“What happened to PhilMusic?” and other Pesky Questions

A few weeks ago the questions started to pop up out of thin air and lunge at me. There were text messages, Tweets (public tweets and DMs), Facebook PMs. They were incessant. They arrived at odd times of the day – while driving to work, while at a meeting, while having dinner. You would have thought someone had died. 

In a way, someone had. The questions were “What happened to PhilMusic?” “Did you sell PhilMusic?” and the more direct “I can’t access Philmusic, when will it be back up? I need to sell my guitars.”

After some investigation, we figured out that the site was indeed inaccessible – our backend dude’s attempts to connect to the server directly returned a cryptic error message that apparently pointed out to a damaged hard drive. After some exchanges with our web provider we quickly decided the best thing for the site’s long term health was to to back up the data and move on and set up a new virtual server at a US-based provider.

But that would have take a bit of time – it was Christmas after all. And PhilMusic.com doesn’t currently operate as a commercial enterprise, so taking time off for vacations from our real jobs takes precedence over internet hobbies.

That explains the downtime – probably one of the longest ever spells since the site domain was registered in December 1996… Making PhilMusic.com 16 years old and probably one of the longest running Philippine websites around!

But what to do about all the nagging questions? Answer them! So without further ado, here’s a mini FAQ:

What happened to the site and domain? The server crashed. Investigation pointed to a faulty hard drive. We have had enough with the old provider so we are moving to a new provider in January 2013.

 Did you sell PhilMusic? Not that I know of.

 Will you sell me PhilMusic? I get this all the time. Give me an offer, preferably a P15M offer

 When will the new site be up? No firm timeline, and please don’t bug us, we have day jobs. Sometime January 2013.

 Are you on Facebook? 

Yes! We are on Facebook! You can keep in touch with Facebook (especially during the downtime) through our Facebook presence. We have two URLs:

PhilMusic Facebook Page – http://facebook.com/philmusic.dotcom

This is our official FB page. Public announcements and bulletins about the site are posted here.  We have about 14,000 likes. Please like us! You can never have too many likes.

The Official PhilMusic Facebook Group - http://facebook.com/groups/philmusic

We just started this a few days ago, for discussions and user posts. We’d like to keep the FB page clean, so this group is more for interactions, discussions, for-sale postings etc. We’ll also use the file area as a repository on FB for community documents. The group is set so anyone can read, but you must Join the group to post. We have over 1,500 signups today and expect to hit 2,000 by New Year’s Eve. Or maybe 2,500. Join us!

There are a number of other “PhilMusic” groups on Facebook, but they are maintained by over-zealous fans or impostors, or both.

Are you on Twitter? Hell yeah, since 2007! We are @PhilMusic (http://twitter.com/philmusic) Follow Us!

Will all the old messages be restored on the new site? We’re restoring from backups. Expect a lot of the newer messages gone, but hopefully the bulk of the 7-8 year old database should be there.

We want to donate to keep the site going! How do we do this? Thanks for the generosity! Crowdfunding is in vogue on the interwebs, so we will be considering crowdfunding models for new projects.

Are you a start-up? We’ve been a “startup” for 16 years! haha

What’s next for PhilMusic.com? Ok, so Ver 1.0 was PhilMusic as the music scene documentarian (what you would call today as a blog), Ver 2.0 was PM as the Musician’s Forum slash Buy-N-Sell slash Sulit for Musicians. There will be a Ver 3.0 in 2013. I’m not sure what it is yet but I would like to explore a mobile app based service. We would like the blog to return, assuming we can get music bloggers to contribute. And events! Expect some live events in 2013. None of these dreams can come true without community support, so we hope you’ll be there for us.

And last of all, thanks to the PhilMusic community for sticking by us all these years, through all our incarnations. You guys are great!

For upcoming announcements, stay tuned to our Facebook page. No Facebook? What are you, a martian?

Crowdsourcing local music scene documentation: The #PhilMusic hashtag on Instagram

Some years back, around the time the first generation Digital SLRs made their appearance. the photo bug bit me hard. Of course, every “serious” photographer eventually finds a speciality – mine was the area of concert photography. I liked the scene, loved the exaggerated stage lighting, and the unique expressions coming from musicians. 

Armed with a PhilMusic.com media pass, I prowled the backstages and mosh pits of some of the more raucous music events in Manila in the late 90s and early 2000′s. I would shoot several times a week, thinking I was doing my bit in documenting the events of that period.

My weapon of choice was a large and heavy camera rig, a Canon SLR (I eventually settled on a Canon 40D) and my favorite lens was the formidable Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS  zoom – superb low light optics that was about a foot long weighed a ton or two. I nicknamed the white beast “the bazooka”.

That lens is one heavy bitch to carry, but the results were always worth it. With it’s tack-sharp focusing and versatility in low light situations, it was the perfect concert lens, and I could always count on it to capture dramatic closeups of guitarists grunting and vocalists emoting on a distant stage.

Well that phase went by quickly. My beloved Bazooka stays in a cabinet unused for most of the year. I stopped going to gigs. I moved on to small cameras that shot fine stills and HD video, like the Lumix LX-3, and lately, the Canon S95. The pocketable S95 is about as small as a smartphone, so this is my go-to “real” camera.

But more often than not, my photographic weapon of choice nowadays is a phone. I went through a number Android phones over a 2-year period before settling on an iPhone 4s as the primary phone – and primary camera.

“The Bazooka”

With its sharp focusing, vivid colors, and most of all – wide array of camera apps, coupled with the ability to share photos instantly via social media, the iPhone is often the only camera I use and need, even on travels where I would have lugged along an SLR body and several lenses in the not so distant past. Indeed a number of tech blogs have posed the question, “Is the iPhone 4s the only camera you need?“

Among the many fine photo apps is Instagram, a portal to a community of cameraphone photo enthusiasts, which is more fun than  barrel full of monkeys.

The photo sharing app with the hipster filters has evolved into photo-oriented social network. And the twitter-inspired hashtag concept has found new meaning in the Instagram – a popular hashtag used by a number of people in the Instagram community becomes a crowdsourced photo album for that topic. Click into a hashtag and you can see an album of thousands of photo contributors all posting with the same theme.

So with that in mind, I remembered my “music photojourno” persona of years past and figured that Instagram might be the best vehicle to revive that aesthetic. And at the same time, I no longer have the time or even the stamina to attend the hundreds of music events that pop up in Manila. But it’s a sure thing that other people will be there, armed with their smartphones.

Last night’s Fete de La Musique street scene in Makati Avenue, posted on Instagram

With the right phone in the right place (usually a smartphone), anyone can be a music photographer like Annie Liebovitz and Instagram can be your  Rolling Stone. Why not crowdsource the role of music scene documentation, and provide a venue (in this case a hashtag) to collect all the photos in one convenient place?

Hence the birth of the #PhilMusic hashtag. I propose this as the hashtag for photos of music events in the Philippines. I hope that if it catches on , anyone who wants to get a bird’s eye of the local music scene can just click on the #PhilMusic hashtag and get a glimpse of the vibrancy of the local music scene.

As an example, just last night, the annual Fete de la Musique festival took place in Makati Avenue, which took a lot of people by suurprise. The festival wasn’t promoted too extensively, so it sort of snuck up on a lot of people and a lot of people missed it. But if enough people on the scene were posting photos on Instagram and tagging them with #PhilMusic, others could at least check in on the “channel” to view photos of the gigs and attend them vicariously.

Granted that peering into a smartphone or tablet screen won’t give you thrill as actually being on the scene in person, at least it gives you  bit of the flavor, less the smell of the moshpit sweat!

Here’s how to post a photo on your smartphone (an iOS or Android device running the Instagram app)

To post to the #PhilMusic hashtag “channel” on Instagram, just add the tag #philmusic to any photo covering a music-related event.

To view the #PhilMusic album – look for a photo tagged with #PhilMusic and click on it. Or use Instagram’s search function to search for the hashtag #PhilMusic.

Reeling in the Years: Raiding the PhilMusic Archives

Our home baked music site PhilMusic.com has gone through several stages of evolution in its 15 or so years of existence.

It started as a mailing list (then referred to as a “listserv”) on the local ISP iPhil in 1996 before becoming a full-fledged web domain. It then went through another round of evolution as a website, from an online music magazine (actually more like a music blog in today’s sense, before the word “blog” was even invented) from 1996 to 2004 — to today’s musician-oriented community forum.

As a new media destination site for the band-dominated music scene of the the era, PhilMusic pioneered some things taken for granted today – the music artist chat event, an event calendar known as a “gig guide”, online concert photography galleries, the site podcast, and long articles and reviews that would probably have looked great in print but were dedicated to the online medium.

Since 2005, today’s PhilMusic.com Forum (talk.philmusic.com)  is more familiar to local musicians as the defacto place to find great deals in music gear. Looking to sell your guitar or want to swap stories about the best effects boxes with fellow guitarists? The PhilMusic Forum is the place.

This community identity may not be ideal for people who still miss the old music-journalism persona of the site, but in today’s net scene, every band already has their own site or social media account plugging their own gigs, and publishing their own content and photos. Having a third party join in would just add to the new media clutter. Besides, every local band out there already has its own Facebook page, and probably a Twitter account as well.

Speaking of Facebook, as of Feb 2011, you can now add another stage of evolution: PhilMusic the Facebook Page. Rather belatedly, The PhilMusic Facebook Page went up in Feb 2011 to serve as the official online presence of the site on Facebook. You can find the page through the URL http://facebook.com/philmusic.dotcom .

Facebook Pages  makes perfect sense for all sorts of corporations and media companies nowadays.The amount of people you can reach on it is staggering (22M Filipinos at last count), and the engagement is amazing.

Content posted on Facebook gets more hits than if they were just placed online on a stand alone website. Then there’s that whole social notion of “Liking” and sharing content, which drives eyeballs back to the original content sources better than the old darling of the blogging community – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) –  ever could. And since there’s no cost to hosting on Facebook – the combination is irresistible.

What to put in a Facebook edition of PhilMusic? After stumbling on a couple of old drives filled with old PhilMusic content – made up of photos, videos and features articles from the site’s “online magazine era”, some of which had been previously published online, some of which had never been seen by the public – I decided to sift through these old files and repost some of these on the Facebook page. People can then freely share these with their contacts.

So there’s the page’s reason for existence: A place to highlight material from PhilMusic’s archives.

A visit to the PhilMusic Facebook page today is a bit like a trip through a time machine. You’ll see images from a performance that took place in 2005, or read a review of a “new” artist that was originally published in 1999. But you’ll see this through the eyes of a modern Facebook user, using the online photo and video display and “like”, commenting, and sharing social functions of today.

So come join us and sift through bits and pieces of music history of the recent past. With 15 years of local music-oriented content to go through, you’re sure to bump into some gems.

The new-fangled social media touchpoints… “Like” or “Follow” PhilMusic on these links!

PhilMusic on Facebook: http://facebook.com/philmusic.dotcom

PhilMusic on Twitter: http://twitter.com/philmusic