Victor and Gloriana Graves knew they needed to be able to produce music videos quickly, they also needed to keep the Gravers doing something, as well as get some more ammunition for the war on the entertainment industry. What they did was start a music movement.
They had already made some inroads with the music industry itself, but not quite enough to do what they wanted to do. They also had a legion of young people awaiting their next word. They had told the Gravers that they wanted to create a culture, and what do cultures need? They need cultural products. In this case, they needed music.
By this time, there had been more than a slew of philosophical videos that had already been published, first on YouTube during those early days and then a few higher quality ones to come out with the movies. There were already Gravers that had music making as a side hobby. They had come in with it. What they needed to do was sift through this mass of musicians and find the talent.
The popular music industry of today doesn’t necessarily have the best musicians in the world practicing in it. There is a lot of nepotism and there is a lot of marketing going on. That and I’m sure you’ve seen yourself musicians who seem to be incredibly talented but never quite make it, they just don’t have access to that powerful infrastructure the music industry has, the star producing power. Victor and Gloriana Graves knew this, and knew there was talent within Graver Nation that, once found, would be able to compete on a national or even world stage. That was the problem, though, how do you find them? And, once you do, how do you empower them to become stars?
Victor and Gloriana had a plan for this. They were going to create a machine with which to produce musical stars. They told this much to the Gravers. They had already created a distribution network, they had already obtained bases of operation all across the country, and now they were going to make their own music infrastructure. What kind of music, specifically? All of it. All of the genres. Rap, Rock, County, Pop, Metal, Classical, and everything else. They also wanted to use their budding musicians to create a new genre of music, but that’s a bit further than we need to go for right now.
People Power. That’s what it was. That and the Power of Technology. Combine the two and you can do anything possible. You can move mountains, fly to the moon, conquer the world. They told musicians to start work immediately. Remember, there was always a sense of urgency when it came to Victor Graves, time just didn’t move quick enough for him. (Not that he had nervous energy, though. He had a very calm demeanor about him, as if he expected everything to happen as it happened, but he was always pushing people to go that extra mile, as long as they were ok with the pushing).
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The musicians were told to start playing and recording their music and uploading it online. I’m personally not too familiar with indie music platforms, but I know they’re out there. Soundcloud? Is that one? Victor and Gloriana had no problem utilizing existing infrastructure out there. They also used their own websites and app, the 4chan site, the Reddit subreddit.
There was one thing that Victor asked them to do, though. Like the bit with the housing, Victor wanted to own all of their output. Not actually all of it, of course, just the stuff they were producing as Gravers. They could always take off their mask and produce stuff on their own. But, as Gravers, he requested that every piece of music, every beat made, every song sung, every instrumental, be transferred to him so that he may personally own the intellectual property.
Some more skepticism came about, but what Victor had said wasn’t surprising, based on what he had done with the housing. That and it had been a few months since the Graver Dens had been purchased en masse, and the Gravers kind of liked the idea, for the most part. So they said yes to Victor again, over all. Not everyone did, of course, but enough of them did to do what Victor needed to be done.
They started uploading their work to the websites with a special statement that transferred their intellectual ownership of the tunes to Victor Graves in its entirety.
After that, Victor got to work making some more videos outlining his ideas. He wanted the Gravers to have access to use all of the music that they themselves had been creating, without worrying about ownership or anything like that. If someone who raps finds a nice beat they like, they could use it. Or if a music producer hears a piece from an instrumental, they could use that to make a beat. If someone produced a beat and a rap and someone else liked it, they could make a copy of the music and play along with it. And then that could, in turn, be used by a producer or another musician or whatever else. And they could do covers, or whatever else. You get the idea. The teams were used here, too. Greens used green products, Orange used orange products, and Purple used purple products. They would compete with one another.
The goal here was to make good music as efficiently and as quickly as possible. The non-musician Gravers were tasked with listening to the output and trying to elevate the best sounding stuff. They utilized all available existing infrastructure on the internet to do it. They created Facebook groups, subreddits, 4chan pages, twitter groups. Virtually using all social media, trying to find a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Trying to find a way to elevate those interesting sounds and to let them spread.
The mood was frenzy, but Victor and Gloriana knew they had a problem on their hands. They needed people to keep producing music, but they couldn’t expect them to do that if the individual musicians weren’t getting anything from it themselves. They needed to respect the rule of Tit for Tat. They needed to figure out how to give credit where it was due and how to deal with the money situation.
