Kim Dotcom launches Baboom, debut album

Kim Dotcom performing at Rhythm And Vines. Source: Scoop

Kim Dotcom launched his music service Baboom on Monday (coinciding with the anniversary of his arrest in 2012), and the first music release available on the site is his own album, Good Times. Producers include Printz Board (Black Eyed Peas) and guests include Tiki Taane and Laughton Kora (formerly with the band Kora, who are now a 3 piece). If you wondered what the incredible voice of Laughton Kora would sound like skewered thru Autotune, here's the record for you.

The album/website launch/birthday party for Dotcom was due to be celebrated with a massive free party at Auckland's Vector Arena, capacity 12,000 (the previous venue Shed 10 was deemed too small), with over 25,000 people RSVPing for tickets.

The party was cancelled after it came to light it maybe conflict with Dotcom's plans to launch a political party to contest NZ's elections later this year. The outcome is Dotcom now has a mailing list with 25,000 names on it.

The press release for Kim Dotcom's album says that "The music celebrates Kim’s ever-present philosophy of inspiring people to feel good, have fun and live life to the fullest. Kim was inspired by the Trance and Dance tracks he listened to during his high-speed driving times on the German Autobahn."

Which goes some way to explaining the style of the album, reviewed by Gizmodo as "ear-wrangling electronica mayhem, still whirring and buzzing in my mind, squeezed into an hour-long playlist." The review is not all negative, with the writer finding at least one song to his liking. Go and have a read.

The Sydney Morning Herald reviewed Baboom, noting that "The long-term plan for Kim Dotcom's new music sharing service is to disrupt the industry, but in the short term it just looks like a way to showcase his own work. Baboom.com launched in preview mode on Tuesday with the founder's album, Good Times, used to show people what to expect when the site goes live later this year.

MegaUpload and Mega founder Dotcom's site intends to be a hybrid of Apple's popular iTunes and digital music service Spotify. "My idea is that artists should make their music available for free, and fans should only pay for it if they really like it,'' explains Dotcom in a video on Baboom."

The managing director of Baboom is Mikee Tucker, currently label boss of Loop Recordings, and the man behind Fly My Pretties.

Baboom plans to return 90% of each sale to the artists. The 'pay what you like' option will of course be familiar to anyone who has used Bandcamp, which has a very similar royalty rate.

It seems like Dotcom's Baboom may be a bit late to the party, when there are existing technologies already doing the job very well for musicians. Nothing I've seen yet suggests Baboom will be doing that job any better.

ArsTechnica say that "The new "late 2014" timetable for Baboom is the service's latest slip. At the January 20, 2013 launch of Mega, Dotcom said his music service would follow in June 2013. In November, he told Wired it would be "a few months" after January 20." 

Late 2014 would also coincide with NZ's election, if the Prime Minister declares the election date for the usual time, November.

Dotocm has talked in the media previously about wanting to create jobs in New Zealand, his adopted home. But the development for Baboom was outsourced to Portugal.

ADDED The same week as Dotcom soft-launched Baboom, Dr Dre unveiled Beats Music, a music service extending on his Beats By Dre headphones brand. The Hollywood Reporter says "According to the NPD Group, annual sales of headphones are now US$1.8 billion, and with 27 percent of the market, "Beats by Dre" still is the leader." 

Kim Dotcom: "Baboom! I made an EDM album"

Kim Dotcom previously announced his music service, Megabox, just prior to the shutdown of Megaupload, and his arrest in January last year. Since then he has changed the name of the proposed music service to Baboom, last talking about it's launch back in September.

Digital Music News reports that "Dotcom has spent nearly four years working on an “iTunes-Spotify hybrid competitor,” and just revealed details about the upcoming service to Wired. At first, Baboom will only show Kim Dotcom’s artist page… he’s releasing an EDM album [called Good Times]. A couple months later, the full site will launch.

The site will have free music and will compensate artists using ad-generated revenue. And all of that will be generated through a controversial ad-plugin component:

“Baboom users can install a little plugin that replaces the ads you’d normally see on the internet with ones that we control through our ad network. Just as advertisers go to AdWords to buy ads from Google for certain search terms, they’ll be able to come to us and buy these ads at half the price and still have ads shown against the same keywords. And 100 percent of the money is credited to the user, who can spend it on music.”

The Baboom site is being developed by a team of 22 people in Portugal. The site will launch in January 2014.
Read part one of a two part interview with Dotcom over at Wired. 

Unsound

Via Digital Music News, with news clips of John Campbell and Kim Dotcom... " The following comes from producer, composer, engineer and now activist Mikael Eldridge (aka, Count), who has spent the past two years making a film about the realities musicians actually face in a digitized industry.

The film starts with the bigger picture, then tracks the stories of several artists – Jurassic Five, Zoe Keating, Diplo, Tycho, and Cracker, Camper van Beethoven, and Old 97′s. ’Unsound’ is now in the process of being crowdfunded to finance its completion and make it ready for major film festivals."

Interviewee quote: "Kim Dotcom lives in a mansion, living the good life, purely off the backs of creators."

That screengrab with the Hunter S Thompson quote on the music business being a cruel and shallow money trench is a bit flawed  - he never said it, as I discovered in early 2011, when a local journalist used that same quote.

The quote comes from Thompson's book called Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s. It reads...

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason...." Source: Urbanlegends.com

Kim Dotcom announces music site Baboom

Daily Swarm reports "After resigning as director of Mega, Kim Dotcom claimed that he wanted to focus on other projects. Now, one of those projects in on the horizon: his new music service, Baboom [previously called Megabox]. He teased the upcoming platform to TorrentFreak, saying that, “artists never had more freedom, transparency and control.”

Dotcom has already secured several millions in funding for the project and there are currently 22 developers working on it. Unlike Mega, Baboom will be operated by a company owned by the Internet entrepreneur himself.

With Baboom, Dotcom strongly believes that he can revolutionize the music industry and give artists full control over their music again.

“I am really excited about Baboom. I can’t wait for artists to see what i have created for them. Their entire career can be managed on Baboom.”

Here’s a breakdown of the concept behind Baboom:

When it’s released Baboom will give the public access to free music, while compensating artists through advertising revenue. With this “free music” business model Dotcom believes he can decrease music piracy while giving artists proper compensation for their work.

In addition, Baboom is expected to have a paid version where music fans can pay for music and not be bothered by ads.

[Giving artists full control over their music sounds a lot like Bandcamp to me. Will be interesting to see if this service takes off.]