I’m no musician, but I was always under the impression that they sort of kept their song writing secret until they were ready to play it to the world. If that’s accurate, new startup JamJunky may not have much of an audience. They provide a place for song writers to write their lyrics, upload songs in progress and share them with friends. Artists can also write notes about their work.
Friends log in and view the work and comment on it blog-style. The artist can then incorporate feedback into the song.
If there are any song writers out there I’d love to hear your feedback. This doesn’t sound like the type of environment that an artist would want to work in, but like I said, I’m no musician.
CenterNetworks wrote about them today as well and included a nice overview video of the product.
The founder of the company, James Thomas, also created Skinnyr.
I think songwriters have their own way of sharing their unfinished music with their friends and partners. I don’t think they’ll be having a blast because JamJunky appeared.
I suppose if you wanted to work out your nerves before you hit the stage, this would be one way. I can’t imagine much that would be more personal than sharing unfinished versions of songs online.
It’ll flame out as soon as people start lampooning the bad ones for kicks.
When will people learn that not everything needs to be Web 2.0ified? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Electronic music producers love to upload their unfinished project files and tracks, if you look at sites like http://sectionz.com (sadly, on the outs these days, but it’s been around for years and in the past has been a booming music production community.)
But even still, most of the tracks posted there are finished, generally speaking. There’s a significant amount of work-in-progress stuff there though, and peer-review and suggestions are absolutely key.
In concept, JamJunky is on the right track, especially for musicians in the folk music realm where group lyric writing has a long tradition stretching back to Woody Guthrie and way before that, too. I was about to set up a JamJunky account when I found out that you can only upload MP3’s, not videos.
Music is a visual medium. Sure, you listen to music on an MP3 player, but you attend concerts so that you can see and hear the musicians.
By coincidence, a day or two ago I set up a YouTube group titled Group Folk where folk musicians can collaborate on songs they’d like to compose collaboratively. I seeded that group with a song whose melody, chorus and opening verses have been already composed. The extra verses — and extra instrumentation — is wide open for any to contribute to. The title of this song, “We Can Take It From Here,” speaks to the generational transitions taking place in many venues these days.
The Group Folk page is at http://www.yout...group/groupfolk
While I love the entrepreneurial spirit of startups, I need to anchor my creative work to something like YouTube, which will be around for a while. Creative sorts learned that lesson when MP3.com deleted thousands of songs after a domain sale a few years ago.
MP3.com appeared to be a solid company with longevity. Never trust appearances.
Phil Shapiro
YouTube: pshapiro
Sharing unfinished songs with friends can be done without a public forum. Jamjunky will have you sharing unfinished songs with the world.
If a writer does not have a network of people already in place to share with perhaps JamJunky will provide them with something they are looking for. What remains to be seen is the quality of the community that will form around JamJunky and will this community serve the needs of the writers.
Why might a writer not choose to share his work before it’s done?
Before a song is finished one might choose not to share it with the public for the same reason that they do not perform a song that has not practiced thoroughly.
If a lyric writer is at all worried about lyric or idea theft they will also choose not to share their work publicly before it has been copy protected. As the input of a song with JamJunky account information into Jamjunky should serve as record, yes this can serve as a “poor-man’s copyright” (the old poor man’s copyright for musicians was to self address a letter containing your lyrics to yourself and not open the letter). But if all the writer is looking for is a poor man’s copyright you can simply email yourself the lyrics.
When sharing new song/lyric ideas with friends and colleagues I am not worried about idea theft or borrowing. But should I put a new song on-line before it’s finished…those lyrics could end up anywhere.
Also, songs are for the most part extremely personal and advice on lyrics is not always easily taken from someone the writer is not confident knows them and the subject matter well.
Many writers already have a network of people they can work on songs with. If not, yes, Jamjunky could serve as a meeting place for people that want assistance/collaboration but the problem some writers will face is – you would ideally like to understand who you are collaborating with. If you are simply putting your song ideas up and looking for some constructive criticism you definitely face the potential problem of finding your ideas/lyrics in other people’s songs. At the “rough draft” or concept stage the protection of lyrics and song concepts is very gray.
Question: On a website designed for entrepreneurs/invertors to share new ideas…would you find people’s best new ideas for making money?
So what would be the goal of a JamJumky community member? To share and learn? To gain recognition as a writer? To assist others? All great things and all potentially found on JamJumky. But for me personally as a lyric writer, while I am anxious to get my songs out there for friends, family, and fans to hear – I choose to wait until the pieces are finished. Once the song is released I love to receive feedback and constructive criticism about the lyrics – and these comments will serve me well when writing the next piece. That is the process…get better for the next one. So finished pieces up for comment? Yes.
If I knew that Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Billy Joel frequented the site and there was a chance they would comment on my work…it would be up there. But with an unproven and anonymous community JamJunky does not have what I am looking for for my unfinished songs.
So finished pieces up for comment? Yes.
Unfinished pieces up for the public. No.
I am a songwriter and my opinion is that i don’t share them with friends at all. If i want to publicize it i go to the artist or to the label and thats it.
Daniel, you may have been high when you wrote your comment, but the service isn’t a place to publicize your work. If you had read what Michael wrote, he said, “They provide a place for song writers to write their lyrics, upload songs in progress and share them with friends. Artists can also write notes about their work.”
It means that you can get help during the writing process and also that “Friends log in and view the work and comment on it blog-style. The artist can then incorporate feedback into the song.”
FYI, songs are not made public so you are technically not “sharing them with the world” — you are only sharing them with the people you want to.
Do any of you guys actually go to the websites when they are featured here, and actually look at them before you ramble off some random post about your issues of the site, before even looking at it? Seriously.. if some of you would even have taken the time to visit the site and understand what its real purpose is for you might be able to post a more educated post about it instead of just speculating about what you think it does by just reading Michael’s blurb on this site. By the way if you would have taken the time to actually view it you would have realized that your songs are never shared “to the WHOLE WORLD”. Seriously before some of you people start posting just to get attention actually read the damn book. Then post your opinions. Just don’t base it solely off what you “think” it is about by just reading the feature here and speculating.
So you write your song into a form and then it becomes shared to those you select;
– Line this up with / emailing / um – whats the difference?
-RB
Well, to write a whole comment on how much it sucks when others comment first before researching… I wonder how much positive influence that comment has. IMO bashing on the perfection of comments is even worse then commenting without research.
Back to the topic: My concerns with anything that offers online storage for stuff that is usually personal or secret, is that it’s stored in someone else’s database, in which case you don’t have control over who REALLY looks at your stuff. How much would the founder (or his system admin) benefit from your work? How “hack-proof” is the site?
Don’t forget, to some an unfinished song/piece is as personal as a credit card number and most of the time way more valuable. If you don’t expect people to store their credit card numbers somewhere online, don’t expect too much of them storing their pieces online.
@11
Jack, That’s the point. It’s not much different than emailing or sending an IM. The problem is, you have to put that file online or send it through AIM or YIM. Then once you receive a comment, its up to you to remember it.
I made this site to be sort of a personal library for musicians who write songs and want to remember the melodies. A container for organizing the songs they write. The sharing aspect comes across as a bigger part of the site than I intended. As you can see right now on the site, there are 52 songs on the site, but less than 20 are made public.
That, imo, shows me that the site is being used now as intended. Granted, the site just launched, but we’ll see how things go. I’m skeptical of it, myself, but I know I wanted a site like this myself as a musician. My friends who write songs also thought it would be a nifty idea, so I built it.
Thanks for the love Mike!
Artists wouldn’t share something until it’s final and they’ve cleared it through BMI or ASCAP.
@Ed
There are far more aspiring artists than there are signed artists. Tons of artists that either play covers or a couple of their own tracks. While you might blow this off as a small number, I can already see this as being absolutely huge for the creation of parodies and politically motivated songs. And you can never dismiss the number of people there are out there who just scribbled something down and hadn’t really thought of making it big or anything, but just want to see what people think about their scribbles. Just look at the amount of stuff on youtube that fits into this genre.
Very cool. My friends started something similar over at songpull.com It’s not really project management but along the idea of presenting a song “in progress.”
I might have to check this out. Always looking for ways to organize myself.