to Business to Arts for their recent tweet on the Pledge Music site. Readers of artsaudiences.ie may recall that last year we posted an article on Artistshare, a US based web organisation which enables those interested in the arts to directly provide project-specific funding to artists of their choice.
As with Artistshare, Pledge Music enables the individual to contribute at a variety of levels – in the example of Duke Special, £11 will buy you a signed EP, £55 would get a phonecall with the artist, and for £300 you could have dinner with the man himself.
Where the UK based Pledge Music surpasses Artistshare, is in the sense of community it builds around this new media patronage. The site has a high degree of social media functionality, and it incorporates donations to charities at the core of its activity.
Of course a site such as this can only succeed with a heavy inward traffic, and so the websites of featured artists must have links from their site into Pledge Music. Duke Special’s homepage has a prominent link to the Pledge Music site, as well as details of his upcoming Pledge concerts. It all seems to be working for him, he has received pledges 30% in excess of his initial requirement.
Kevin Costner – he built it, and they actually did come
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Whoever said ‘if we build it, they will come‘, wasn’t a web designer.
He was, in fact, the ghost of a baseball player, speaking to a farmer from Iowa. However, ghostly apparitions aside, as anyone who has built a website (started a facebook page/ Twitter account/ Ning community, etc etc) will know, putting something up online is only half the battle, it takes work to get the word out, and to get traffic in.
So while the arts in Ireland is seeing an increasing amount of high quality work occurring online, these endeavours aren’t always getting the attention they deserve. We’re looking to provide a platform to showcase new work in this area, and with any luck to help bring this work to a wider arts public, nationally and internationally.
So, if you’re using the internet to present work in a new way, if you’re launching a dynamic new website, if you’ve a new and imaginative ways of engaging with new audiences online, drop an email to james.kelly(at)artsaudiences.ie. Looking forward to hearing from you!
CMC’s new home page
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The Contemporary Music Centre has relaunched it’s website. With a new look home page which places an an increased emphasis on social networking and news, the site is nice to look at, easy to negotiate, and has a very dynamic feel to it.
As well as offering the visitor video and audio, the home page includes links to all the Centre’s different sites, including Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and MySpace, as well as featuring a feed to the CMC twitter page, meaning users can access the latest information on news and events.
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