DownSlam, Inc. is an online music licensing service that signs unsigned musicians to a program of free music promotion. The musician gets guaranteed radio play, free band promotion, listing on a job search engine for musicians and complete demographic statistics of the musicians listening audience. DownSlam also provides eCommerce tools for bands and other financial resources. All musicians signed to DownSlam get to keep all rights associated with their band, name, lyrics and music. The agreement is non-exclusive and can be cancelled by the artists at any time. DownSlam was co-founded by Mark Cassell of Greensboro, NC and Storm Williams of Lewisville, NC.
DownSlam announced today that they will use Appleis OSX Server Technology and Quicktime Streaming Server for their music distribution service.
"We considered Real, but the price made it not an option in this dot com start-up environment. After an examination of our beta test, we would need to more than double the amount of funding we are seeking just to pay for the licenses to stream Real content.", said Storm Williams, Chairman of DownSlam, Inc.
Money was not the only factor in the decision. Co-Founder and Vice-President, Mark Cassell said on Friday, "Our product is music, so we were wanting to make sure that our streams were of the highest possible fidelity on the smallest amount of bandwidth. We have seen many Real vs. Quicktime fidelity studies, but our testing benchmark were the ears of local musicians. They all put the Quicktime streams on top of the fidelity list and we figured they would know what they are talking about."
DownSlam plans on offering 18 music genre channels and one "best of" channel, featuring music by unsigned artists from around the world.
DownSlam will begin signing musicians in April of this year and the project is planned for completion by the end of May.
You can find more information at the Downslam Web site.