The Manifesto

Why ARTEEST exists

MUSIC is LEARNING. Plain and simple. PERIOD.

The INSTANT you hear a new song, you are LEARNING. It could be a leading line, an intro, a lyric, a pause, a SILENCE, a BEAT… whatever it is, YOU’RE learning it. You’re learning whether you’re going to look up this artist later, or if you’re probably, NO!!! Now FOR SURE going to listen to this same song again the instant it ends. Music teaches you about WHO you are right now. It teaches you how you actually feel about someone. In an instant you could suddenly find God, OR find out that the person sitting next to you is actually the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, OR celebrate the birth of your child, or mourn the loss of a parent, a sibling, a child, or a friend… and you play certain music at that person’s funeral. It’s literally the backbone, fabric, DNA, tapestry that our HUMAN experiences are tied to, VERIFYING to ourselves WHO WE ARE, who we want to become, and maybe even, for some of us, what legacy we want to leave behind.

THIS IS SERIOUSLY THE HEART OF ARTEEST.

So what is it? ARTEEST is a premium music discovery platform. Thousands and thousands of artists, bands, record labels, producers, and engineers, each with their own page showing their entire career chronologically. Personal profile pages with collections and bins of favorite artists, live concerts, and festivals, all stackable, filterable, and shareable as custom lists you can send straight to socials or text to friends.

My core belief, and the reason for building this, is finding the actual connection with the artists and bands again. I have listened to more music in the last two months while making this site than I have in the last 25 years, and I am a MUSICIAN who has played jazz, rock, funk, soul, and gospel all over the world, starting in San Francisco blues and jazz clubs in 1992, at 13 years old. I owned over 2,000 CDs, and of course I lost them all. I knew where everything was. I had big floppy CD books with hundreds in each, but I could flip to an area and know I was going to find my Keith Jarrett collection, or go straight to the back of that same book and find all my Radiohead. This example could go on and on. I KNEW MY COLLECTION. I KNEW more about the ARTISTS, what they were going through. I followed the stories of their lives and their sessions, and that made for a vastly more profound understanding and appreciation of their message, their voice, their challenges, their successes, and their STORIES. Their lives and their music taught me how to understand my own life and my own challenges.

MUSIC WAS MY REFUGE. MUSIC WAS MY SAFEST AND MOST AMAZING PLACE ON EARTH.

Then the iPods came, and all the confusing years where we were downloading CDs into our iTunes. And those libraries WERE amazing, because they were built by hand. They let us craft INCREDIBLE mix lists, play them at events and parties, export them by burning them onto CDs, and take them everywhere with us. THIS IS LOST NOW. And I’m trying to fix that.

We were connected to the musicians, their stories, and their entire albums. We could look at the liner notes and see who the musicians were, most of the time. We could read about that recording session and ponder the enigma of what that label must be like, and dream of getting the opportunity to be a musician recording something like this someday. Or maybe we just dreamed about what it would be like to see them live, if we could afford it.

I have been brought to tears while building ARTEEST, because I finally had ALL the albums I couldn’t afford when I was younger, staring at the Art Blakey, or the Beatles, or the Grateful Dead sections of records, tapes, or CDs, buying only one or two, but FOR SURE clocking 9, 12, or 20 other records I totally wanted and, again, couldn’t afford. Later I probably could have afforded many more of them, but LIFE really started to get in the way… and I just forgot. I forgot those 12 Art Blakey album covers, and I sure as heck didn’t know the names of the albums. I couldn’t sit there all day and Google album cover art, trying to remember and describe them with words. NO WAY. We moved on with our lives, and those albums fell off into obscurity, into a dusty yet romantic part of the depths of my mind.

Then suddenly… NOW IT’S ALL SITTING in front of me, and I BUILT IT!! I was bawling in joy, and nostalgia, and a freedom to just click and listen. I was transported across hundreds of albums and songs I never knew existed, while I sat there coding away, building my site.

Jorel O’Dell, Founder