The HearIAm Online Band Competition

story by Steven Jaynes

“American Idol” is dead — or at least floating lifeless in the water — thank the good lord. Currently there is a better contest that carries with it more benefits for the bands, and for the fans. Notice that I said the word “bands.” That is key.

The contest is called “Hear I Am”, and it’s being run through the website www.HearIAm.com. The contest is a conglomeration between PickTheBand, a fan-run record label owned by Universal Republic Records, and Sennheiser Electronic Corporation, maker of high-end performance audio and recording equipment. The contest invites fans to preview and share thousands of tracks using the site’s built-in social media tools and apps. Bands have to create a profile and upload their music (like another social media site that shall remain nameless) and then try to attract fan votes. There are judges at the final stage of the process, so maybe Paula Abdul can land herself another job — although (and may I reiterate the part about the good lord) that’s not very likely.

All bands that register for the contest will receive a marketing toolkit that includes a few electronic communication pieces to help them reach fans. Finalists will receive customized phone applications to assist in their outreach to fans, and whoever garners the most fan votes in a specific time frame will get $10,000 in gear from Sennheiser, a big-name manufacturer of microphones, headphones, wireless transmission systems, and pro recording equipment. They have been in the game for 65 years and have won a handful of awards for quality.

The winning band will also get to play in a major music festival. There are a few festivals that have teamed up with HearIAm: New York’s CMJ Music Marathon and Montreal’s Osheaga. HearIAm’s band winner in the first phase of the competition was Kansas City rock group Trucker, who played at this year’s Osheaga on August 1. The winner of the next phase of the competition will be announced on September 30 and will have the opportunity to play at this year’s CMJ on October 20 at La Poisson Rouge. HearIAm plans to unveil similar partnerships with other music festivals as the contest extends into next year as well.

So what’s in it for the fans? For you bandless kids, once you register and vote and share tracks, you have some things to look forward to as well. For each festival HearIAm will pick a few fans to win a trip to the partnering festival such as Boston’s Jack Barakitis, who was flown to Osheaga for a VIP weekend with three friends as the contest’s first phase fan winner last month. There are going to be other small incentives scattered throughout the process as well, but the free tickets are the major carrot.

By the time the whole contest wraps up next spring, a single grand-prize winning band will be selected by a panel of judges to win an A&R showcase and a huge distribution deal, courtesy of Universal Republic Records. The number of votes, the amount of shared music, and the votes from the judges’ panel will determine the grand-prize winning band, which will be announced in the spring of 2011.

The whole contest works along the same model as Pick The Band, the world’s first fan-run record label. The goal of the label is to bring fans into the music label process by having them help find the best unsigned bands and help market the band to the label and potential fans. When the band gets signed, the registered fans have input on decisions like what the singles are going to be from the album, t-shirt designs, etc.

If you were on MySpace and you checked out a band’s page, you would only be able to listen to their music and maybe comment on their spam-ridden wall. Pick The Band is set up in a very similar way but once you check a band out, you can vote for them to be signed. You and the band then campaign to garner votes from other fans and once a band gets a certain amount of votes, that band gets signed.

The site also allows the bands to stay in direct contact with their fans. A lot of acts make the same tour stops, but let’s say that some band has a huge following in a city that is off the beaten path, like Ocracoke on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Normally those fans would have to drive a few hours to see their favorite band. However, if all those fans are on Pick The Band, they can vote for the band to come play in their small town.

If you don’t know who Universal Republic Records is, they are a division of Universal Music Group — and if you don’t know who that is, I don’t know what to tell you. Regardless of whether or not you like music on the top 40, you should know who owns and produces the music that makes most of it. Universal Music Group has a handful of smaller divisions, but they all work through the same distribution and production models. Bottom line: it’s the world’s largest music company, with wholly owned recording, production, and sales locations in 77 countries.

Attention “American Idol”: your 15 minutes are up.

For more information, visit www.HearIAm.com

The Chicago Independent Radio Project

story by Mike Scales

This past month the Chicago Independent Radio Project, an endeavor two and a half years in the making, reached its first and most important goal of bringing a truly independent music, arts and culture-based community radio station to the city of Chicago with the official launch of Chirpradio.org. Countless volunteer hours were consumed painstakingly amassing a giant digital library of around 2,700 albums (and counting) while building a fully-functional on-air studio and workspace from scratch, in addition to reviewing hundreds of records for airplay and raising the appropriate funds to support it all.

Needless to say, everyone involved breathed a well-deserved collective sigh of relief after pulling off the sold-out launch party at Empty Bottle (featuring live performances from the Yolks, Hollows and Rabble Rabble) on January 16 and the noontime station launch the next day, which went off without a hitch. Yet no one breathed more deeply or beamed with a brighter sense of accomplishment than CHIRP founder and president Shawn Campbell. Chicago Innerview had the chance to sit down with the 16-year radio veteran and discuss the bright new future of CHIRP and where the group’s constant pursuit of new goals will hopefully bring them in the coming months.

Chicago Innerview: With such a successful launch weekend behind you now, can you give us a sense of where your head is at the moment?
Shawn Campbell: There’s definitely a big feeling of relief. Everything went really smoothly and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve gotten a lot of really positive feedback from listeners and from the community at large. I feel relieved that things went well and now we can just be planning for the future.

Chicago Innerview: Now that CHIRP is officially up and running, what’s next on the agenda?
Shawn Campbell: Of course we’ll always be paying attention to how listeners are reacting to CHIRP and seeing what their suggestions are. And there are still a lot of pieces we need to work out. For instance, we are still in the process of building our production studio that will also double as our live sound engineering booth. So, the idea of bringing in live bands to record and figuring out that whole set-up as well as developing some different programming ideas as podcast content; that is what’s next for CHIRP.

CI: With an actual broadcast station still the future goal at the moment, what is the latest update on the Local Community Radio Act?
SC: Well, we’re still waiting on a full vote in the Senate; that’s the last step, the Senate floor. Unfortunately, we don’t really have any sense of when that might happen. Obviously healthcare, climate change and other bills are kind of consuming all the efforts and time right now. But, as we’ve said, the Local Community Radio Act is an uncontroversial bill so our hope is that it will make it to the floor at some point this winter or spring.

CI: Though the majority of feedback and press thus far has been quite positive, how would you respond to skeptics who might say ‘Well, there’s so many internet radio options available already, so why Chicago and why now?’
SC: I don’t think that what CHIRP is doing really sounds like any other station out there but, more importantly, we are treating CHIRP Radio like a local radio station even though it’s on the web. I think the most powerful thing we’re doing is creating a station that has a very clear sense of place in our city whereas most web radio goes in the opposite direction, making it as universal and ‘placeless’ as possible to try to attract as many listeners as possible. We’re all for making CHIRP Chicago-specific.

More information @ http://www.chirpradio.org/