You may remember the original Yesmate.com site(s) and perhaps even the vision of 'Music 2.0' - a brave new world where the producers and consumers formed a 'virtuous circle' that encouraged the ongoing production of creative works without having to sign restrictive record contracts that gave little in return.

We were experimenting with content and media asset management for the creation of a community and various tools to manage the creation, sharing and distribution of digital entertainment, we were running trials with multicast and other peer-to-peer networking concepts, live a/v streaming and jamming with things like Resrocket... unfortunately much of this experimentation relied somewhat on the dotcom boom. When it ended, we were left high and dry with little more that a 'Free ISP' and some found memories of the Yesmamma project, and the knowledge that we had at least helped some artists along in their journey towards making a living from their craft...

It was a bit ahead of its time, considering we didn't have ADSL in the UK back then. It was pretty brave of Ninja Tune to get involved, but then again, they have always been ahead of their time. Anyway - as it happens, much of what we anticipated has indeed come to pass. We just weren't involved that much once we had to give up doing Yesmate bizniz on a daily basis and focus on finding 'proper jobs' to pay the rent. With hind-sight, we should have found the time to put more effort in and kept it ticking over. We should have started to work with the emerging open-source community management systems and other cool developments that started to happen shortly after we had to move out of Yesmate HQ.

With the advent of things like Youtube, Last.fm, Facebook, Myspace etc - you can understand what we had in mind in terms of the infrastructure. However, towards the end of days of Yesmate as a 'dotcom' - we had started talking about a co-op type model. Our logic was that there was no point disintermediating big labels, if all you were going to do is replace those fat cats with dotcom fat cats. (Hah! It was nice being a paper millionaire for a couple of weeks though - so I can understand the attraction - we even put a bid in to buy DJ Mag and were looking at buying a club in London!).

Shareholders would always be demanding, wanting more pounds of flesh from the artists for less - that's the way business works. You are 'product'. So - we thought the artists/contributers should be the shareholders - if there were going to be any at all... who knows what would have happened if we had managed to get that up and running before the bubble burst... I digress.

Some of you reading this may even still have a yesmate account, and will be pleased to hear that your email is still working and there is probably a few thousand spam messages waiting for you (can you remember your old password though?!). Have a look at webmail.yesmate.com if you want to find out... (this service is provided by the people at breathe.com).

You may be interested to hear that Yesmate may be getting a new breath of life. I am back working in the web business (after doing some events stuff - like setting up gaianova productions with some friends and also doing quite a lot of VJing), in fact I now do a lot of social networking stuff. Stuff that is now being called Web 2.0 (as far as I am concerned it's just the web we envisioned all those years ago!). So, although I am not a php developer or any kind of developer really, I am able to hack around with the web and have a few ideas.

I won't go on now, as it's all very much in alpha. But I just thought I would let you know that the old beast is stirring. If you are interested in getting involved - come back soon, and I will have got around to something more than writing raw html via command line, 1995 style ;-). In the meantime - perhaps check out CCMixter for a taster.

Peaces, Paul Yesmate
12/07/2008