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Intro Hi there! I'm a digital product designer (sometimes known as a UX/UI designer) and I'm currently doing a personal design challenge: redesign a website from scratch. I've chosen ocremix.org for this challenge as it has been close to my heart since I was little and I'm already familiar with the site and its mission. BUT... I can't do this all on my own. Any decent design needs to be informed by its users and their needs. This is where you (yes, you) come into the picture. Below is a quick overview and then a few questions about how you use OC ReMix. Cool? Cool Overview What is this? Redesign a website (ocremix.org in this case) with complete creative freedom, unrestricted by budget and technical constraints. This is a pure exercise of design. How exactly? Gather data on how and why users interact with the website and other potential channels. Use this data to define a brief and/or list of goals to work against during the project. Produce a set of mockups that provide a solution for the goals outlined in the brief. Why though? Learning about my own process as a designer to better understand my strengths and areas for improvement. Survey Please follow this link to answer the survey. No personal data will be collected and none of the questions can be used to identify you. Go to the survey → Thanks for your time! If there's interest, I can keep this thread updated with my progress. Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with OverClocked ReMix in any way. Any outcome of this project is strictly personal and should not be viewed as representative of OCR.

Hey fellas. I'm starting out this topic in order to possibly find out others thoughts / opinions and experience of music as sort of a business if you are interested to reply in anyway. I have actually written a blog post on my home website already about this but i would assume that not many would stumble there, and especially reply anything at all from their end, as no one ever has on either of my home websites. Anyways if you are interested, read it here: https://sunshineartwave.wixsite.com/home/single-post/2018/04/16/Music-Business Now, as you may know, there are A LOT of producers and composers from all corners of the world, especially now in the age of information and Computers, and time of Digital Audio Workstations and their ability to access vast amount of sound design plugins and virtual instruments to use on productions and composing at home. And hence it is rather absurd how many talented composers and producers i encounter online really often, that do not seem to have still many people who know, follow, like them or otherwise haven't made it "big". And then.. on the other end, isn't it rather odd, almost in an annoying way, how big some producers are when their productions seem to be quite simple in the end, often just some really basic repetitive bass heavy beats/basslines and simple leads or melodies, and often also enhanced with some singing to even drown the music further or sometimes music videos to distract you from the sounds themselves. I'm not saying tracks with singing and lyrics for example or even vocal chops are bad, but i see singing and music as rather separate things myself as they are. And not saying music videos are a cancer especially considering i also design some moving effects for my own music videos for the tracks i produced, visual art is whole separate category on its own, but still you can see sometimes how basically "sex sells" on some cases. So the public image out there for musicians of all sorts (composers/producers, bands, singers) is often boosted by gigs and touring, which would kind of be understandable in a fashion that someone pays off tickets to be on some suffocating (in my opinion, introvert here) party or concert/festival, and notice of course someone who might be on the stage of some sort and hence all the people there get to know the person(s) perhaps. And i have heard that those pay quite big sums for the ones that are performing something on the stages, no matter was it genuine band, singer on a mic with some live instruments or even background music playing on some recording, some DJ partying with their already made music and maybe just maybe doing something with the tracks changing on the spot though not always, or some really public figures lip syncing and performing some "sexy" dance crap to entertain or something like that. Then i assume live orchestras aren't as popular among big crowds of "millennials" or something and hence don't pay as much especially to the individual players of instruments that only play the music someone else composed (there might be the composer/designer along though as conductor or something who gets more, the hell if i know) But is music on it's own a dying business, as in someone buying the music instead of tickets to some party or live performance? I mean in the age of internet and streaming services, no one wants to necessarily use their hard earned or otherwise small amounts of money to get some tunes as audio files, when they can basically connect to internet anywhere anytime with all kinds of devices from phones to big pads and laptops, and listen for "free" (or some small prices some streaming services charge such as Spotify for example would be one extremely popular one) and those hardly pay anything to the artists unless you truly get millions of plays, similar to the ad revenue Youtube has. Like when i upload my music to Bandcamp, there hardly comes even plays, but i did get 1st EVER money from my music as donation from a fella downloading my track called 'Sunshine'. Still the 1€ he used, and the 73cents i got after Bandcamp and Paypal fees, would hardly be a notable earning from music from 5 years of practicing and occasionally uploading the tracks online. That in mind, there are still people who would like to support some artists to produce more instead of letting them die out in the masses of others music and without the artists being able to support their productions and future in it, but this too depending on cases, if it would be only few, even few hundred, it wouldn't affect almost at all say if all of those donated/used 1 euro for downloading 1 track. Also assuming that in this modern age, in order for to succeed in business world with music only, you would have to produce a lot of it in order for some people to like at least one of the many, as even tastes in music are obviously different, or otherwise could create what is "ordered" or needed for something and therefore you would have to be doing it a lot for anything to eventually pay off and not just casually doing what you feel like. Would it then just get frustrating and boring and take the fun out of it completely when you are forcing yourself to produce too much? I mean all jobs are like that but would music then feel like work instead of feeling it with the interest and emotion otherwise. One way to get out there as composer/producer only would be making soundtracks of course, but even they aren't as needed always with the vast amount of people attempting the same and getting their better fitting tracks to play on movies/games etc. But still there is also a lot of other entertainment and even advertisements (for example i know a website called 'Tracks&Fields' which has these request for music often, would it be wise to attempt to get your stuff out there and get paid for the effort you put in through there?) so the demand for background music is still strong. Would making these order requests be worthy thing to do in order to get something from the effort? Or in general is music just a fun hobby, but not at all could be considered as a way of making living without touring around (i want to settle down more and stay at home) or basically selling-out and doing only what others order you to do? I mean personally i have practiced a lot of different stuff so i could create indeed a lot of different genres from composing instrumental or orchestral music with virtual instruments, to producing, composing and designing sounds for a lot of different styles of Electronic genres from heavy Dubstep and fast DnB to party vibe House/Trance music. Still i would want to create what i want, not what others want, though for it to be thought as a business, of course you are supposed to give the "customers" what they want, in a way at least. What are your thoughts on general of all this, if you had patience to even read this? Have you thought of same things? What would you like to do? What would you recommend? Are you even experienced about music business more? Do share your intake on this for me and us all at this forum. Thank you.