Chatting with…a Flashfwd nominee Pt 4

Posted on | February 27, 2010 | No Comments

Next up is Craig Swann who is the “Chief Imagination Officer” of ClubCreate. Seems like a fitting title for a Deadhead involved in a music tech company. I can joke because I too love the Dead. Anyways, this is Craig’s story.

1. Tell me who you are in 140 characters or less.

ClubCreate is a free interactive music platform for anyone with an internet connection to quickly and easily create/remix music.

2. Why and how did you get involved in the music industry?

Music has always played a strong visceral role in my life. Led by the moment, as a youngster, when I first heard Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner – I realized that “music”, in the right hands, could be transformed into something altogether different and magical. I had the unique opportunity of witnessing the Internet in the early 90’s via University and at the same time i was part-time following the Grateful Dead. The powerful convergence of this up and coming technology, with the raw expressive musical inventiveness of the Dead combined with the massive social and community energy that came with their shows showed me a vision of the future that I wanted to be a part of or create. Music, Technology & People. I just had to wait, as I discovered, for the technology.

3. What’s your idea? Does your idea/your work/your company fill a void in the music industry? Is your idea working? why or why not? Who is doing something similar to you? How are you different/better?

Our idea is simple really – connecting people to music. We provide extremely simple, yet powerful online music tools to empower musical creativity and social sharing. We believe the relationship between artist and fan is at the core and we are exploring ways to connect fans with artists using technology. We are building technology that allows music lovers to not just play music, but play with the music. By breaking down music into it’s building blocks of stems, loops and samples we provide a musical playground where – like lego-pieces – fans can re-create, re-imagine and re-mix the music they love. By creating this new piece of music they’ve a) connected on a powerful emotional level with the content by creating it, b) become a co-creator alongside their favorite artist and c) created a piece of content that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.

We are focused on bridging the gap between Guitar Hero / Rockband and pure musical creation. Music should be fun, but it should also be creative and collaborative. You shouldn’t need to understand music theory or play an instrument to participate – and that is our focus – creating the technology that can ‘take away the black keys’ and expose music as a fun, interactive, collaborative and *creative* process that can be experienced and shared by as many people as possible.

4. What are you doing to promote FlashFwd and getting people to nominate you?

We did post the opportunity and news on our site, but quite honestly we have gone more old-school in this approach reaching out to people that understand what we are doing and who have seen this concept grow and evolve over the last few years. We could have hit our members with a batch email asking them to nominate us, and I am sure many would (as they are passionate about the service ) and you probably would have received many additional nominations – however we didn’t want to rely on the easy social mechanisms as powerful and as relevant as they are to our model. So, our unique approach was much more organic and offline - powering our nominations with human energy more than social/tech savvy. Call us crazy