THE Winnipeg Folk Festival is about to get plugged in and enter the electronic age.
Thanks to a $100,000 gift of technology from a former Winnipegger, the venerable music festival will christen its own online store next week. Trudy Schroeder, executive director of the Folk Fest, said the virtual store will enable it to expand the promotion of artists who have performed at Birds Hill Park for the last 34 summers as well as sell their CDs.
Folk Fest’s Trudy Schroeder, (L-R) Chris Frayer, Andy Morton with music.
She said the festival wouldn't have been able to take the financial risk to launch a site on its own and she feels fortunate to have connected with Dave Jaworski, a former DJ at the University of Manitoba radio station in the 1970s and the CEO of PassAlong Networks, a Nashville-based media distribution developer.
PassAlong will provide the Internet infrastructure, e-commerce interface, catalogue of songs and the album art for the site (winnipegfolkfestival.ca).
"We'll be better able to serve our mandate of getting music into people's lives and being part of a technological revolution that enhances their ability to hear diversified musical styles and forms," she said.
The Folk Fest will receive one dime for every song sold through the site, which will go live Dec. 20. The prices will range from 33 cents to $1.29 -- depending on each song's popularity -- with the vast majority set at 99 cents each. Buffy St. Marie, who was recently presented with the Winnipeg Folk Festival's Artistic Achievement Award for 2007, will be the site's first featured artist.
Schroeder said even during an age when sales of recorded music are slipping at the retail level, annual sales of CDs at the Folk Fest typically ring in at about $200,000.
Jaworski said his donation is his way of giving back to his hometown and helping out a local institution that provided one of the seminal events of his life. He attended the Winnipeg Folk Festival a number of times but it was his first experience at the event in 1979 that got him hooked on live music. He still has an official sticker from that festival on his guitar case.
"It really impacted me. I spent every day there from morning to night and I was bit by the live-music bug. It was the experience. You can get so close to the stage and interact with the artists. You feel connected.
"Music is great but it's even better live. Anybody who has attended the Folk Fest can now support it and stay connected with the artists that they love," he said.
PassAlong's total music catalogue boasts more than three million songs from artists such as Madonna, Coldplay, The Guess Who and the Tragically Hip.
PassAlong is making two other technological elements available to the Folk Fest's site. The first is an OnTour widget that can be downloaded to your computer. It will scan the music already on your hard drive and let you know when those artists will be performing in the area.
The second is called ROSTR, a feature that will enable the Folk Fest to compile set playlists of artists who have performed at the festival since 1974.
"It will allow us to put together representative samples of the artists at the festival. People can either download the entire year's worth of music or pick and choose, but they'll be connected with the music they've heard at our festival," she said.
geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca
PREVIOUS
