We’ve had a busy couple of weeks, with a number of artists signing up each day, from established musicians with a long history of performing around the world, to independent musicians just starting out.

Carlos de Nicaragua “has been a songsmith, poet, musician, political activist for justice and equal rights most of his 50 years”. He was one of the first to feel a “Positive Vibration” about Karmafan and to really understand what we’re trying to do.

Eoin Dillon, one of the founder members of Kíla, loved the idea of as many people as possible being able to hear his music.

Jalebi were also very positive about Karmafan and wrote to say “thank you and congratulate Karmafan.com for offering a much needed service to artists, musicians and all other creative individuals who have talents and services that people around the world appreciate and would like to support”

Francesco Amico was one of the first musicians to get involved, and has been very encouraging. He’s based in Dublin and is a member of the “The Young Composers Collective” (YCC), a non-profit organisation of composers whose mission is to promote new music in Ireland.

Greg Gobel is another member who joined Karmafan at an early stage. Greg plays his “homebrewed acousto-funk” in Madrid and organises open mic sessions for local musicians.

Dave Flynn really gets the idea: “If you don’t want to buy the CD but like the music then why not consider donating something to Dave via karmafan. Karmafan let’s you donate any amount to Dave, even 10 cents, every little helps you know!”

Others are at the beginning of their careers, such as Catriona. She’s 14 but has a great voice and, as “the granddaughter of legendary Latin recording artist, Alberto Vazquez”, she also has a strong family connection to making great music.

Would love to write something about each artist but there’s plenty of work to do. We’ll definitely make time to mention in more detail the artists who have signed up, but for now will just post a quick list in no particular order of some of the more recent members.

Michael Riversong
Carlo Capocasa
soo p and the outsider
Mike Borgia
soliloquise
URR Records

Karmafan was mentioned in the Irish Mail on Sunday in their review of In Rainbows - the idea of karma really took hold and was repeated throughout the piece, from the headline:

“Thom leaves good karma up to you…”

through to “Radiohead are trusting in karma”.

The reference to Karmafan was a good summary of the idea in a few lines:

“Irish site Karmafan.com may help. Artists can submit work to the site and fans can pay a stipend or one-off fee in admiration and patronage of the work”

It’s not exactly how Karmafan works, but it’s close enough and they did understand that it’s all about patronage.

Amazing media buzz around the release. Looks like people are starting to think that maybe artists can trust their fans.

Spent some time posting comments to various boards to see how people react. Musicians seem to feel that it’s a cool idea but are slow to sign up until others are using it. At the other end of the spectrum, game modders - who are definitely creative and spend a lot of time crafting their work but don’t consider themselves artists - don’t feel that anyone would give them anything. Really don’t believe that. You may only give a small amount, but so many creations are worth supporting.

Bands like Radiohead show how artists can develop a direct connection with their fans. They know that people will give something back if the music is good. The Internet allows you to make your work available to all, but it goes both ways. It also allows your fans to reciprocate - to show you that they care, that they are listening. You’ve got to trust your fans.

Karmafan provides a way for artists to do just that - trust that their fans will respond to what they enjoy. No fees, no telling you how to distribute - just a quick and easy way to let fans give something back.

So now we’re starting to let artists, musicians, bloggers, writers and other creatives know that there’s a new way to get support for their work.

It’ll be interesting to get some feedback from people. We think that fans will support something they really enjoy - even small amounts can add up very quickly if you have enough fans.

And it’s not just artists in the traditional sense of the word. Bloggers, software developers, game modders, journalists, font-makers - anyone who creates something for others to enjoy.

Well, hopefully we’ll have more time to blog now that the site is up and running.

Dave

Guess what the story was? No prizes for guessing that the problem was a well known bug in IE.
Before to get that problem though we found a small problem in the openlaszlo’s lzc file for Linux. Seems like the way “find” is being used there causes problems on my debian.

There is a line in lps-4.0.2/bin/lzc which says -
LPS_HOME=`find “$myhome/../Server” -name lps’*’ -maxdepth 1`
It should really say -
LPS_HOME=`find “$myhome/../Server” -maxdepth 1 -name lps’*'`

Apart from the widget we are re-working our front page to explain the whole idea better.

But now that we have the widget working on IE, we want to start inviting people to join. Finally.

Here we are - after a year of development, we have started emailing some friends - musicians and bloggers - to come check out Karmafan.

We have some issues to be resolved, but gee its fun times.

Issue number 1 - We used openlaszlo to generate a flash widget. By jove its a pain. We can’t figure out now what laszlo generated swf wont load on IE. Our solution - dump laszlo, we are gonna use flash. We tried our best to use opensource tools, but we are under stress now. Need a widget quick, and flash seems our best friend.

Issue numero duo - Damn SSL certificate. Damn SSL certificate. Its taking ages to get it. We plan on replacing our self signed one with a trial one from thawte, so this should start behaving properly in the next few hours.