IntellectualMusician.com

Intellectual Musician is a company dedicated to innovating the way musicians think, interact, and do business in a virtual environment.

We operate our business as a community rather than a company. Our theory is that in a community every individual is given the ability to add value to the community and reap the benefits of doing so.

The best way to see this relationship would be to look at a few test case scenarios.

Lets say that you are a band from Portland, OR. It occurs to you that in order to be successful musically you are going to need to have more than a great set-list. You need to advertise yourself, connect with fans, book gigs, fill seats, hire industry professionals, and the list could go on and on.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was one central place where you could do all of this while getting paid for just being there? Wouldn’t it be even better if this place gave a level playing field to all its users, and you could get ahead by simply doing more or being better than the next guy, without all the corporate favoritism? Wouldn’t it be better still if there was a whole community of people working hard to help this place grow, and you could reap the benefits of all of their efforts by having thousands of eyeballs cross your content every day?

Welcome to the world of SoundFound.net. Built on the platform of IntellectualMusician.com, SoundFound.net is taking an already great business model and turning up the volume (the pun is strictly coincidental I assure you).

SoundFound.net strives to achieve these simple goals:

• Create a resource which is rich in content with above average members
• Provide a simple format for communication and sharing of information
• Make sure that EVERYONE who visits the site or participates at any level benefits in as many ways as possible.
• Only benefit monetarily when someone else is benefiting monetarily.

Simple right?

Ok, by now you are probably convinced that I’m completely nuts. Something like this MUST BE COMPLETELY UNREALISTIC.

And I’m here to tell you…

IT IS!!!

Isn’t that great? All that talk of a city on a hill, it’s completely unrealistic indeed. But the simple fact is that (to our great joy) we are dealing with a virtual community, not a real community. There’s no one mopping floors, or digging ditches! No one to cook, no one to clean, no one to build, no one to maintain (except for the lovely staff at SoundFound that is -but even then work is minimal).

So where then does the money come from?

Well we’ve thought of this too! By allowing the fairies to harvest pixy dust from the magical fountain of…

I’m just messing with you

Actually, the best way to get an idea of how this place generates revenue for ourselves and for all of our members is to look at another hypothetical scenario.

Let’s say that you’re a fan. Actually, let’s say you’re a super-huge-mega fan. You see that a band you like has set up a couple of pages for themselves on SoundFound.net so you decide to pop in to check out what’s happening. Once there you realize that there is a wealth of other cool musicians promoting themselves, sharing musical advice and info, and just all around having a good time on the site. It looks like fun so you try to figure out a way you can get involved too.

You enjoy using the site because your personalized homepage feeds you info on all your favorite bands, music industry news, upcoming shows in your town, what you had for breakfast… (I get carried away, sorry).

So after awhile you decide to set up your own page on the site. Its got some pictures of you, some information on who you are and what you do. And while you’re not a musician, that’s still o.k., because you’re there to talk and learn about music and find other people who like to talk and learn about your similar style of music.

One night after too much coffee and sugar you decide you want to write about the show you went to last night. You talk about the venue, the atmosphere, the band’s guitarist and how you love those tight leather pants he wears, and then after a couple hundred words drift off.

You awake the next morning to find that the band you were talking about has added your little article to their page. Then you look and see that you have a message from the guitarist with the tight pants thanking you for the article. You think, wow! I should do this more often. You proceed to write up about 4 or 5 more reviews for your page (or “blog” if you will) that week.

Your page starts to get a fair amount of traffic. One day you go out to get the mail and there’s a letter from a company called Intellectual Musician (founders of SoundFound). You remember that little rotating ad for several of the music venues you visit all the time that you placed in the corner of your page way back in the day. You open the letter and to your surprise is a check for $112!!!! You read the letter that’s attached and it tells you that 10,000 people had checked out your page this month, and that enough people had clicked that tiny ad to earn an average of 2.24 cents per 1oo unique visitors. You get to keep 50% of that, which is $112 for the month!

But what you might not realize is that those venues you were advertising (what we like to refer to as recommending, as you play an active part in creating the ad, and even personalize it a bit) had an additional 200 people show up this week thanks to your add, while another 750 people discovered that they existed and will probably visit them in the near future.

You never even realized that you were making money. You just were having fun talking about stuff that you wanted to talk about before, but just never had the means to do so.

This type of scenario could be replicated in an infinite number of ways. You could be a venue looking to promote yourself who advertises a band playing at your club this weekend. You could be a guitar manufacturer looking to give more information about your newest guitar who puts ads up for players who use your product. You could be a music business attorney who writes articles on legal music issues who endorses (places an ad) about a book that you wrote.

And the money doesn’t just have to come from within the community, you can create an endorsement for almost anything that you really like, such as a cd being sold on amazon.com, or a third party site. The benefit of this is that money can come in from the outside, and unlike many other paid membership communities and online resources, SoundFound.net won’t be financially draining it’s community, but instead rewarding them for being there and participating.

And while I’ve spent a good deal of time talking about money, I do so out of necessity, as money is only a secondary (or third, or fourthondary) goal here. What we really are trying to accomplish is create a place where musicians can get ahead without the interference of a large record label.

This may be a bold statement, but I feel like it’s fairly safe at this point in history to say that the overwhelming majority of musicians really dislike large record labels. Why do they dislike them? Because they are dependent on them, and by being so are often taken advantage of.

SoundFound.net is all about NOT doing that. In fact, we might have actually become a non profit if we didn’t feel like we’d better serve our community by becoming a corporation (corporations are largely more agile and aggressive than a nonprofit).

What you can expect with Sound Found is to be heard. We want you to be successful, and we will provide you with every tool we can create to help you make your impact on the music industry. Perhaps our mantra really says it best, at SoundFound.net you can “find your resonance”.