photo by Rene Martinez
Lou CharLe$ at Lola’s Trailer Park
It’s been a little more than a week since Amplify 817 hit the airwaves — er, interwebs — allowing listeners to jam out to Lou CharLe$, Gollay, Jack Barksdale, and Taylor Pace via the Fort Worth Public Library’s free music streaming service.
But Amplify 817 is looking to build its artist portfolio. And while anyone can visit the site and listen to local music for free — and those with Fort Worth Public Library cards can download songs for free — the service also looks to disrupt the traditional ways artists get paid for their work.
Starting summer 2020, local artists can submit their music to Amplify 817, which the library runs in partnership with Hear Fort Worth. To be featured on the streaming site, artists and their music must go through an application process. According to the public relations specialist for the Fort Worth Public Library, Todd Overman, the application process is not finalized yet, but should be fairly easy and efficient.
Once an application is turned in, a review board will consider the application and decide if the artist will be featured on the site. Amplify 817’s review board members have not yet been appointed.
There will be more information on the board members as the time for the first round of submissions approaches, according to Overman.
If the artist and their music are approved by the review board, they will be granted $300 up front in exchange for the site’s ability to feature the artist’s music for three years. This allows musicians to receive a higher initial paycheck instead of getting paid per stream like most music streaming sites.
The money paid to the artists partially comes from the Fort Worth Public Library Foundation and its donors; however, there is a donation link on Amplify 817’s page for people to donate to the streaming site.
In addition to featuring original music, the site gives each artist their own bio page where they can write a little about themselves and their music. The page also allows the musicians to post their social media links for listeners to follow.
At the end of the three-year term, an artist can choose to re-apply to have their profile and music continue to be featured on Amplify 817.
For now, Amplify 817 is only featuring musicians from Fort Worth. In the future, the site hopes to include artists from surrounding cities as the site grows, according to Overman.
According to Fort Worth Public Library director Manya Shorr, the library hopes to grow Amplify 817 to one day include a public recording studio, a program to help musicians get professional headshots, an educational program on the inner workings of contracts, and possibly an app.
“My hope with Amplify is that people will be exposed to a diverse and wide range of local area musicians,” Shorr says. “A trusted institution like the public library can expose people to music that they haven’t known that they liked before.”
