KICKSTART your career: Introducing our super-star video wrangler Aleah MO

Jeeni Blog

Helping the next generation of talent to build a global fanbase

KICKSTART your career: Introducing our super-star video wrangler Aleah MO

JEENI are delighted to be employing with the Government’s Kickstart Scheme initiative.

Aleah Mo (she/her) was our first Kickstart recruit. Aleah is a 19-year-old dancer and dance teacher from Portsmouth. Since Aleah joined the team, JEENI has helped her to showcase her talent and keep 100% of the rewards.

Launched by Rishi Sunak last September as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Government’s Kickstart Scheme provides funding to employers to create jobs for 16–24-year-olds who are receiving Universal Credit and at risk of long-term unemployment.

As a fast-growing new business, still in its exciting dewy youth. JEENI are delighted to have signed up for the scheme. The successful Kickstart employees are taken on for initial placement of up to 6 months. And given training to learn new skills, and ongoing support to look for long-term, permanent work.

To qualify for the Kickstart Scheme, jobs offered must be brand new positions that were not previously available at the company. For JEENI, this works perfectly as the company is currently growing and expanding at a rapid rate. Meaning that these exciting new roles have evolved naturally.

Aleah joined Team JEENI in March. As one of our Marketing Assistants, she creates showcases for many different independent performers like herself. And she’s already using the skills she has learned so far to promote her own talent and services. With Kickstart Employees working for up to 25 hours per week. Aleah says her hours easily fit around her busy schedule of teaching and dancing.

“JEENI is such a great company and the hours I work really fit around my dance, which is really beneficial for me, because I am a teacher, so most evenings I am dancing as well as on the weekends. “
Aleah Mo.

The Movement Initiative

The Dance Company that Aleah dances for is called The Movement Initiative (TMI). TMI is a Charity Dance School located in Southsea, formed to help dancers fulfil their full potential. By providing opportunities, facilities, and classes for dancers to learn excel, and perform regardless of their age and ability. TMI are World Champions in the International Dance Organisation. Aleah is already using what she's learnt as a Marketing Assistant for JEENI to help promote her dance school and increase their following. As well as her own individual talent, all or free.

Aleah, along with some other dance school members, and a wide range of independent dancers will also be featuring in JEENI’s next online festival! Our first themed festival, the theme, of course, being DANCE which Aleah is “super-excited” about!

If you’re interested in working for JEENI, featuring in one of our upcoming festivals or just want to find out how we can help you promote your talents and services. Contact the Business Helpdesk here: https://jeeni.com/support/

To check out the full Inside Story Interview with Aleah Mo click here: Inside Story: Aleah Mo interview

BACK

05
Jun

How to Stay Sane While Sheltering in Place

by Kelli Richards, Jeeni MD USA Many of us have been going a little stir crazy after several weeks of sheltering in place. But given it’s likely we’ll be in this situation for quite a while longer, it’s to our benefit to find ways to retain our sanity during these challenging times. Here are a few ideas to share that I’ve found have been working for me. Stick with a schedule and routine — what worked for you when things were ‘normal’? Keep doing those things now. For me, it includes getting up early, exercising, meditating, good nutrition, getting outdoors every day, sticking with my work routines (work bursts, scheduling calls and Zoom video chats), stretching, staying hydrated, and getting plenty of sleep. I’m getting an extra hour daily now to boost my immune system — and of course the additional rest has all kinds of extra benefits for your mind and body as well. Reading daily is also an anchor for me, so it’s paramount (at least for me) that I make time for that. Make time to connect with friends, family, colleagues and loved ones. Make sure you balance your time between work and play/rest. Move your body daily, however that works for you. Take time to make nutritious meals for yourself and keep your house clean and tidy. Watch something funny, educational, or inspiring on TV if it moves you. Minimize your exposure to news — limit your intake to maybe 2x/day. Listen to great music throughout the day. Have fresh flowers around and get your nature intake daily. Those are some of my tips — I’d love to know what some of yours are that are helping you in these times. Be sure to leave a comment! Click HERE to visit or return to jeeni.com

21
Dec

Welcome to Our Annual Round-Up of The Jeeni Project for 2021.

The pandemic has had a devastating effect on independent musicians and performers who are the core subscribers to the Jeeni platform. 83% of our professionals have been unable to find regular work, 33% of our artists have not earned a penny since restrictions were lifted earlier this year, and 20% say they will give up the struggle for recognition permanently. In support of our existing membership, we agreed to suspend paid subscriptions during the lockdown and may do so again in light of the current situation. Our Generation-4 platform was released on schedule, and our Generation-5 platform is scheduled for release on Amazon Web Services in the second quarter of 2022. This year, our pre-market valuation increased by 12.5% to £4.5million. Our awards and grant funding increased to £245,540 since launch and our investment funding increased to £513,734 since launch. The number of members in our musicians and artists community increased to 9,979, of which 5,424 are often active and 4,555 are continually active. The number of artist showcases on Jeeni increased to 2,492 with a global audience outreach to 3,430,790 fans. Team Jeeni increased to 15 core members. We launched our popular channel of Inside Story celebrity interviews, alongside Artist-of-the-Day and weekly News Roundups. Our most recent Jeeni Festival was enjoyed by 27,489 viewers, of which 7,739 were live-stream, plus another 19,750 on catch-up. Our world première of the jazz opera Spring Street topped 67,000 viewers, and for the first time, we achieved 10,000 visits to the Jeeni platform in one hour. Four of our strategic partners have become prominent for mutually beneficial marketing and support: BIMM - Europe’s largest music institute, Gradfuel - with over 10,000 graduates on their books, SeedLegals - the UK’s Number One growth hub, and Chillblast - the UK’s most awarded PC manufacturer. Stay safe and well, The Jeeni team.

10
Jun

Mel's bedtime story

Once upon a time, I created a platform called jeeni.com which is where independent artists perform their music in front of new fans, and get rewarded for their efforts. On a Saturday night we ran a live global music festival featuring 18 acts from both sides of the Atlantic. The oldest performer was over 70, the youngest was under 10. They were brilliant, each in their own way. We broadcast over social media and websites. There were no adverts, there were no fakes, there was no hype. It didn't cost us a penny to run. Everyone had a ball. We are part of a revolutionary process that is killing a corrupt and rotting music industry which has held both audience and performer to ransom since the 1890s. So if you will indulge me, I'd like to tell you how, and why ... I'm an old hoarder, I hoard old music recordings, and when I say old I mean really old. Upstairs, in what was once a studio but has turned into an Irish Setter leisure lounge, there are several hundred wax cylinders from the 1890s. Each cylinder is a unique recording from an age before duplication was possible. If Miss Florrie Forde wanted to sell a hundred copies of Hold Your Hand Out You Naughty Boy to her adoring public, then she had to keep lubricated and trill the bloody thing into a brass horn a hundred times and record it onto wax in real time. But to me the beauty of these cylinders is not that each one is a unique recording, but that each one is mercifully short, rotating at 120 revolutions a minute and lasting a meagre two minutes, because that's all a wax cylinder can hold. And so the two minute pop single was born. At the start of the twentieth century discs replaced cylinders, but not a lot changed. I have another room full of shellac discs that spin at 78 revolutions a minute. When it came to pop singles from artists bringing joy to the world throughout the first half of the twentieth century, they had just under three minutes to do it in. And if they were any good, just under three minutes was plenty. I feel personally to blame for what happened next, because in the hour of my birth in 1948, the microgroove vinyl disc hit the market, spinning at what my Irish chums call dirty tree and a turd revolutions per minute. I have an entire wall of vinyl albums, with their glorious covers and sleeve notes. And yes, they are arranged in alphabetical order by artist and date-order of release. Their storage capacity is approximately twenty-five minutes a side, which is usually twenty-two minutes too long. And on the opposite wall is where all my CDs sulk, each one capable of storing seventy-four minutes of audio, and not one of them played since the turn of this century. Why? Because a hacker called SoloH went and ripped the source code of something called the Fraunhofer MP3 encoder and spread it all over the internet for free. Thanks to SoloH, I can not only digitise my entire collection of recorded music without any restrictions on playing time, I can access the entire library of everything that has ever been recorded, for ever. My phone weighs exactly the same as my 78rpm copy of Little Richard's single Tutti Frutti, which runs for two minutes 28 seconds of total perfection. My phone holds 21,417 tracks in MP3 format, some of them complete symphonies, which are pretty good, some of them prog-rock drum solos, as used by Viet Cong torturers to break the spirit of the enemy. My desktop hard drive and cloud-accounts contain too many tracks to keep track of. I declare that my motivation for amassing this ludicrous collection of music was that one day it would bring me comfort in my old age, when my body and brain become enfeebled and I feel the need to keep hold of past pleasures while dying. As it turns out, I started playing my collection early, during lockdown, and wished I was dead by the end of day three. The singles were great, but the albums were mostly insufferable. Which is when I realised that the music album is stone dead, and the nightmare of a lifetime of audio padding is finally over. Then the real truth hit me. The recorded music industry is dead too. Thanks to COVID19 there has been an explosion of new creativity. Everyone is now a record producer, anyone can run a broadcast music channel, and that's exactly what everyone and anyone seems to be doing, including me. The spongers and leeches and shysters have been exposed as completely unnecessary, as have most of the agents, publicists and managers. They are no longer able to milk performers in our new world of social distancing, because they have lost their power. It's the remote audience that now has the power, and this audience wants instant gratification, not a load of overhyped, overwrought, overlong, flimflam. Jeeni.com is my final project in a very long career. I'm giving my artists three minutes per track to nail it, because that's what my old hoard tells me is right. And I hope you agree that in order to shine, three minutes is all that anyone should ever need.

Jeeni Blog