Page 38 - Zone Magazine Issue 014

evermix exclusive interview
Evermix is a brand new digital music platform.
Evermix enables DJ's to connect with their fans and followers through the recording of their music sets. Giving you direct access to a catalogue of sets to re-listen to, re- live and share with your friends. Whether you were at the club, you knew someone who was, or you’ve just heard about an epic set from one of your favourite DJs, with Evermix, music lives on.
With Evermix, DJs can record all of their sets onto their smartphone via our new MixBox. Using the Evermix DJ app they can add their own photos, stories and comments before uploading and sharing it with you.
Evermix is more than just about accessing great music. It’s about connecting with your favourite DJ's and re-living unforgettable nights with your friends and capturing the stories and photos from memorable sets and venues. We’re creating a community that gives music lovers the opportunity to share their own experience of each night and connect with the people they met and the people they know. Long after the turntables have stopped and the club doors have closed.
Zone has a chat with founders and owners of Evermix....
Andrew, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Evermix has been going for nearly two years now, what was the initial inspiration for launching Evermix, and what was the idea behind it?
Thanks for having us! That's right - we initially launched in 'beta' mode back in September 2015 with a basic website and recording app. And then we made it loads better and launched the website you see today late in summer 2016.
The inspiration was a pretty simple one really. After a big night one of the guys who started Evermix was trawling the internet trying to listen to DJs from the night before... and got frustrated at how hard it was to find live recordings. So we looked into it in a bit more and talked to lots of people in the industry, and it was
very clear that there was a real appetite to record sets, but the existing ways of doing it were either very expensive, bad quality, or really fiddly and laborious to do. So we realised if we wanted to relive and re-listen to our favourite nights we'd need to do something to solve this - and so Evermix was born.
It was quite a bold move to enter the market of online mix hosting, with some notable sites already well established. What makes Evermix different from the others?
Yeah there are obviously some really big players in the market already. We're not only a streaming site though - we provide a complete end-to-end package to DJs. A recording App, our MixBox hardware, and the site itself. This means we can specialise in sets from 'live' events which makes us a bit different to what's out there already. We also make it really easy to share those sets on social media, and even to other streaming sites if the DJ wants to put them up there too. There are some other things you can use Evermix for too - for example a few of our DJs have told us they use the MixBox and our app to digitise their vinyl!
For the listener it's all about reliving the experience... listening to the sets again exactly as they were played in the club, but also in the future we're working towards making Evermix a really social experience - where you can add photos, connect and build a community with other people who were there, and even with the DJs themselves. So the idea is that the night lives on long after the club doors are shut.
I'd say these two areas are our main point of difference. We make the recording and uploading process really easy for DJs, and for listeners we think we're the best place to find that set that you went nuts for the night before - and stream it in really high quality.
Within the first 2 years you've garnered support from not only many “bedroom” djs but a whole host of industry heavy hitter aswell. Is it important for you to have a good mix of unknown and well known artists using Evermix?
Big name DJs are really important to us and it gives us great confidence to see
how much they love Evermix and the MixBox; it's good to have that credibility on our platform, as well as the really high quality sets those DJs deliver. But we're equally committed to DJs earlier on in their career... we run loads of DJ competitions to help uncover rising talent both in the UK and internationally, and to get those DJs seen and heard - with the help of some of the brilliant partners we've worked with like Krafted, Toolroom, and Cr2 Records. It's good for the DJs, but it also helps listeners find new talent to follow.
Where there any that you intentionally aimed Evermix towards?
Yes absolutely. To start off with we built our DJ members primarily through a mix of our own networks. Then recommendations from those first DJs started flooding in. We've never seen ourselves as elitist, so it wasn't all about who had the biggest following. We wanted really solid, credible DJs who played brilliant music, and who really liked what we were doing and wanted to get involved with the project early doors.
Now we're about to sell our MixBox2 for the first time ever, so it's properly opening up Evermix to any DJs and Promoters that would like to join - wherever they are in the world.
As well as that, many well known brands from within the industry are supporting you such as The Warehouse Project, Toolroom and Abode. Was it an intentional thing to make Evermix appealing to them aswell?
We originally started approaching our own network of DJs but quite quickly the promoters got wind of Evermix and, if anything, they were even more into the concept and started getting in touch in order to get onboard. It's always been notoriously difficult for promoters to capture live content from the events as DJ's are quite protective over their content and are wary of it being in someone else's hands.
By putting the DJ in control of what they record and share but the promoter then getting access to that content, it eliminates the risk for the DJ and makes them happier to record. Which in turn means we've had a lot of support from that side of the industry.
38 ZONE-MAGAZINE.COM