Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

A few weeks ago my friend Roy Zu-Arets (disclosure: I created his wikipedia page) who is the most gifted musician and very original composer I have had the luck to meet and I began working on a fun side project that involves music & social media. We call it “The Vibe Of Now”.

The idea behind “The Vibe Of Now” is to create a musical micro-blogging experience – release of original compositions that are created in a spontaneous, immediate, unplanned and instant way and reflect what the composer is feeling at that moment. The entire production process is also very fast. We meet at Roy’s studio in Hollywood three times a week (Mon, Wed and Fri) for 1 hour. It takes us 45 minutes to record a piece, mix the video with stereo audio that we pull out of the recording console and publish the clip to YouTube.

Both of us have worked and released products that reached millions – I have done it in the internet space at Snap, JDate and ICQ and Roy has worked as a composer, pianist and producer with many artists, performed in prestigious halls in front of thousands and produced platinum and gold albums. But this small side project has its own magic and is very exciting for both of us. Users from all over the world send us their feedback on the music videos and how they touch them. Our YouTube channel metrics are growing week after week – the number of daily views, subscribers (now is a good time to become one), friends, comments and ratings.

A few days ago we reached a new major milestone with the release of Roy’s first solo piano solo album (after a 20 year career of playing, producing and composing with and for others) called “Confessions of a Composer”. The album features selected tracks from the first series Roy released to YouTube during the summer of 2009 plus a few bonus tracks recorded with guest musicians. You can buy the album on iTunes , Amazon or order as physical CD.

We are also about to put the “The Vibe Of Now” concert. It will be a very original and different show from a typical piano recitals, and it will feature the album pieces, variations on a theme of known songs but with some twist, and original compositions that will be composed during the concert together with the viewers similar to the process that happens at the studio. If you are interested in bringing Roy to your venue, university, tech-conference, town hall or your next corporate event, please contact us.

Next for us are a few additional mini projects:
* A special album for the holidays which is being finalized these days (Update: It is now live)
* Collaborations with some of LA’s finest musicians
* A 100% live session that we will stream to the web using UStream and twitter
* And probably a few more fun projects since the tools we have in our hands allow us to do almost anything and take it to the masses.

Last thing – this project would not exist without users’ feedback. So if you have one for us, a request, suggestion, media inquiry, touring/booking request or a testimony/album review, please contact us using this form or on twitter – royzuarets or jaym.

I have known Roy Zu-Arets since our sons attended the same day care a few years ago. Since then I have been closely following his unique journey in life which includes music, Judaism and a constant struggle of a musician trying to make it big.

After all, it is not easy to do what he is trying to do given his background. He started playing piano at the age of 3 and began his professional music career at the age of 12 (!). In his early twenties he was already a busy music producer, composer and pianist in Israel. He played with many artists, produced mega hit records and concerts like Rita’s “A Great Love” 4 times platinum album and tour, HaYehudim (The Jews) debut album called “Separate Reality”, one of Meir Banai’s albums and many others including Guy Zu-Aretz (his brother) upcoming album. He wrote scores for movies and theater and had a successful and busy career in the Israeli music industry. But then he decided leave everything behind and went after his dream – move to the US to become a musician in the premier league. He first spent a few years in New York where he attend Julliard & Mannes music academies, and then he moved to Los Angeles where he is trying break into the small, close group of Hollywood movies score writers. In the mean time, he is slowly establishing impressive milestones n the US which including producing Taking Back Sunday’s “Where you want to be?” platinum album, and writing MacHeads soundtrack, but he has not gotten to work on a really big movie since in Hollywood it is very difficult for a “nobody” to become “somebody”.

This might change though, very soon, thanks to the way he uses YouTube to share his talent, music and work process with the masses. Every morning, as part of his warm-up, he improvises melodies based on his mood and feelings. None of these melodies were composed before and he does not memorize notes – he “simply” plays the melody that is going in his head at that very moment. His studio neighbors, owners of a video production company, heard him play and suggested to video tape those short improvisations and publish them to YouTube as part of a documentary series called “Confessions of a Composer”. The videos are recorded using two iPhone 3GS phones, the sound is recorded separately using Roy’s studio equipment (thus the high quality), and then they mix and edit everything to a short video clip that gets posted to YouTube. This entire process happens 5 days a week, Mon-Fri.

I predict that it is just a matter of time until one of Roy’s improvisation videos will become a major hit on YouTube. Naturally, the variation on a popular songs tend to get more traffic and views (probably not enough views given the quality of these videos), like Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” (see embed below), Michael Jackson’s Earth Song and Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling. But the improvisations are even more fascinating to watch, as they truly show his qualities as a composer and pianist.

From what I have gathered from Roy, the amount of feedback he has been getting after a few weeks of daily videos submissions is unbelievable. This includes comments, ratings and many emails from YouTube viewers from all over the world. More than that, a well known Hollywood director who stumbled upon one of his videos and loved it, already came to meet Roy at his Hollywood studio.

So, here are two video clips that illustrate how talented and versatile he is. My recommendation is to subscribe to his channel as well as go back and watch all the videos uploaded since the project began on July 13th. You will get a daily injection of heavenly and inspiring music from such an extraordinary & gifted talent.

It seems like there are mixed feelings about this new feature. I like it though. Why? Because it allows a video viewer to avoid the need of visiting YouTube.com to search for videos, and it keeps that users for a longer session on the sites he is on. Just like Snap Shots!

Do you know these house organizer services you hire to come to your house and organize stuff? Well, one of the best things that often happen when they organize your house & closets are the forgotten photos and other items they are able to find.  Things that you know are somewhere in the house but you have no clue where exactly.

Well, Xoopit is the same but for your Gmail (as long as you use Firefox). It is a great inbox search utility that makes it easy to find attachments (photos, videos) and browse through them inside Gmail.

You should give it a try.

The Israeli music industry has changed a lot in the last ten years. The leading radio station, GalGalatz (Israeli Army Radio #2), created in 1998 the playlist — a list with a limited number of popular songs, selected by powerful music editors, that is being played repeatedly and sets the public taste and opinion. Despite the criticism GalGalatz received, claiming (rightfully IMHO) that they became focused on ratings rather than quality, nothing changed.

These days, Galgalatz gets exclusive rights to play new singles before all other stations which makes them even powerful than ever. The result – small group of musicians, mainly mainstream, get the glory, while others are completely ignored.

But all of this does not matter if you are lucky enough to get discovered by Apple’s marketing folks. This is what happened to Yale Naim, a fairly unknown Israeli singer that made her career in France. One of her latest album’s songs, New Soul, is used as the soundtrack of the new MacBook Air TV ad.

The result is great – she is now on the world’s most popular playlists — iTunes Store (2nd most popular song!) and YouTube (with 1.5MM views as of Feb 1, 2008)!

Since June ‘07, a MyBlogLog user can add services to his profile. These are the user’s online identities on over 30 popular social services (Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, del.icio.us and others). This is very useful and creates a richer profile.

But viewing someone’s profile and figuring out which username belongs to which service is a frustrating process that involves trial and error. Labels (text or favicons) would greatly help here.

Make labels for data fields distinctive, so that they will not be readily confused with data entries, labeled control options, guidance messages, or other displayed material.” (Jakob Nielsen, Sixty Guidelines)

Since the launch of Snap Shots back in Nov 2006 (at the time the product was called “Snap Preview Anywhere”), we have been receiving plenty of requests from users asking for a browser add-on that allows them to take the Snap Shots functionality to the entire web.

Today, we are happy to announce the release of Snap Shots Add-On for Web Browsers (Firefox version available today, IE version is coming soon).

Here are just a few examples of Snap Shots Add-On can make improve users browsing experience:

• Search engines – Get Snap Shots and previews on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Live and others. I am sure you will appreciate the fact that by being able to see what’s behind the link your “Back” button usage and the time you wait for different pages to load just to find out they are not relevant will significantly reduce.
• Myspace – Snap Shots Add-On displays profile information of people who leave comments on myspace page…
• Wikipedia – any link to a wikipedia page turns from ‘just a link’ into an instant encyclopedia
• RSS – Visit blogs on different platforms (blogger, typepad, vox etc) and rollover their blogroll just to read the RSS excerpts of the linked blogs
• and there are plenty of other useful examples – just try it when you visit Amazon, Wikipedia, IMDB, YouTube, Metacafe and many other sites.

To get started Download the Snap Shots Add-On.

BTW, Snap.com home page also got a nice facelift and it now features Snap Shots solutions for Bloggers/Publishers and End Users more prominently.

Technorati Tags: Snap.com, Snap Shots, Firefox, Browser Add-On