26,426 views of Jeeni Blogs since we launched Crowdcube

Jeeni Blog

Helping the next generation of talent to build a global fanbase

26,426 views of Jeeni Blogs since we launched Crowdcube

With 5 days to go on Crowdcube we are reflecting on what we could have done better and how we could have improved our campaign, as well as on our successes. Even though we "bust a gut" working 7 days a week for 5 months, we always want to reflect and improve where we can. Both Mel and I are academic in terms of looking at all the options and possibilities and like to analyse our work, and most days we take time to look at how things could be improved. We are not critical of each other, just honest and reflective in an open and supportive way. Jeeni, the social music platform that brings artists closer to their fans and shares revenue ethically, has successfully raised over £340K on Crowdcube across three rounds. If you want to see our pitch click HERE.

As part of the campaign we launched Jeeni.blog which has been a huge success and we have had over 26,426 active views, and my LinkedIn has over 12,000 followers. LinkedIn has become my preferred social media and we have genuinely started moving away from Twitter and Instagram. I find it much more professional, interesting and informative. So as part of our learning we are going to learn how LinkedIn can best support Jeeni going forward.

Our Facebook Group Independent Musicians and Performers has also been a huge success with over 2,500 new and active members with organic growth, and over 1,300 posts, comments and reactions with no advertising spend, engaging with over 30,000 unsigned artists with a zero cost of acquisition.

Click HERE to visit or return to jeeni.com

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11
Mar

A Legend, A Bus, A Fan and A New Chapter

A Legend, A Bus, A Fan and A New Chapter. In 2018, our chosen charity ‘Arms Around the Child’ reached out for Jeeni’s help. In their efforts to help their cause, the charity had acquired a vehicle with history, was completely unique and of significance to its previous owner and his fans. However, at this stage it needed serious help. That help sadly, became a burden to the charity and its finances, so the vehicle had to be sold. Here the story unfolds............... A Legend Back in 1970, Sir Paul McCartney had a life-changing moment. We’ve all had them. Life takes a turn and you find yourself going in a slightly, or very different direction. For legend Sir Paul, it was one door closing and another opening. A year later, he formed a band called Wings, with Denny Seiwell and Denny Laine, plus his wife, Linda. After an initial album release and some university gigging, McCartney was enjoying his simpler life away from the fast lane. He decided to take the band on the road for the summer, touring Europe. Sir Paul McCartney - A Legend Wings on their Tour Bus A Bus In 1972 the ‘Wings Over Europe’ tour took place – 25 dates over two months and 7,500 miles. All fairly standard stuff for any band, apart from the mode of transport. McCartney decided the band would be travelling in style, in the form of a vintage 1953 Bristol Double Decker ‘Open Topped’ bus, registration WNO 481. Carnaby Street boutique owner, Tom Slater was charged with fitting out the bus, giving it a bright paint job and livery announcing the tour and band had arrived. The band ate, slept and practiced on the bus, lying in the sun on the top deck writing their next album ‘Red Rose Speedway’ and even the track ‘Live and Let Die’ for the first James Bond movie for Roger Moore. WNO 481 - Wings Tour Bus A Fan(s) After the successful tour, a handful of other worldly adventures and a 2017 tweet from Sir Paul asking if anyone knew where the bus might be, WNO 481 (as it’s affectionately known) ended up being rescued and returned to the UK by ‘Arms Around the Child’ trustee Justin James. It was his difficult decision in 2018, to have to sell the bus and relieve the charity of the financial burden it had become. However, for Super-Fan Tom Jennings and his wife Rose, it was a dream come true and a life ambition fulfilled. Tom has since set about completing the restoration of the bus, bringing in fans from all over the world and setting up a fabulous site www.1972wingstourbus.com giving regular updates on progress of WNO 481, as well as the bus’s colourful history. It’s a fabulous read! A New Chapter On the back of this new connection, Jeeni are very pleased to have created a working partnership with Tom and Rose, and their merry band of ‘Busketeers’. We hope to work with them, their amazing bus, Sir Paul and our hefty music connections to create new and positive adventures for WNO 481. Jeeni have been granted access to the bus for a certain number of weeks per year and our intention is to use these weeks to create events and gigs for our Jeeni artists to perform. For Jeeni SuperFans there will be the chance to secure early tickets and memorabilia for the events and the bands performing. As with the emergence of Wings, the band and their music, we would like the bus to play a part in the launch of new music talent, giving performers the chance to thank supportive fans, share the experience and excitement of live performing, as well as creating new fanbases. Jeeni as a platform, has a large, growing audience of music lovers, as well as performers. The instant opportunities offered with their engaged social media, allows for followers to be ‘teased’ with where upcoming venues may be, before official announcements and tickets are released, creating a buzz and anticipating excitement. This cool, utterly unique piece of British rock and roll and engineering history has much to look forward to, as do the generations of music fans past and present, who will have the opportunity to be entertained by the Jeeni and ‘Wings Over Europe’ bus and events. www.jeeni.com www.1972wingstourbus.com www.armsaroundthechild.org

11
Jun

Inside Story with Keithian

Kethian is a Singer, Songwriter, Musician, Actor and Producer based in the US and who performed his song ‘Communicate’ in the JAM Festival collaboration in April. Kethian is relaxing in his Californian back yard as the interview with Kate takes place. “You recorded your track ‘Communicate’ live from your home studio for the JAM Festival, we have all faced the technical difficulties of working from home over the last year, but did you face any whilst recording?” she asks. He says that there were not any technical issues as such but recording at home always presents some issues, for example the neighbour had the lawnmower on but luckily, he didn’t think we could hear. His song ‘Communicate’ is beautiful and very emotive. When asked about his inspiration for writing it, he said that it came from his friend, who so sadly committed suicide, and so the song was an open letter to this friend, as well as anyone else that is struggling and needs to communicate as it is one of those things that “you actually have to do to feel better or to get your thoughts out, so that’s exactly what that song was about.” Kethian was born in New Orleans into a “showbizzy family.” Kate asks about what influence their work had on him as a child growing up and how it inspired his music and career. He grew up in Louisiana and Texas, “New Orleans is just full of music, everywhere you go”, his parents were in music as well as his grandparents so making music for him was something that “just happened, I’ve never known any different.” Kethian was previously signed to a major record label, but has ended up going independent, Kate asks why he made this decision “It wasn’t really the best experience. I figured if I went independent, I could give myself the better experience, and control creativity and stuff like that, and now that I’m my own everything, I’m able to understand myself more as an artist, what I need, what I want, how I want to promote, or what songs I want to choose” he shouts excitedly. In 2018 Kethian was working on music for Rhianna, he said “it was one of those things that just happened, although she hasn’t actually released the music yet and I wish I had some insider knowledge as to when she will, but I don’t! Basically, after I left the label, I was a writer and producer...I was writing for various artists and one of them said ‘this is gonna be for Rhianna’ and I was like ‘what?!’ and that’s how it happened. I met the [person] that I work with now and produce most of my music with currently and it has just been cohesive since then.” Kethian is currently raising investment for his next project: “It makes me feel really good as an artist when someone invests in me because it means that they believe in me as an artist, and as an art, a lot of our motivation and motivators are to make people happy and just to feel something or have an outlet, so to be supported in this way makes me feel so much more confident.” In response to this comment, Kate explains what Jeeni is: a platform for new and upcoming artists which seeks to support them in the best way possible and asks Kethian what his advice would be for aspiring artists that are just starting out. “Simply be the best artist that you can be and be the most you can be in life for you. It’s one of those things…being an artist is so giving, you walk around with your art, you are your art, and so when someone says something a little different or a little insane, it touches you more…just be confident, stay close to your art and stay close to you as a person and just love every bit of it.” What can we expect from him in the future? He expresses his excitement in regard to doing more shows with Jeeni and is hopeful for the future of live shows and touring as the world returns to normality after the Covid-19 pandemic. He says that he ultimately wants to “put out as much music as my fans want me to and as much as I want.” Through AmplifyX, one of our collaborators from the JAM festival, Kethian is working on his new EP called Green Clouds which is due at the end of May and you can invest now. To find out more about Kethian, listen to his music and invest, please visit https://jeeni.com/showcase/keithian/

06
Jun

Mel Croucher - Multimedia Entertainment - Ahead of his Time.

Today, Jeeni has returned to Crowdcube to raise more funds for helping new talent. Jeeni founding director Mel Croucher says, “I admit we're ahead of our original schedule, but there's still so much more to do. We need to scale our online platform globally now and build our mass artist showcases. Then we can hit all our targets, and give our new artists the recognition they deserve.” If you want to see our pitch click HERE. Mel has been writing the best-loved column in top-selling tech magazines for over 30 years. Now he's agreed to share his work with all our members. He's a video games pioneer and musician, and to to find out more about Mel check out his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Croucher. Here's one of Mel's latest! I produced my first multi-media entertainment at the age of eight. It was a birthday gift for my mum. I called it Smellyvision. TV sets had begun to appear in the cleaner homes down my street, but my family was still years away from owning one of those magic boxes with their nine-inch screens. So I made my own. I took a cardboard box and cut a porthole in it, and used my mum's crank-handle mangle to scroll up the storyline that I drew on the reverse of a yard of wallpaper. The soundtrack lasted just under three minutes, which determined the length of my entertainment. It was a recording by the singing cowboy Roy Rogers, played on a shellac disc that spun at 78 revolutions a minute, also driven by a manual crank. But the best bits of my Smellyvision show were the different pongs that accompanied each segment of the story. I can still feel the sting of my mum's flattened hand because I had used her special perfume to enhance the production. The scent was called Evening In Paris, and had been maturing in a little blue bottle too precious to use since the 1930s. I sourced the smell of horses after the coalman's wagon had passed by, and that didn't go down well with my mum either. But how can you have a multimedia show about cowgirls and cowboys without perfume and horseshit? Capcom had exactly the same idea for their videogame Resident Evil 7, and I was not in the least surprised to discover that it too was horseshit. It was marketed as a "4D candle smelling of old timber and blood", with the brand name Blood, Sweat And Fears, and a burning time of 18 hours. The idea was to fire up the stinking candle to enhance gameplay, having handed over fifteen dollars for the privilege. As I have already said, it was crap, unless of course you managed to knock over the candle during your gaming frenzy, and emulate the zombies in the game by setting fire to your face. It wasn’t the first time that Resident Evil had been used to extort money for idiotic multimedia ideas. Back in 2005, there was a crummy accessory for the Nintendo Game Cube device called the Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Controller. It was nothing more than a standard Game Cube handset with a vibrator unit and a "realistic chainsaw roar", that sounded like a wasp trapped in a jam jar. But gamers seemed to be willing to lay out fifty dollars for the privilege of acting like dorks, so what do I know. In fact Nintendo are serial abusers when it comes to dopey add-ons. Who can forget their Super Scope wireless light gun? Well, just about everybody, it turns out. It was a truly dreadful lump of overpriced plastic that only worked with a handful of games, and devoured AA batteries at the rate of six every four hours. And how about the Nintendo Power Pad which cost anything up to two hundred bucks way back in the 1980s. This was nothing more than a little shiny mat with a dozen or so pressure sensors in it. The idea was to jump around its red and blue squishy bits in order to trigger actions during video gameplay, and break your ankles in doing so. That's why most players resorted to cheating, by going down on all fours and using their fists to bash it into submission, My favourite Nintendo multimedia device is the DK Bongo. It's a totally stupid pair of miniature bongo drums, which suits me just fine. There's a built-in microphone to monitor my bongo-playing skills, and help track my progress as I play along to some of the worst music tracks in recorded history. To be honest, it works just as well if I clap my hands or produce fart noises, but sometimes honesty is not the best policy. After years of misuse, my DK Bongo still works fine and gives me innocent pleasure. Which brings me back to Resident Evil. Since its launch, the Resident Evil series has generated just over one billion dollars, making it the most profitable videogame spin-off in history. The only reward I ever got for my Smellyvision efforts was a sore arse. But I have never claimed to be a profiteer in these matters, only that when it comes to multi-media innovation I have always been way ahead of my time. Click HERE to visit or return to jeeni.com

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