Needless to say, I am a little shocked that Orest over at Ukrainian Musical Matters closed down his blog supposedly on my account, but that is a topic of another post.
As in all online competitions to select musicians, when you run one for the first time you hit a few bumps along the way. This seems to have happened with the people at the Koktebel Jazz Festival. After having their voting process up for many months, along with their very unclear set of rules of who could participate in the competition, when a number of musicians began receiving little postings next to their competition entries stating they would be removed from the competition. There were a few different bands that I like besides my friend Yevhenia Sakharova who found themselves in this position with a little more than a week of voting left, some of which I have heard perform before. All this happened after the server was down for maintenance last Saturday for more than seven hours. So some were considering it to be foul play...
After review the comments of the "Expert Council" on many different bands who had this happen to a couple of friends and I contact Yevhenia. "Zhenniu, we seldom see you perform as a duet, you have to do something if you really want to go to Koktebel! See if you can't resubmit with your regular band members..."
Yevhenia, with our moral support found the right phone numbers to call and did what she had to, and early this morning I found out from her as well as other partners in crime that her new application with her more complete group was excepted.
Better yet, I just found out from her that her votes for her new entry of Сахарова & Band would be merged with the votes which she receive from today until the end of the competition on August 4, 2008. So if you haven't registered and voted, then please do so.
Everything is constantly in flux, from the music we listen to, to the politics and society around us. uaMuzik is a reflection on Ukrainian music, politics, society, the food I create and technologies.
In a country (Ukraine) where human trafficking is large, where corruption exists on every level from the top to the bottom, where as you say musicians borrow melodies from Western bands at will, where illegal CD/DVD factories exist, it is very strange that you singled out Ukrainian Music Matters for your diatribe. All that Ukrainian Music Matters was trying to accomplish was to spread the word about Ukrainian music and bands. There are plenty of articles written in Ukrainian and the websites are abundant but that was not my primary audience.
ReplyDeleteMy audience was outside of Ukraine for all the people who have an interest in Ukrainian music but do not understand the language. I did my best to aggregate all the English language articles that I could find into one place. To promote artists so that maybe the rest of the world might get a chance to read about them and maybe see a video clip or hear a sample of their music.
I have never claimed that these are my articles. I have never put my name on these articles. I thought that it was pretty obvious that these articles were collected from all over the web and assembled into a blog. I should have included attribution to the articles, but that was my mistake. Many of the articles were taken right from the artists' website. I was once contacted by the article writer and asked to include their credit. No hostility and certainly no accusations.
Maybe you should head on over to: www.ukrainians.ca, www.muzon.com, ftp.uar.net, ftp.ifra.net. These internet sites have massive archives of Ukrainian music available for download for FREE. I'm sure a few rights are being violated like copyright infringements, illegal distribution, unlawful storage, I think you get the idea.
Keeping a blog current and readers interested takes a lot of work and time. During the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest I was receiving 2000-3000 visitors per day at Ukrainian Music Matters. While their primary interest was Ani Lorak, I'm sure that they managed to check out some of the other artists. I was also spending 2-3 hours per day on UMM searching for articles, sizing images, site expansion, mobile device optimizations etc. Now that I've closed the site, thanks to you, I feel like a burden of work has been lifted off of my shoulders. Now I have more time to enjoy an Obolon or two.
I am personally offended and insulted being called a plagiarist and a thief of intellectual property. Maybe it's genetic for you but not for me. So now someone else can waste their time and realize the little or no appreciation for the efforts that are put forth. My aim was cultural expansion for Ukraine, nothing more, nothing less!