Following on from my previous post about the 30 Beats Competition, one of my good friends from showmethelab.com has put forward his entry and I’d like you to take a minute to listen to the track and cast your vote for him please.
Tim, who loves to play the drums, studied at Alchemea, college of Audio Engineering and has been working in the music industry for many years. He has also made his own chill out and Drum and Bass albums but this is the first time he has made anything with car sounds!
A new project has just been started up which is encouraging DJs to make music out of the parts of a car.
The project www.30beats.co.uk is a web site created with Krysko, a Manchester based DJ and car manufacturer Hyundai. Krysko has made a track to bring the concept alive and they are challenging DJs and producers to make their own tracks, with the incentive of a winning a car as a prize.
They have supplied numerous samples of noises that the car makes, from horn beeps and wiper blades to seat belts and starter motors. You can download the lot as a package and then manipulate the sounds to create your very own track.
For more information including the rules and how to enter, check out the website over at www.30beats.co.uk
A few weeks ago, I was mooching around the Hed Kandi web site and saw that they were due to release a competition soon. It was billed to be the mother of all competitions where, in a nutshell, the prize would be a residency with Hed Kandi, playing at parties all over the world and living the jet-set lifestyle.
This competition really appealed to me and I got quite excited about the prospect of jetting around the world with some of the top DJs playing for such a well known brand.
So I had a look at their website this morning and saw that the details for entering the competition had been released. What would the rules be? How would they be judging this competition for the ultimate prize? I read on to find out.
Whoever gets the most votes, wins.
I’m sorry? What was that? Whoever gets the most votes, wins??? What kind of stupid competition is that? Allow me to explain.
To enter the competition, you have to create a Hed Kandi page on Facebook. This page is then used to describe all about you, have some press releases, some videos, mixes, releases, biography and so on. There will be a button on the page where, when clicked, will give you one vote. The idea is to get as many votes as possible to make the top 10 leaderboard. If you are on the leaderboard when the competition closes, then you have a chance of winning.
It doesn’t really make sense to me. If Hed Kandi are looking to take someone around the world with them, if they are looking for a DJ to represent their brand, surely they would want to pick a DJ based on their skills and not how many friends they have, or how deep they roll.
By running the competition in this way, it is not impossible for Hed Kandi to have a top ten leaderboard of bedroom jock wannabes who happen to have an entourage behind them.
This has really upset me. I thought this would be a good competition to enter because I think I might have the skills that they are looking for, but there is no “competition”, no comparison of talent and I am reluctant to get pipped at the post by some kid who happens to have over a million “friends” on myspace.
As marketing campaigns go however, it has to be said that this is very clever of Hed Kandi. This is a great way to get other people to do their marketing for them and they are really using the social networks to promote and enforce their brand. What better way than to create a popularity-based contest in order to get people spreading the word and marketing the Hed Kandi product for them.
So from a marketing angle, I genuinely applaud you Hed Kandi, you have found a way to really harness the web of today and use it to your advantage.
But as a DJ, I feel cheated and I fear that each and every day this industry is starting to become less and less about how talented the DJ is and more and more about how many people walk through the door.
Beatport has teamed up with Defected Records for the ultimate talent search.
Aspiring producers are able to submit their original productions to a special microsite where they will be rated by members of the public and judged by a panel of leading A&R bods.
The prize? The opportunity to have your track mixed down by house supremos The Shapeshifters in their studio and have it released as a single through Defected and promoted on Beatport.
The winner will also receive a portable handheld DJing device - Pacemaker, a Native Instruments Audio 4 DJ soundcard and $250 of Beatport credit.
To celebrate the launch of the first release in the brand new Hed Kandi series “Nu Disco”, Hed Kandi are teaming up with Pioneer Pro DJ to offer a treat to all of their fans.
Their web site says “Up for grabs are FIVE pairs of fantastic HDJ-2000 headphones for you to win along with a copy of the Nu Disco album”… but what you would want with five pairs of headphones I don’t quite know
To be fair, the Pioneer HDJ-2000 headphones are a great piece of kit. They look good, are comfortable and produce a great sound which are three of the main things that I look for in a pair of cans.
The HDJ-2000 have a flexible lightweight swivel/fold design which means you can stuff them in your bag a bit easier without them snapping. They’ve even got some of that memory foam stuff for the ear cup padding! Quality!
To mark the launch of Kris’ debut artist album ‘Indiosyncrasies’ (in stores / available to download from 20th April 2009) Kris has teamed up with the lovely people at SoundCloud to bring you a very unique competition.
They’re asking producers (young and old) from any musical persuasion to submit a ’sketch’ or and idea for a track to Kris via his SoundCloud drop box and he will choose his favorite idea to finish in the studio with the winning track receiving a full release on Compuphonic under the artist project ‘Kris Menace Vs (insert your name here!)
Sketches to be no longer than three minutes and to be submitted as 128K MP3s.
A sketch refers to a rough idea for a track which Kris will then work on / finish. Do not supply full tracks for Kris to remix. This is not the idea!
Please supply your email address as the file name when submitting your track.
Final date for submitting is Monday 20th April. The winner will be contacted by Monday 27th.
The winning release will be fitted into Compuphonic’ release schedule in the soonest available slot.
To celebrate the launch of Street Fighter IV, the latest instalment in one of the most successful fighting game series of all time video games giant Capcom has made available the original, fully-mastered vocal, FX and music samples taken from the cult classic Street Fighter II, enabling DJs and producers access to cut, scratch, remix and re-edit these classic parts to their hearts content.
Trackitdown have teamed up with Capcom to bring you this exclusive remix competition offering DJs and producers across the globe access to download a full Street Fighter II sample pack for free featuring classic 8-bit vocal gems such as Hadoken, Sonic Boom, Tiger Uppercut alongside hundreds of FX noises and music in lossless .wav format.
All you need to do is download the sample pack below and show them your skills. They’re interested to hear remixes across the whole spectrum of electronic music, anything goes. The four best remixes will each win an Xbox 360 and copy of the brand new Street Fighter IV game, with runners up winning copies of the game. Trackitdown.net will also give away the winning tracks after the competition for free as a featured bundle. Super stardom awaits you!
Calling all up and coming DJs! Do you think you are any good at DJing? Why not come and show what you are made of at the Houseproud DJ Competition being held at The B52’s over in Horsham, West Sussex.
Prizes up for grabs include: Pioneer DJS virtual DJ software, Allen & Heath Xone XD53 professional DJ headphones, SEDA membership for a year, A DJ set at the BGMF Music Festival and a DJ set at a secret London Night club.
You will take part in a series of heats, with winners from each heat progressing on to the semi-finals and then the grand final. The first heat takes place on Wednesday 4th June 2008, and all subsequent heats will every Wednesday thereafter.
Presented by shejay.net, the polls are now open for the top 100 female DJs. This is a great tribute to the female DJs that are on the professional circuit that deserve recognition for their talents. Get voting now!
Plans are in the pipeline for one of the most exciting events of all time. To be held in association with SEDA, I am looking to run a DJ competition to help find the UK’s best unsigned talent in the South East of England. At the moment, this is just at the planning stages. We already have sponsorship prizes from the wonderful people at A & J Recordings in Woking and we are looking for more donations of prizes from larger companies in exchange for association and promotion with this event. If you would like to promote your company in all the right places by sponsoring a prize, please get in touch.
Check this out The Funky Drama by Felguk: Artist: FelgukLabel: Bugeyed RecordsGenre: HouseRelease Date: 2010-03-1... http://bit.ly/bmr4Xs#5 hours ago
Mixes and audio available from this site are intended for home review only. If you like the music, please support the artists and purchase the music legally from the links provided.
Following on from my previous post about the 30 Beats Competition, one of my good friends from showmethelab.com has put forward his entry and I’d like you to take a minute to listen to the track and cast your vote for him please.
The project 
This competition really appealed to me and I got quite excited about the prospect of jetting around the world with some of the top DJs playing for such a well known brand.
Aspiring producers are able to submit their original productions to a special microsite where they will be rated by members of the public and judged by a panel of leading A&R bods.
Their web site says “Up for grabs are FIVE pairs of fantastic HDJ-2000 headphones for you to win along with a copy of the Nu Disco album”… but what you would want with five pairs of headphones I don’t quite know 
They’re asking producers (young and old) from any musical persuasion to submit a ’sketch’ or and idea for a track to Kris via his SoundCloud drop box and he will choose his favorite idea to finish in the studio with the winning track receiving a full release on Compuphonic under the artist project ‘Kris Menace Vs (insert your name here!)
