I was catching up with a friend at a bar in the East Village on Thursday night when “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop came on. I was sitting next to a dude with a tuba and encouraged him to accompany. Wasn’t much of an arm twist for him to start bellowing the chorus on his tuba and within seconds two of his buddies joined in with their NOLA version of this absolute classic. Everyone in the bar was on their feet. Awesome.
Thank you so much for coming out to the launch party with Biz Markie! What a night!!
Biz brought down the house in his custom TuneUp gear with his unreal spinning, rhyming and beat boxing skills. We feel honored to have had such an iconic legend of Hip Hop help us celebrate our launch.
As a world renowned DJ with an insane digital music collection he absolutely loves TuneUp, so stay tuned to see Biz become part of the TuneUp family in months to come.
Hope all of you had a great weekend. Things here continue to move forward at a rapid pace. We’re still in the top 5 (out of 400) music management apps on download.com which makes us feel great. We’re cranking away on bug fixes and the new features we will be rolling out based on all of your feedback.
So, to give a little more insight about the vibe here at headquarters I figured I would post a video of us rocking out between coding sessions. Hope you like listening as much as we liked playing.
To be clear, we are entrenched in music here. We have a Sonos digital jukebox with a Rhapsody subscription set up here in the office that gives all of us access to almost any song ever made. Perfect environment for us to share our favs with one another real-time. I’ll post later on the spontaneous music wars that present themselves as well.
Anyway, a few months ago, my friend Jennifer Maerz (very talented music writer) turned me (and ultimately all of us here) on to Bon Iver. Bon Iver has created some of the most beautifully haunting music I have ever heard. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing them live on several occasions and suggest you do to. Simply brilliant.
Another cool TuneUp feature is “Now Playing” that will give you access to videos like the one below while you listen to it in iTunes.
Greetings TuneUpians. We can’t thank you enough for all of your valuable feedback and for using TuneUp. We’re continuing to make improvements, fix bugs, add features and crank hard on the Mac release (still coming this fall, we promise).
Again, we’ve gotten so many love letters from you telling us how much we’ve helped your music collections. As such, we have decided to ask for your assistance in making them 3D.
Here are the Rules:
1. Make a video about how you love TuneUp (testimonial, skit, documentary, short, vignette) 2. Upload it to YouTube or Vimeo 3. Send it to us at videos@tuneupmediaDOTcom
Here’s how you win:
1. First 10 entries will receive +1 tickets to see Biz Markie 2. Best entry will receive airfare from anywhere in the US + 1 night accommodation + VIP pass for the party
You rule. We are doing backflips (figuratively) here at TuneUp headquarters. Over 20,000 downloads in our first week out! Insane. Check out what they’re saying about us here.
So, live music is super important to us here at TuneUp. As such, we created a built-in concert alert system based on your favorite artists. Click on the concert tab and check out who’s coming to town. Cool, right? Now click the links, buy tickets and go see live music. It will make you a better person.
Here’s a bit on my first show without my mother:
The Year: 1988 The Artist: RUN DMC The Venue: Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
I had seen posters advertising the show around town and had literally worn out my “Raising Hell” cassette. After quite a bit of coaxing, moms took me and my buddy (L Dubs) to the box office at Sears which is where you had to go to buy tickets. Weird. I couldn’t sleep the night before. Butterflies the whole day at school.
Needless to say, they absolutely killed it. They opened with “King of Rock”, smoke machines, Kangols, huge gold chains, trademark laceless shell toe Adidas. Throwing high fives to each other as they swaggered across the stage. Crowd on their feet. The energy was like nothing I had ever seen or felt. I left that show floating and when I saw the hand-printed lithograph on the telephone pole outside the venue I grabbed it. It sits above my desk today. Check it out.
For real. We are 100% focused on putting an end to your miserable lives. How dare you interfere with our mission to clean the world’s music collections? We know where you lurk, you sneaky little things.
Think you can hide in Vista? Ha! Within firewalls? Ha ha! You’re done. Know this.
Seriously though, while your feedback overall has been really really positive, there are some of you that are having issues. Just want you to know that we are doing everything we can to fix them and push a new release by July 28. Thank you in advance for your patience and stay tuned (get it? ”stay tuned”). You can get help at tuneupmedia.com/forums or hit us up here. We’re here to serve.
This is one of my favorite videos from the YouTube of all time. Vintage Biggie, 17 year old prodigy, slaying anyone that dare step to his other-worldly freestyle prowess. Check it.
SAT style analogy: Biggie is to Sucker MCs as TuneUp is to Bugs
Thank you again for all of your support and for being so communicative about issues you’re having. We’re burning the midnight oil making sure that we respond as quickly as possible and hope that our answers have been satisfactory.
So, what’s really cool is seeing how many countries are being represented that are using TuneUp! Check it out! Djiboutians! Kazakhstanians! Samoans! United Arab Emiratians!
United States United Kingdom Canada Australia Netherlands Germany France New Zealand Ireland Brazil Mexico Sweden Italy Belgium Philippines Spain India Japan South Africa Singapore Norway Portugal Denmark Israel Austria Switzerland Turkey Argentina Chile United Arab Emirates Malaysia Venezuela Hong Kong Afghanistan Puerto Rico Finland Poland Bangladesh China Romania Netherlands Antilles Jamaica Albania Azerbaijan Thailand Angola Iceland American Samoa South Korea Slovakia Bahrain Lithuania Dominican Republic Greece Russian Federation Uruguay Indonesia Andorra Cambodia Bermuda Ukraine Croatia Pakistan Czech Republic Egypt Bulgaria Algeria Antigua and Barbuda Latvia Uganda Slovenia Vietnam Panama Taiwan Lebanon Cayman Islands Cyprus Georgia Bahamas Armenia Trinidad and Tobago Tonga Djibouti Sri Lanka Dominica Costa Rica Central African Republic Virgin Islands (US) Zaire Barbados Brunei Darussalam Aruba Cameroon Colombia Ghana Luxembourg Kyrgyzstan Kazakhstan Maldives Peru Namibia Moldova Mauritius Jordan Antarctica Honduras Guatemala Guadeloupe Hungary Serbia and Montenegro Rwanda Saint Helena Saudi Arabia Nauru
Check out this video. We love Matt (the dude dancing).
We seriously do. I write this from my own MacBook Pro, so I understand your frustration about TuneUp not being ready for you yet (especially for iTunes, an Apple product!) Long story short, the tools we needed to build the Mac version arrived several months after the Windows version. Rest assured, we will be launching TuneUp on OS X as soon as it’s finished and tested (this fall). I am not making excuses, just trying to explain the reason behind it. Please sign up here to be notified of our beta.
In other news, we had another doozy of a day here at TuneUp. You guys (and girls) rule. Check out our “Love” page for all of the great things our users and the press are saying about us. I apologize again to some of our “Gold Members” who had some issues receiving verification codes. We feel like we’ve nailed the issue. Please let us know if we haven’t.
We’ve gotten some great requests for additional features from a bunch of you as well. Most of em are on our roadmap, but if there’s something you’d like to see us add, please let us know.
First of all, thanks so much for all of your support! The positive response has been overwhelming!
I know some of you have had a few issues in validating TuneUp Gold yesterday and for that I apologize. While we appreciate the positive press we got Monday night, we weren’t expecting to be covered until yesterday (Tuesday) morning. As such, there were a few last-minute payment process fixes that didn’t make it until a bit later last night.
I’ll continue to keep you posted as the day progresses with any new issues that come up. In the meantime, here’s what we’re listening to at TuneUp headquarters today. If you haven’t checked out Santogold, you should!
RSS 2.0