Radio Dubroom, Creative Commons Archive rescued and available again!

WWW, July 13 2013 - After the sudden and unannounced removal of all MP3 files from IODA Promonet which provided the Dubroom visitors with hundreds of free/legal MP3 files, and after the unfortunate but financially necessary decision to remove the podcasts and other files from Podbean a lot of site-cleaning had to be done. A report.

Yes, it actually was quite a shock to realize that 100's of reviews (all with links) had to be removed. This included artist pages and much more, not just a simple deletion of pages. It was painful but it is done. Then came the next bill for Podbean and it was no longer affordable. Podbean did not just host the podcasts, but also a lot of CreativeCommons albums and singles. An alternative had to be found and at least a temporal one is.

In short, the Dubroom's archive of Creative Commons released material is now hosted on the Dubroom's own server. Fortunately there is enough space. All links have been updated of the site, blog and forum. The podcasts are now stored on a SkyDrive, from where they can be downloaded. There are links on http://radio.dubroom.org and elsewhere on the website. This might just be a temporal solution, in fact it probably is, but for now it is like that. In a way, it makes Radio Dubroom a bit exclusive as we're no longer listed on podcast websites and only visitors/readers of the Dubroom website will have direct access to the non-stop mixes.

Those of you who like to link to the podcasts and/or Creative Commons material, can still do so. However, it is best when you link to the pages that start with http://redirect.dubroom.org as files may move elsewhere in the future and you then might have to change a lot of pages/links. A redirect page, as used by the Dubroom also, can simply be changed in half a minute, without having to worry which page links when to which file.

To conclude about two weeks of pretty hard backstage work on the site, blogs and forum: everything should be working again even though we've lost hundreds of MP3 links. Hopefully you still have them on your computer. The Creative Commons archive is rescued as well as the shows of Radio Dubroom. Happy downloading and listening!

One Love,
Messian Dread (Dubroom Webmaster)

Music Industry Austerity Hits The Dubroom: Hundreds Of Reviewed MP3's No Longer Available

WWW, April 2013 - Sad and bad news: it turns out that IODA has pulled the plug out of it's promotional program which provided the Dubroom visitors with hundreds of free and legal MP3 files. This means that currently, hundreds of links do no longer work and will have to be removed in the upcoming times. Truly a sad "development" for the Online (DUB) Reggae Community and for the Dubroom visitors in particular, as a true resource of available Reggae has been switched of with the touch of a button at some company HQ.
Not much is known about this move, but it seems like it has something to do with a fusion between IODA and The Orchard, a New York based company. Here's one blog about it:

The Quiet Death Of IODA Promonet

Most people don’t know what IODAPromonet is, or was. And I don’t see any news articles about it closing, so I’m making a little post to say goodbye to what was a remarkable resource. IODA (now merged with Orchard) is an online distributor of recordings: they take the music made by independent labels like the one I record for, and feed it out to iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and other online music retailers and subscription services. Promonet was a site that IODA created, which gave bloggers some tools to easily post and promote music in the IODA catalog. The idea was to encouraged people to discover and promote music in the “Long Tail” – the vast, undiscovered or under-discovered bulk of contemporary recorded music. I used it extensively, posting links to hundreds of records and promotional free mp3s that I found there over the years. Word is that as of today, the site is going dark along with all the content in it. I’ll miss it. But it isn’t a huge surprise. In the evolution of music and commerce in the digital age, there are hundreds of former sites. I’ve been following this stuff since IUMA. What a long strange tail it’s been.

http://ericdin.com/the-quiet-death-of-ioda-promonet/

We could MP3.com to that list as well, along with other (smaller) sites.

Now, what does this mean for the Dubroom? Apart from the obvious "austerity" as hundreds of reviewed MP3's are no longer available for download or use in future podcasts, it's kind of "back to basics" because the focus will obviously be more to the independant online producers, musicians and net labels.

In the coming weeks, links and reviews will be removed from site, forum and blogs.

 EDIT May 2012: Links have been removed from site, forum and blogs. The reviews have not been removed but remain as so-called "orphan pages", pages without any link to them. Should in the future the tracks become available again, it would then be more easy to bring them back "alive".