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Articles, Events, Reviews

My EDC Orlando Experience

My first rave was when I was 16 years old, when my brother put on the show at a local fire hall. Both my parents and grandparents attended. My parents showed up probably because they had to…you know, legal reasons and all, and my grandparents and I to show our support.

The music was great, with DJ Deadly Buda headlining. As an invincible teen, I wanted to jump in the mosh pit, flail around running into everyone, and let out some of that pent-up teen aggression. As luck would have it, though, I made it around the pit once and then fell, only to look up from the ground, and see a nice, scruffy pair of combat boots heading my way. The next thing I knew, a multitude of arms were there helping me up and saving me from being crushed by those boots. That ended my mosh pit days, but what remained was the knowledge of that feeling of caring from those faceless helpers.

Enter 2017, where I was given the opportunity to attend Electric Daisy Carnival in Orlando, as a VIP. It’s been 28 years since that first rave, and my how things have changed…or have they? EDM has become so popular that whole football fields are necessary to accommodate all the partygoers. Tinker Field was a huge venue with multiple stages (back in 1989, there’d only been one). There were chill out zones, amusement park rides, and vendors of all kinds. Inflatable furniture anyone? How about some organic jewelry? What amazed me was how the good folks at Insomniac had all these stages outside near each other, each with a DJ playing their own music, yet the sound from one never interfered with the other. You heard each clearly without distortion or distraction from the other, yet there were no walls or buffers of any kind. Amazing acoustic planning!

Ferris Wheel at EDC Orlando 2017

The layout and flow of traffic was also planned out well. For the amount of people at the show, one never felt overcrowded, and liquid refreshment and chill areas were always right there, much different from, say, and other famous Kingdom here in Orlando.

I truly enjoyed all the colorful lights everywhere. The Kinetic stage was my favorite, with its fireworks, water fountains, light show, dancers and video screen imagery, which was planned to the music with the goddess’s heart beating and close-ups of the djs. Kudos to the creative team! Partygoers were also creative in their dress, from furries to kandi kids, butt-cheek models to neon-clad gentlemen, marching bands, stilt walkers, and oversized fish. Those last three might have been Insomniac’s doing, but oh what fun and good vibes they made for. Some of my favorites were the lite-up butterfly wing cape, the lite-up faux fur coat and the lite-up tutu. Notice a trend here? What I didn’t notice were any combat boots or mosh pits. Nor did I miss them, to be honest. What I loved seeing was that EDM has become so popular, that people danced peacefully next to each other all over the field and most of all that raves are still multi-generational.

While waiting for a friend to buy refreshments, I started talking to a young girl with glitter and rhinestones on her face and her blonde hair in braided pigtails. She was 26 and a graduate of Flagler College. She and her Dad had come all the way from Jacksonville for the show. Her mom liked more classically played music and had opted to stay home. However, as the marching band passed by, she exclaimed to her dad how “Mom really would have liked that.”

I bet there was more her mom could have appreciated: the goddess-designed stage, the creative outfits, the more chill VIP area, and most of all, the family bonding. Back at my first rave, my grandparents found the music sounded “quite funny”, but they still polka-danced to it anyway. I’d like to believe that had my grandparents been alive and with me at EDC that they’d have been there in the VIP area drinking, eating, and polka dancing into the night. That’s what’s so great about EDM shows, there is something for everyone to enjoy and a feeling of acceptance for whoever you are.

My niece is only 8 years old at the moment, but I hope one day to take her to a rave as well and continue on the tradition.

Articles

The Hard Data and Musicoin Pilot Program Report

The Hard Data is an electronic dance music magazine, both print and online, that focuses on several small sub-genres of EDM music. The Musicoin Foundation oversees the maintenance and promotion of a music-focused cryptocurrency called Musicoin. In August of 2017, the two entities endeavored on a pilot program to find out how Musicoin might positively effect a small music scene, and at the same time see if that scene would embrace Musicoin. The program lasted until August 31, 2017. This report was written on the evening of August 30, 2017.

The 31-day program consisted of the following aspects:

  1. The Hard Data would pay writers, photographers, web developers, social media sharers, and artists with Musicoin for the month, in an effort to familiarize the creative base of The Hard Data with the cryptocurrency.
  2. The Hard Data would encourage user sign-ups for Musicoin.
  3. The Hard Data would accept Musicoin for magazine subscriptions and t-shirt sales.

Results

During the pilot program, theharddata.com doubled its readership. Over 2,500 unique users visited thehardddata.com in August, only a little over 1,200 users had visited the site in June and July, respectively.

theharddata.com also greatly increased its flow of content.
23 unique articles were published on theharddata.com during the program, four posts were on its Steemit.com page, three posts were translated to Russian for Golos.io, and a press release and a unique Facebook photo album were uploaded to The Hard Data’s Facebook page. As of this writing, there are still a few articles and photos expected under the program that still need turned in and published after the August 31 deadline. However, the bulk of expected content (35 articles) was on schedule.

The type of content expanded.
During the program, several articles were translated by the community from English into the following languages: Russian, German, and Spanish. This was a new development for theharddata.com, and seemed instigated by the offer of Musicoin for the work.

Adoption of Musicoin by The Hard Data’s creative community was good, especially considering the vast majority of the community was only barely familiar with Bitcoin.
 A total of 15 creative contributors were paid with Musicoin during the program, of those, and only four had ever owned a cryptocurrency previously.

During the program, the price of Musicoin tripled.
On August 1, Musiccoin was priced at about .015 USD, and rose to  .048 USD by August 29. This of course intrigued the new adopters. However, many have not taken the required steps they would need to actually sell the Musicoin on Bittrex or Cryptopia because the process is still confusing to them.

During the beginning of the Pilot Program, the biggest hurdle was simply talking to potential users to get them to sign-up for an account and get in the system. About a week-and-a-half was spent focusing on this before the bulk of content could be created in the program.

Users were also paid to share content via social media.
This part of the program was less successful than the content creation in that not as many users signed-up for this task. This was perhaps because The Hard Data was primarily focused on content creation, and spent more time reaching out to those potential users. That said, by the time this article is read by the majority of the public, over 1,050 links back to content generated during the Pilot Program will have been shared on social media. So, the word got out none-the-less, but it would have been nice to have a larger number of users aggressively sharing the content.

67 New Users signed-up via The Hard Data’s sign-up link during the Pilot Program.
12 of these would release music on the platform. Two of these users also contributed to content on theharddata.com. So, of 67 sign-ups, 24 (36%) were active creators in some way to the music ecosystem facilitated by Musicoin.

0 subscriptions or t-shirts were purchased with Musicoin during the Pilot Program.
This was disappointing. However, there was no real online-shopping cart for users to make a purchase. Essentially, the purchase would have had to be made via Musicoin’s commenting interface built into musicoin.org, and would have required theharddata.com to comment back and then contact via email to complete the transaction. So, this aspect of the Pilot Program I believe is only a failure because of the technical handicaps and time constraints.

An unexpected result of the Pilot Program was that the first blockchain-enabled DJ mix was created, which garnered outside press on at least three well-known cryptocurrency websites and brought attention to Musicoin.

Pending Results

There are still a few loose-ends to tie-up to relevant to the Pilot Program. These pending results of the Pilot Program won’t have much directly measurable results with the public though, and as such were considered a secondary priority. Nonetheless, they are expected to be completed shortly.

These aspects currently in process are: a modified version of this report will appear in the print version of The Hard Data magazine. There are several jobs for the print issue that still must be finalized by its publication on September 21. Initially, the print magazine was scheduled for the last week of August. However, Insomniac Events—the USA’s largest EDM show producer—agreed to buy an ad in the upcoming issue, and the artwork will not be ready until the first week of September. I decided it would be best to delay the printing a week or two to facilitate the nation’s largest event company in the magazine’s space.

3.5 hours are still pending on web development tasks. The proposed tasks were integrating Musicoin with theharddata.com via API more directly, and streamlining various aspects of the site.

Conclusion

Obviously, I have a biased conclusion being the publisher of The Hard Data. However, I think the numbers support my view that the Pilot Program achieved important goals.

  1. It introduced users unfamiliar with cryptocurrency to accept the currency in exchange for services.
  2. Because content creators were paid, it doubled the readership of the site, and generated more, better, and wider-ranging content, expanding the music ecosystem with which the magazine and Musicoin was involved with.
  3. Musicoin tripled in price. Though the Pilot Program was not solely responsible for the uptick in price, it was an active and visible participant aggressively spreading the word of Musicoin’s adoption to crypto and non-crypto users, which was recognized by the crypto community.

Ultimately, I believe the Pilot Program demonstrates that Musicoin can have a profound impact on a small music scene and these techniques can be extrapolated to larger music ecosystems. It can be reasonably concluded that the only things delaying Musicoin’s greater adoption can mostly be solved by mere manpower. The Hard Data/Musicoin Pilot Program has established that non-crypto users will accept and adopt the usage of Musicoin in exchange for services and listening to music.