BOSTON (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — OurStage , an online destination for discovering music from top emerging artists, has announced its slate of music festival partnerships for the upcoming 2008 festival season. Several of the nation's top music festivals, including Bonnaroo, Noise Pop, Newport Folk Festival, JVC Jazz Festival Newport, Bumbershoot, SoulFest, Afro-Punk, among others, will tap into OurStage to help fill out their line-ups using the company's fan-driven music filters to identify the best emerging talent on the site.
"OurStage provides a viable alternative to existing festival submission mechanisms and the traditional A&R process," said Bonnaroo founder Richard Goodstone. "We partnered with OurStage in 2007 to discover promising acts like American Babies, Ashleigh Flynn, and Nico Stai. We found real value in OurStage and are expanding this partnership in 2008."
Bonnaroo is using OurStage as its online talent search platform to host a contest for the best up-and-coming bands in the US to play Bonnaroo 2008. Bonnaroo and OurStage have opened up a new channel on OurStage, dubbed The Battle for the Roo, free to enter and open to all bands interested in playing the festival this year. The channel runs through the end of May when the Bonnaroo team will select from top-ranking bands in the channel, as decided by the fans, to play the Sonic Stage at Bonnaroo in June, 2008.
Other festivals using OurStage include San Francisco's famed Noise Pop. "Noise Pop has always been about showcasing and celebrating the best independent music, and for Noise Pop 2008, OurStage enabled us to do this in a way that also brings the fans into the mix," says Kevin Arnold, founder of the 16-year old festival. "Identifying the best new bands, with increasing fan following to play our festival, is always a challenging undertaking. OurStage was the platform that helped us scale our selection process in a cool, open, democratic way."
As the only website that allows fans to identify the best new music on the site using a tamper-proof judging process, OurStage offers artists a free platform to showcase their talents, while at the same time giving the industry a much-needed market research platform by tracking how music tests with a growing number of music fans.
"OurStage's vision is to become the first choice for both music fans and industry professionals to source the best music for their needs," shares Ben Campbell, CEO of OurStage. "As the music business continues to search for new and better ways to identify and distribute quality music, we are excited to provide a more sound A&R process based around audience testing and consumer demand."
Since its inception last year, OurStage has developed relationships with dozens of music industry partners to create career-launching opportunities for artists who are charting on the site. The site recently partnered with AOL, the #1 ranking music destination site, to be its exclusive content provider for unsigned and "independent" music, thereby offering its top-ranking artists additional mainstream exposure on AOL's music homepage, artist homepage, and elsewhere on the site.–by CelebrityAccess Staff Writers
