MoogSpace: rather boring ?

[DeFrag]

I would love to see the Moog Music Forum and Moog Space joined together so that everyone could enjoy the attributes of both forums for free.

I concur. It is as simple as this: Moog should have ONE, solid, integrated community presence (period).

[Kevin Lightner]

I'm not going to make any friends with this post, but this is the way I feel.

Moog. You're in the entertainment field.
Any entertainer knows that opening night is the most important night of all.
It's when everyone's looking.
The most time and effort ever should be devoted to the first few shows because the most dedicated fans attend first.
It's their talk that generates further interest.

If an entertainer announces a show and takes money for it, they have to come through.
They have to be dedicated to putting on a good show.

One can't put on a poor show, then ask the audience for help.
If questions aren't being answered as expected with just a few members, then having more members probably won't get them answered any faster.

I would imagine that a person who paid for MS and asked a question that wasn't answered would be fairly irate to see Amos on Analogue Heaven answering questions for free.
Like it or not this IS PR. Good or bad.

I think it was extremely responsible for Moog to say something when this thread started, btw.
I think it was well said and obviously took some time to compose.

But I also think that a show's been announced and it's time to perform.
I myself am waiting at the ticket booth to see if it's any good and so far.... sorry .... I've not been impressed by the effort of the performers.

[chris allert]

Would you guys be willing to have banners or google-style ads on MoogSpace? It's cost us thousands of bucks to set up what we have now, and I'd love to just give it away as a gift to our user community ('cos y'all rock) - but it's hard to justify when we're such a small company, running on a tight budget as we are. If MoogSpace is going to become something really cool and a good community, it needs:

-to attract a "critical mass" of users so that it's fun for all of us to hang out there

...

i certainly wouldn't have a problem with google style advertizing. as for other kinds of advertising, to be honest, i'll probably end up adblocking it, as will most other technically inclined people. i usually run firefox with adblock, noscript, and flashblock, so google ads are the only ones i end up viewing. and i do occasionally click through them since they often advertise things i'm actually interested in. i don't use myspace and genereally don't visit myspace pages because the advertising is too intrusive and it is too much of an inconvenience as there is too much stuff you have to be registered to see. so i guess to answer your question, i'd use moogspace if it were free and if the advertising weren't too intrusive, or if the intrusive advertising were easy to circumvent. but i'd stop using it the minute it became inconvenient. (i stopped using the yahoo tv listings a few months ago for this reason)

to respond to your other point, i know moog music is a small operation, but i think that describing a free moogspace as a "gift" to us your customers is an incorrect way to think of it.

if anything, our willingness as customers to contribute to building it up, and even our willingness to post and ask questions here on the forum is a gift to moog music. remember, there are plenty of free places on the internet we can go. but we choose to build this forum and potentially moogspace because we like your products. with a $10/month web-hosting account, a simple drupal installation, and a few hours of volunteer time, anyone here could create something that does what moogspace does with very little effort. it wouldn't look as pretty, but it would allow people to have their own blogs/audio/picture posts and so on. the hard part, as i am learning from trying unsuccessfully to get another community site going, is getting people to use it and contribute content to it. (see http://www.toypiano.org/forum and notice how few posts there are)

i don't know how you should run your business, or how much you spent on moogspace compared to a marketing campaign, but the fact of the matter is that regardless of how much money was involved, you are not going to make it back charging people to use it, and you are probably missing out on extra sales a free moogspace site would generate. how may extra sales? maybe not many, maybe several. i don't know. the fact that i have to register to download any of the audio files of voyager patches someone posted the other day does not warm me up to the idea of getting a voyager. right now i'm pretty sure i'll get at least one voyager as soon as the os is updated to support alternate temperaments, but maybe if i heard more of what other people were doing on the voyager, i'd decide that it's worth it to get one now, even without the exact feature i'm holding out for. or maybe i wouldn't, but maybe someone else would. i hope this example illustrates how the people posting their audio files to moogspace are the ones doing moog music a favor, and not the other way around.

i don't mean to suggest that moog music owes us anything. but since you've already spent the money on it, i'd hope you can understand why some of us will not join something that is not free and easy to use. as i said earlier, i am willing to contribute to building a free moogspace that will remain free, but not a proprietary one. it is an equitable exchange if the community we are building is free and open.

[martin]

if anything, our willingness as customers to contribute to building it up, and even our willingness to post and ask questions here on the forum is a gift to moog music.

i agree. without the forum i'd have been lost with the voyager and its oddities many times.

posting my music here has always been kind of a thank you to the friendly people who gave me the help necessary to keep on playing. i'm pretty sure that the more music is presented by moog players, the more people will understand the merits of these instruments - and hopefully many will base a purchase decision on stuff that's beyond a bunch of singular demo sounds.

it's free advertisement. i earn not a quark of a molecule of an atom of a cent from inviting people listen to moog products.

i signed up at moogspace when it was announced. but there was absolutely no reason at all to pay money for not much.

oh well, i gotta go now. sun's out. still free, and always changing.

[Sweep]

Our participation here & MS quantitatively defines further value to the entire Moog experience which in my book is worth something.

Are you using some kind of translation software?

[martin]

Our participation here & MS quantitatively defines further value to the entire Moog experience which in my book is worth something.

i think DeFrag is saying that a free moog community would make everybody happy.

[goldphinga]

theres nothing wrong with this board anyway. transfer this board/memberships to moogspace,scrap the look and name of this mooger forum, add the advertising as needed and there ya go!

moogspace running in tandem with this board unfortunately causes confusion and even as an avid moog owner there really isnt anything missing from this board apart from a files/photos/sounds section etc. If its all moved to moogspace there will be one clear community and i think that will work great.

moog will get its money back through the added number of new members who end up buying moog products.

[Amos]

...to respond to your other point, i know moog music is a small operation, but i think that describing a free moogspace as a "gift" to us your customers is an incorrect way to think of it.

if anything, our willingness as customers to contribute to building it up, and even our willingness to post and ask questions here on the forum is a gift to moog music. [...]

i don't mean to suggest that moog music owes us anything. but since you've already spent the money on it, i'd hope you can understand why some of us will not join something that is not free and easy to use. as i said earlier, i am willing to contribute to building a free moogspace that will remain free, but not a proprietary one. it is an equitable exchange if the community we are building is free and open.

Very well considered, and well-said! Thank you!

Thanks to K. Lightner as well; I see your point about the "opening night" effect. I had been thinking along similar lines.

I know that the others here @ Moog are also paying attention to this discussion, and I think that all of you have contributed valuable insights and perspective on the situation. I hope that together we can turn Moogspace into something really special. That's all from me... I'm off to answer some tech questions.

[eric coleridge]

I would love to see the Moog Music Forum and Moog Space joined together so that everyone could enjoy the attributes of both forums for free.

I concur. It is as simple as this: Moog should have ONE, solid, integrated community presence (period).

Although it may present some problems for the current Moog Music, I'd think that many people who contribute here would even like to see alot of the content that is now on http://www.moogarchives.com also mirrored here on this site.

I realize that the new Moog Music has no affliation with any of the older products or older Moog companies--and it may present some confusion--but I think that, in many ways, the current Moogs fall into the legacy of instruments designed and inspired by Bob Moog and should, at least, conceptually take their place besides these older instruments. Moog Space might be a good place to present this legacy and history; a site that is apart from the main products pages, but still connected to Moog Music.

I haven't visited MS for a while, and I think there was already a little bit of content concerning the older products there, but perhaps you could even think about contracting the guy who runs Moog Archives to help with MS.

This would add alot of value and content to MS, IMO.

[eric coleridge]

...I'm not aware of an on-line Moog product answer service apart from Moog Space.

Hi Eric! You can always reach me at techsupport(at)moogmusic.com.

yeah, I figured there probably was some sort of product support. I'm sure it must be nearly impossible to keep up with all of the online product support-- especially if you're the only person holding it down-- in addition to your service responsibilities. I can see why you might need/want to limit the q+a forum to a membership.

I live in NY and once worked, for a few years, at a university here-- mainly answering the e-mails that came into the admissions office everyday. It was a collosal task. I used just end up deleting half of them (oops!:)).

you should have seen it before Jared started manually approving new forum registrations and deleting all of the christina aguilera porno-spam. Yuk!

I promise not to complain if a few of those slip by.(':)')

I agree, there is some real room for improvement. More content, more stuff to look at and listen to and do...

Yeah, you know, it's not like Moog even needs this on-line service. You're obviously running a really great, unique music company already. But if you're gonna do it... might as well make it work. Not that it's terrible--or that I have the solution to it's problems... but it seems like opening it up to everyone might help (at least it could raise the user participation).

It's obvious that everyone at Moog really listens to and responds to your consumer-- so whatever happens-- I'm sure it will work out eventually.

I'm also pretty confident that you wouldn't have any problems finding volunteers to pick up some of the slack, should you decide to go in that direction. There are probably no more enthusiastic instrument fans than the Moog users here (apart from Casio fans-- those guys are maniacs).

[mee3d]

I have over 14 hours of professionally shot, un-edited video of Bob during his UK Moogfest tour in 2004. Some of which has been edited down into the rlmusic.co.uk interview and the Turnkeys Music Store Talk, which was playing on a loop in the store in London next to the Voyager (is it still playing?).

I have three hours of Bob himself going through each and every function on the Voyager, shot on three cameras (2 locked off and one roving) which would have made a great instructional DVD... but I see that is now done elsewhere.

Problem is it takes time to edit this material, I do this for the love of it and as it's not funded, can only complete this type of work in my down time which is limited.

My point here is that no one from Moog has ever shown any interest in this material, even though I have pushed it to Mike Adams on more then one occassion... i even flew over to NYC for the 2005 moogfest show to try and get some interest!

I have offered the material to the bobmoogfoundation thinking it might be useful should they get a museum up and running but not had much feedback from Michelle there either.

In the end I decided to produce/direct the material myself along with several other interviews with the likes of Jean-Jacques Perrey and Howard Jones so I know how much work goes into creating good content.

Unless moogmusic dedicates staff to moogspace, much like you would in a radio or TV station you are not going to get much out of it for your subscription. It's a mindset change that moog have to go through, there are many people out there that would love to do stuff for MS but might need a small fiscal or gift incentive to cover basic costs... moog have to find some way of making revenue from the "space" so that they can put back into it for the subscriber... new content has to be created to keep it going etc.

Mal

[sir_dss]

Maybe they didn't like your footage that you shot and that's why they didn't use it.

Were you trying to get some sort of compensation($$$, a free Voyager, etc...) for the video work they didn't want to use and now trying to vent on this board about them in this topic?

[eric coleridge]

Maybe they didn't like your footage that you shot and that's why they didn't use it.

Were you trying to get some sort of compensation($$$, a free Voyager, etc...) for the video work they didn't want to use and now trying to vent on this board about them in this topic?

I don't think that's a fair assessment of this guy's situation at all. Why would you just make a bunch of judgements about him like that?

They probably didn't have time to even look at the footage, much less decide they didn't like it.

No matter what level of professionalism was put into the production, it sounds like very interesting/compelling subject matter--and I'm sure alot of people here would love to see it. Everybody seems to love those 'gear-wire' videos from NAMM-- and those are pretty piss-poor productions, if you ask me.

The point is, it won't get shown on MoogSpace-- because there's no resources or time spent in developing content like this.

Here's this guy who clearly travelled out of his way to offer such content-- and apparently there wasn't even anyone available to screen his footage. That's what it sounds like to me. How bad could it have been? Bob Moog demo-ing the Voyager shot by a professional??? How much better can you get than that???

[mee3d]

You know there's a reason why I no longer post to this forum with jirky comments like that - where do you get off in making statements like that?

Not that I need to reply but firstly I currently own about 10 moogs (the least amount I have owned in 5 years), all paid for by my hard earned cash made from my successful media business. I bought my Voyager all the way back in 2001 ... SE serial number 86 so I don't need anything from moog in the way of salary thank you.

I offered my services because both moog and Turnkeys Music Store wanted the event captured, they then did very little with it which is my point. No one really valued the video content when Bob was alive and I would have thought that after his passing this stuff would have been of interest to the moog clan but so far not.

I personally don't care whether moog like or dislikes the material as they have no right to it as A. I shot it therefor I own it, B. I was not remunerated for it and C. no interest has been shown in it from them, and this is my point.

Moog has always striked me as a company that knows little about promoting itself, they are a small firm too focused on getting the kit out and in some way they probably don't want any further success through marketing as they probably wouldn't be able to meet supply.

As a content maker/provider I know how many man-hours is required to create new and interesting entertainment and without putting someone on the moogspace full-time it's going to lag behind... while there are professional owners/fans out there that could help to populate the space with a little incentive from moog themselves, that's all I'm saying.

Jeez.

Mal
(rubbish cameraman with absolutely no experience looking to gain equipment as payment for services - right, dickhead).

[earsmack]

+1 for FREE MoogSpace w/ Google-style ads

Let's make this happen sooner rather than later!