dflux4

Welcome Sojn!

WHADDUP SOJN!

Ohh haaii

Ohh haaii

Sarrpp

Finally an update pretty happy with the set up now that I have moved into the bigger room The monitors are at perfect ear height, I have flipped over an open tall boy for a makeshift dj table. I have an extra screen that allows me to use torq without having to turn my head. I still havent got a tower so I have purchased a usb hub to have all the things connected at once!!

im there yellow and peppered!

Luv this track!

Might see if i can track a 2nd hand one down of this and give it a go!!

UPDATE: All sorted, Control CDS ordered from the UK arrived and BAM!!! It works, happy days!

Nice one bro! JJJ event looks mean!

One man you've never heard of juices his numbers, buys followers and fake plays and is becoming the star you always dreamed of. This is how he does it. by Terry Matthew Fake views, fake plays, fake fans, fake followers and fake friends - the mainstream music industry has long been about "buzz" over achievement, fame over success, the mere appearance of being everyone's favorite artist over being the favorite artist of anyone. Social media has taken the chase for the fumes of fame to a whole new level of bullshit. After washing through the commercial EDM scene (artists buying Facebook fans was exposed by several outfits last summer), faking your popularity for (presumed) profit is now firmly ensconsced in the underground House Music scene. This is the story of what one of dance music's fake hit tracks looks like, how much it costs, and why an artist in the tiny community of underground House Music would be willing to juice their numbers in the first place (spoiler: it's money). 'BORINGLY ORDINARY' In early January, I received an email from the head of a digital label. In adorably broken English, "Louie" (or so we'll call him, for reasons that will become apparent) asked me how he could submit promos for review by 5 Magazine. I directed him to our music submission guidelines. We get somewhere between five and six billion promos a month. Nothing about this encounter was extraordinary. A few hours later, I received his first promo. We didn't review it. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, disposable: a bland, mediocre Deep House track. These things are a dime a dozen these days - again, everything about this encounter was boringly ordinary. But I noticed something strange when I Googled up the track name. And I bet you've noticed this too. Hitting the label's SoundCloud page, I found that this barely average track - remarkable only in being utterly unremarkable - had somehow gotten more than 37,000 plays on SoundCloud in less than a week. Ignoring the poor quality of the track, this is a staggering number for someone of little reputation. Most of his other tracks had significantly fewer than 1,000 plays. Even stranger, there were only 117 comments - a very low number for a track with so many plays. Stranger still, most of the comments - insipid and stupid even by social media standards - came from people who do not appear to exist. You've seen this before: a track with acclaim far beyond any apparent worth. You've followed a link to a stream and thought, "How is this even possible? Am I missing something? Did I jump the gun? How can so many people like something so ordinary?" Louie, I believed, was purchasing plays, to gin up some coverage and buy his way into overnight success. He's not alone. Desperate to make an impression in an environment in which hundreds of digital EPs are released every week, labels are increasingly turning toward any method available to make themselves heard above the racket - even the skeezy, slimey, spammy world of buying plays and comments. I'm not a naif about such things - I've watched several artists (and one artist's significant other) benefit from massive but temporary spikes in their Twitter and Facebook followers within a very compressed time period. "Buying" the appearance of popularity has become something of a low-key epidemic in dance music, like the mysterious appearance and equally sudden disappearance of Uggs and the word "Hella" from the American vocabulary. But (and here's where I am naive), I didn't think this would extend beyond the reaches of EDM madness into the underground. Nor did I have any idea what a "fake" hit song would look like. Now I do. THIS IS WHAT A FAKE DANCE HIT LOOKS LIKE Looking through the tabs of the 30k+ play track, the first thing I noticed was the total anonymity of the people who had favorited it. They have made-up names and stolen pictures, but they rarely match up. These are what SoundCloud bots look like: The usernames and "real names" don't make sense, but on the surface they seem so ordinary that you wouldn't notice anything amiss if you were casually skimming down a list of them. "Annie French" has a username of "Max-Sherrill". "Bruce-Horne" is "Tracy Lane". A pyromaniac named "Lillian" is better known as "Bernard Harper" to her friends. There are literally thousands of these. And they all like exactly the same tracks (none of the "likes" in the picture are for the track Louie sent me, but I don't feel much need to go out of my way to protect them than with more than a very slight blur): Most of the comments are hilariously banal, but a few do stand out. You have to wonder what Louie thinks, knowing that comments like "YOU ARE A GOD" come from imaginary fans he's paid for: Most of them are like this. (Louie deleted this track after I contacted him about this story, so the comments are all gone; all of these were preserved via screenshots. He also renamed his account.) FAKE PLAYS, REAL DOLLARS It's pretty obvious what Louie was doing: he'd bought fake plays and fake followers. But why would someone do this? After leafing through hundreds of followers and compiling these screenshots, I contacted Louie by email with my evidence. His first reply consisted of a sheaf of screenshots of his own - his tracks prominently displayed on the front page of Beatport, Traxsource and other sites, along with charts and reviews. It seemed irrelevant to me at the time - but pay attention. Louie's scrapbook of press clippings is more relevant than you know. After reiterating my questions, I was surprised when Louie brazenly admitted that everything implied above is, in fact, true. He is paying for plays. His fans are imaginary. Sadly, he is not a god. You have noticed that I'm not revealing Louie's real name. I'm fairly certain you've never heard of him. I'm hopeful, based upon listening to his music, that you never will. In exchange for omitting all reference to his name and label from this story, he agreed to talk in detail about his strategy of gaming SoundCloud, and then manipulating others - digital stores, DJs, even simple fans - with his fake popularity. Don't misunderstand me: the temptation to "name and shame" was strong. An early draft of this story (seen by my partner and a few other people) excoriated the label and ripped its fame-hungry owner "Louie" to pieces. I'd caught him red-handed committing the worst sin one can be guilty of in the underground: Louie was faking it. But when every early reader's response was, "Wait, who is this guy again?" - well, that tells you something. I don't know if the story's "bigger" than a single SoundCloud Superstar or a Beatport One Week Wonder named Louie. But the story is at least different, and with Louie's cooperation, I was able to affix hard numbers to what this kind of ephemeral (but, he would argue, very effective) fake popularity will cost. This is "Louie's" actual level of popularity - tracks that were put up months before he began gaming the SoundCloud system. THIS IS WHAT A FAKE DANCE HIT COSTS Louie told me that he artificially generated "20,000 plays" (I believe it was more) by paying for a service which he identifies as Cloud-Dominator. This gives him his alloted number of fake plays and "automatic follow/unfollow" from the bots, thereby inflating his number of followers. Louie paid $45 for those 20,000 plays; for the comments (purchased separately to make the entire thing look legit to the un-jaundiced eye), Louie paid €40, which is approximately $53. This puts the price of SoundCloud Deep House dominance at a scant $100 per track. But why? I mean, I'm sure that's impressive to his mom, but who really cares about Louie and 30,000 fake plays of a track that even real people that listen to it, like me, will immediately forget about? Kristina Weise from SoundCloud told me by email that the company believes that "Illegitimately boosting one's follower numbers offers no long-term benefits." But to hear Louie tell it: it does. THIS IS WHAT A FAKE DANCE HIT CAN DO FOR YOU This is where Louie was most helpful. The first effect of juicing his stats, he claims, nets him approximately "10 [to] 20 real people" per day that begin following his SoundCloud page as a result of artificially inflating his playcount to such a grotesque level. These are people who see the popularity of his tracks, go through the same process I did in wondering how such a thing was possible, but inevitably shrug and sign on as a follower of Louie, assuming that where there's light, there must be heat as well. But - and this is the most interesting part of his strategy, for there is a method to his madness - Louie also claims there's a financial dimension. "The track with 37,000 plays today [is] in the Top 100 [on] Beatport" he says, as well as being in "the Top 100 Beatport deep house tracks at #11." And indeed, many of the tracks that he juiced with fake SoundCloud plays were later featured prominently on the front pages of both Beatport and Traxsource - a highly coveted source of promotion for a digital label. They've also been reviewed and given notice by multiple websites and publications (hence his fondness for his scrapbook of press clippings he showed me after our initial contact). Louie didn't pay Traxsource, or Beatport, or any of those blogs or magazines for coverage. He paid Cloud-Dominator. All of these knock-on, indirect benefits likely add up to far more than $100 worth of free advertising - a positive return on his paid-for SoundCloud dominance. Louie's records on the front page of Traxsource and Beatport, which he attributes to having bought tens of thousands of SoundCloud plays. So it's all about that mythical social media "magic". People see you're popular, they believe you're popular, and eager as we all are to prop up a winner, you therefore BECOME popular. Louie's $100 for pumping up the stats on his underground House track can probably be scaled up to the thousands or tens of thousands for EDM and other music genres (some of the bots following Louie also follow dubstep and even jazz musicians. Eclectic tastes, these bots have.) Pay $100 on one end, get $100 (or more) back on the other, and hopefully build toward the biggest payoff of all - the day when your legitimate fans outweigh the legion of robots following you. This entire technique was manipulated in the early days of MySpace and YouTube, but it also existed before the dawn of internet. Back then it was called The Emperor's New Clothes. OF PAYOLA AND STEROIDS SoundCloud claimed 18 million registered users back in Forbes in August 2012. While bots and the sleazy services that sell access to them plague every online service, some people will view this issue as one which is SoundCloud's responsibility. And they do have a healthy self-interest in ensuring that the little numbers next to the "play", "heart" and "quotebubble" icons mean exactly what they say they mean. This article is a sterling endorsement for many of the services brokering fake plays and fake followers. They do exactly what they say they will: inflate plays and gain followers in an at least somewhat under-the-radar manner. I've seen it. I've just showed it to you. And that's a problem for SoundCloud and for those in the music industry who ascribe any integrity to those little numbers: it's cheap, and if you can afford it, or expect to make a return on your investment on the backend, as Louie does, there doesn't seem to be any risk to it at all. For the record, Kristina Weise told me that SoundCloud is: continually working on the reduction and the detection of fake accounts. When we have been made aware of certain illegitimate activities like fake accounts or purchasing followers, we deal with this in accordance with our Terms of Use. Offering and using paid promotion services or other means to artificially increase play-count, add followers or to misrepresent the popularity of content on the platform, is contrary to our TOS. Any user found to be using or offering these services risks having his/her account terminated. But it's been over 3 months since I first stumbled across Louie's tracks. None of the incredibly obvious bots I identify here have been deleted. In fact, all of them have been used several more times to leave inane comments and favorite tracks by Louie's fellow clients. (Some may worry that I'm listing the names of said shady services here. Rest assured, all of them appear prominently in Google searches for related keywords. They're not hard to find.) And should SoundCloud develop a more effective counter against botting and what we might as well coin as "playcount fraud", they'd have an unusual ally. "SoundCloud should close many accounts," Louie says, including "top DJs and producers [with] premium accounts for promoting like this. The visibility in the web jungle is very difficult." For Louie, this is simply a marketing plan. And truthfully, he has history on his side, though he may not know it. For much of the last sixty years, in form if not procedure, this is exactly how records were promoted. Labels in the mainstream music industry bribed program directors at American radio stations to "break" songs of their choosing. They called it "payola". In the 1950s, there were Congressional hearings; radio DJs found guilty of accepting cash for play were ruined. Payola was banned but the practice continued to flourish into the last decade. Read for instance, Eric Boehlert's excellent series on the more elegant system of payoffs that flourished after the famous payola hearings of the '50s. All of Boehlert's allegations about "independent record promoters" were proven true, again attracting the attention of Congress. Payola consists of giving money or benefits to mediators to make songs appear more popular than they are. The songs then become popular through radio's free exposure. Louie's ultra-modern form of payola eliminates any benefit to the operator (in this case, SoundCloud), but the effect is the same: to make you believe that this "boringly ordinary" track is an underground clubland sensation - and thereby make it one. The acts that benefited from payola in Boehlert's exposé were multiplatinum groups like U2 and Destiny's Child. This isn't Lady Gaga or even the Swedish House Mafia. It's just Louie, a fairly average producer making fairly average underground House Music which probably sells an average of a hundred or so copies per release. It's sad that people would go to such lengths over such a tiny sip of success. But Louie feels he has little choice. Each week, hundreds of EPs flood digital stores, and he feels certain that many of them are deploying the same sleazy "marketing" tactics I caught him using. There's no way of knowing, of course, how many artists are juicing up their stats the way Louie is, but I'm less interested in verification than I am in understanding. It has some kind of creepy parallel to Lance Armstrong and the steroid debate plaguing cycling and other sports: if you're certain everyone else is doing it, you'd be a fool not to. I posed that metaphor to Louie, but he didn't seem to get it. Language problems. But I'm pretty sure that he'd agree. As his legitimate SoundCloud followers inch upward, as his tracks break into the absurd sales charts at digital stores that emphasize chart position over the pathetic number of units sold (after all, "#1 Track!" sounds much better than "100 Copies Sold Worldwide!"), he feels vindicated. It's worth it. ----- END

Thunder moose - Threat Level Midnight

Great read! Looking forward to seeing what comes up in the future from him

Looks pretty cool, When it goes android i might look into this...

Scottie you fiend!!! What a hektik set bruzzz you killed it!

Dude.... I FRIGGIN LOVE THIS SET!!!!! Nice one bruv!

Its leaked!! From what i have heard its definitley different, but Cudi is the man!

nice one lads thank you!!!

Fixed

ADJF MEET MAY 17 ?? Who is down

One dance club, Pacha, has dominated the Spanish party paradise of Ibiza since the 1970s. Built on former marshland, this island disco and its all-night parties have become global symbols of hedonistic glamour, and the business has expanded to Buenos Aires, New York and beyond. Lately Pacha’s profits have soared along with the growing popularity of electronic dance music. But so have the fees demanded by the top D.J.’s, to the annoyance of Ricardo Urgell, the 75-year-old Pacha patriarch who runs the club as a family business. Last year he decided that enough was enough. He fired his longtime music director, Danny Whittle, and did not renew the contract for Erick Morillo, a Pacha regular for more than a decade, one of a chain of departures by other headliners like Tiësto, Luciano and Pete Tong. Only one big name, David Guetta, will return this summer, largely to protect his brand, which he built at the club. “The D.J.’s wanted more money to play less,” said José Urgell, known as Piti, who is Mr. Urgell’s 65-year-old brother. “It was an abuse. We had to come up with a new plan because the old one was going to explode.” The Urgells’ move to shake up their D.J. lineup reflects a growing friction in the dance subculture as the music goes mainstream. The budgets behind the dance business are ballooning, with superstar D.J.’s now commanding hundreds of thousands of dollars a night in the megaclubs of Ibiza and Las Vegas, where they once spun anonymously in the dark. Tiësto, perhaps the world’s most popular D.J., is skipping Ibiza altogether this summer. Instead his world tour includes Hakkasan Las Vegas, an 80,000-square-foot megaclub set to open this month at a reported cost of $100 million. “I’ve played in Ibiza every summer for the last 10 summers, and I felt like it was time for a change,” Tiësto said through his publicist. “Las Vegas is an amazing place, and I’m incredibly excited about my residencies at Hakkasan and Wet Republic.” The Urgells chafed at the growing power of celebrity D.J.’s and their handlers and said they longed to return to simpler times when the club wasn’t ruled by money. Ricardo Urgell, the son of a Barcelona engineer, built Pacha in the early 1970s on a desolate half-acre he bought for about $14,000. After its opening in 1973 the club came to represent ultracool debauchery and an escape from the conservative moral code of Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator. Native Ibicencos mixed with artists, hippies, thieves on the lam and those whose bronzed bodies were all the clothing they required. But as the scene grew, the elder Urgells eventually became disenchanted by the music that made them millionaires. “It’s monotonous sound and volume; it’s bodies squeezed together, it’s a little masochistic,” Ricardo Urgell said in a 2011 interview. “The great defect of this music,” he added, “is that it has to be accompanied by drugs. I took Ecstasy just one time in my life and found that out for myself.” Electronic music, Piti Urgell said last month, “hasn’t evolved in 20 years and is for idiots.” The Urgells say that things began to change after 1999, when Ricardo Urgell’s oldest son, Hugo, hired Mr. Whittle, a former British firefighter and rave organizer. Mr. Whittle charted a new strategy for the club, introducing a record label and a magazine, and signed top D.J.’s like Mr. Guetta and Fatboy Slim. The changes raised Pacha’s profile, but the Urgells grew annoyed at how Mr. Whittle indulged the whims of top acts, like redesigning the D.J. booth last year to accommodate Tiësto and finding the Swedish House Mafia trio extra Champagne at island supermarkets. They also clashed when Mr. Whittle began allowing Pacha D.J.’s to spin at the Ushuaïa Beach Hotel, which put on afternoon pool parties, taking its cue from Miami and Las Vegas. “I told them two years ago not to look at Ushuaïa as competition, look at Vegas,” Mr. Whittle said. “The question is, ‘What is attracting people away from Ibiza?’ and that is Vegas.” In just a few years Las Vegas has become a center of gravity for the dance world. Big D.J.’s are booked for long and lucrative residencies at casino nightclubs, and new competition has inflated fees. Along with Hakkasan Las Vegas this month also brings the arrival of Light, which will combine dance music with the acrobatics of Cirque du Soleil. “D.J.’s doing well in the U.S. market will be increasingly torn between the two locations,” Mr. Tong said. “The zeitgeist moment for Ibiza has arrived. It’s no longer the only game in town.” But the Urgells waited a long time to take a stand, and the economics of Big Dance are hard to ignore. Pacha Ibiza, with a capacity of about 3,000, grossed more than 30 million euros (about $40 million) last summer, compared with 7 million euros in 1999, Mr. Whittle said. Pacha paid some acts more than 100,000 euros (roughly $130,000) a night, he said, but all of those D.J.’s generated three times that amount in revenue for the club. Recent business deals have attached values to dance properties that were once unimaginable. SFX Entertainment, controlled by the media investor Robert F. X. Sillerman, paid $50 million for Beatport, a music download store, and $102 million for a majority share of ID&T, a European festival company. Some in the dance world criticize the Urgells for firing Mr. Whittle and say that they misread the market for top D.J. talent. “This is going to cost them a fortune,” Mr. Whittle said of Pacha’s new direction. “I am either dealing with madness or genius, and it’s just about to come out in the wash.” Mr. Whittle could become potential competition. He said the billionaire Ronald Burkle was backing his new D.J. promotions and management agency, and Mr. Whittle, 50, is programming the music for the Cipriani restaurant just down the road in Ibiza, having already signed three Pacha defectors: Luciano, Mr. Morillo and Defected in the House. Amy Thomson, the manager of Swedish House Mafia, who used Pacha to catapult that act in 2009, said the Urgells “just assumed we were the bad guys, when in actual fact the whole business model created around Pacha was one of the most phenomenal of our time.” (She is also the music director at Light in Las Vegas.) In the end the Urgells may not care anymore. They want to recapture the spirit of Ibiza’s yesteryear, when Ricardo Urgell would throw the light switches, and the club would spring to life each night. This summer they plan to make their monthly “Flower Power” party, in which Piti Urgell spins classic rock ’n’ roll, a weekly event. And they are bringing in more underground acts, like the Israeli D.J. Guy Gerber, 38, who has never received $100,000 for a gig. Last month the Urgells met in Miami with Mr. Gerber, who is taking over for Mr. Morillo on Wednesdays, to hear his vision for his weekly show, “Wisdom of the Glove.” He promised to feature indie bands, magicians, fortunetelling machines, maybe a puppeteer. “I was trying to create a night to bring back Ibiza like it used to be 30 years ago,” he said last week. “I want to freak people out.” Days after spending time with Mr. Gerber, Iria Urgell, 26, sent an e-mail to her father, Ricardo Urgell. “We have the best D.J. in the world,” she said, “and a new sense of a family.” Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/arts/music/pacha-in-ibiza-feels-dance-clubs-center-of-gravity-shift.html?_r=0

One of the most famous acts in the world chooses to unveil their new album in a small, off-the-map Australian town and a media frenzy ensues. It may sound like the plot for a quirky Australian comedy, but this is real life. Yesterday, the Narrabri Courier announced it was hosting the “global album launch” of Daft Punk’s hotly-anticipated fourth album Random Access Memories. As hard to believe as that news was, today we have confirmation that one of the biggest dance albums of the decade will be heard for the first time in the regional town of Wee Waa, population 2000. Pitchfork have confirmed the reports overnight, presumably by way of a Sony representative. Sony are expected to make a public statement about the event later today, but inthemix can confirm the label has already purchased the domain name www.daftpunkweewaa.com. So what do we know so far? On the night of May 17, Random Access Memories will be played to 4000 ticket holders in Wee Waa and, it’s thought, streamed live out to the world. As with everything Daft Punk, many of the details about the event are still shrouded in mystery. We’ll be updating this story regularly, so hang around to stay up to date with the latest. In the meanwhile, though, this is what we know… TICKETS Tickets are going for $60 a pop and are limited to 4000. Officially, they go on sale at 9am on Friday the 12th of April through the Venue Tickets website (or you can call them on 02 6792 4654). However, inthemix spoke to a representative from the Narrabri Shire Council this morning who told us that a glitch in the system resulted in a small number of tickets going up for sale last night, after news of the event broke. The council has assured inthemix those ticket sales will be honoured, but couldn’t tell us how many had been snapped up in the tech error. If you managed to get a ticket then, you’ll need to pick it up on May 16 or 17 from the Crossing Theatre in the neighbouring town of Narrabri. Naturally, you can expect the remaining tickets to sell out in an instant – the council already has reports of people camping out to buy them in person. ACCOMMODATION Speaking to inthemix, the Narrabri Shire Council has confirmed that information about accommodation will be released at 9am on Friday morning to coincide with ticket sales. Hotels, motels, houses for holiday rent and camping options will all be available. THE EVENT Let’s be clear: so far, there is nothing to suggest that Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo will be at the Wee Waa event in person. What we do know is that the launch will be held at the Wee Waa showground during the annual Wee Waa show, where the album will be played in full and streamed out online. “Gates open at 3:30 on Friday in readiness for a fun packed weekend of events,” the Wee Waa town website promises. “Kicking off with the Daft Punk launch on Friday night other events will include typical Australian country show entertainment including the pet show, showgirl competition, cross cut saw competition, fireworks and much more.” As for how the townsfolk are feeling about it? A Shire Council representative told inthemix the town is “absolutely excited” and that the event is “a coup for regional Australia”. THE TOWN Wondering where the heck Wee Waa is? You’re not alone. Pronounced Wee-War, the town is situated on the North-Western slopes of regional NSW. That’s about 570 kilometres or eight hours drive from Sydney, or six hours by car from Brisbane. Wee Waa is part of the Narrabri Shire and is 40 kilometres from the larger town of the same name, which has a slightly larger population of 6,100. According to the Wee Waa website, the town boasts a “butcher (coming soon), a baker and a candlestick maker”- you can’t make this stuff up! There’s also a café and not one but two pubs, for those in search of food and drink. This morning, inthemix spoke to Narrabri Shire tradesperson steward Zoe Miguel, who told us she couldn’t comment on how preparations were getting underway as “I’ve honestly got no idea, I’m currently picking cotton and haven’t been into town for weeks”. Take a look at an aerial view of the town below. Link:http://www.inthemix.com.au/news/55021/Daft_Punks_Wee_Waa_album_launch_Everything_you_need_to_know