Unique guitars

Since the name of our startup wraps around the word 'guitar', I thought I'd check out and post some interesting links about guitars. (Hey, I do have more important things to do, but if you can guess from my interest in scouring the Internet for mentions of guitars at this ungodly hour, you know I've been up for too long!)

A cool resource for all things guitar related: http://guitarz.blogspot.com/

A gallery full of weird guitars http://gizmodo.com/photogallery/weirdguitars

Here's a guitar with bat wings. http://www.edroman.com/ Hmm.. how did no one think of that before? This biker chic guitar from : http://www.guitarsla.com/

A Korean tiger guitar, from http://www.krakenguitars.com/

Free music versus a free* lunch

In the real world, there's no such thing as a free lunch. You are expected to pay for things that you want/need. But is there such as thing as free art? Free music, for example? One of the schools of thought propounds that music should be totally free. Free of charge, free to use and appreciate. That is, you pay no money to get the music. The artist is supposed to make money from the sales of associated products and services such as concert tickets, T-shirts, endorsements and other avenues. Music - of the people, by the people, for the people, you say?

The question is, how many T-shirts/stickers/buttons/photo frames can you or would you buy to support your favourite artist? And would your music records (or downloads) hold the same special place in your heart and ears if they came for free? And would an artist's creative pangs have the same intensity if they knew they were going to earn nada from their latest number? Would they then be more inclined to focus their creativity on T-shirt designs and new pyrotechnics for their next concert?

Anyhow, I wonder how such an approach would translate to other areas in life. If you went to a restaurant, you could have a free* lunch, but if you wanted to have a table by the window, you'd have to pay. You would have to pay for the parking. You would have to pay for a better level of service or for use of cutlery... You would have to pay till the peripheral charges started to seem like a desperate attempt to cover the price of the lunch. The restaurant would be serving the food for free* and hoping desparately to lure the people into spending money on peripheral services.

Freedom does not have to mean 'free'. Do we want free-dom or do we want free*?

*conditions apply.

Guitarati : Strings, Not Attached

Yes, another online music startup. In this web 2.oh! world, is there space for another online music service? We believe that where there is a need, there is a web-site! And the same need can be met in different ways. Ways that suck less succeed and become widespread. And make someone rich along the line. In this blog I will be sharing our (more on 'our', 'us', 'we' business later) roller coaster ride through the creation of our startup, Guitarati. The focus of Guitarati is to make music available to music lovers and provide a profitable platform to the musicians to showcase their talent.

I fibbed in the previous sentence. The focus is, actually, to have fun. We are an infant startup, with maybe a few hundred lines of code to boot and a head full of ideas. I would love to say that we have the backing of a billion dollar company, but it is open to interpretation (wink).

A little about me. I am an ex-'cubicle prisoner of war' and I love technology. In the same way as I love Yoga and beer. This blog will feature not only our website progress, but also our hopes, fears, dreams and disappointments in a candid and sometimes politically incorrect manner. But who cares, as long as we can all laugh?