J.viewz KickStarter project to put music DNA on display

Thanks — or no thanks — to the Internet, the music business is in radically worse shape than it was just a decade ago. Album sales in all formats are at an all-time low, radio is a shadow of what it used to be, and even (legal) digital downloading rates are falling. Even so, artists aren’t lying down and playing dead.

Some, like Jonathan Dagan — known in the music business as j.viewz — are using the Internet and other technology to remake their music and the way fans consume it. Dagan has been a pioneer, one of the first to use downloading and direct-to-fan interaction to sell albums. In his latest project, Dagan promises fans a tech-focused inside look at the creation process — “documenting the things that give birth to a song, from the writing process through the studio recording,” he told The Times of Israel. “People will be able to follow the whole thing on a website we are putting up, and we will be raising money for it using crowdfunding platform KickStarter.”

As j.viewz, Dagan — born in Haifa, and now based in New York — has released two albums, many singles, and an award-winning music video. His second full-length album, “rivers and homes,” was released in 2011, one track at a time, to fans who subscribed to his “music service,” paying in advance for songs and then getting access to them. “It was a good way to finance the album, but I didn’t know about KickStarter then, and that will hopefully make the fundraising process easier,” said Dagan.

The KickStarter campaign launches on Tuesday, the same day the DNA Project goes live. The Project will be hosted on line and presented in a timeline that showcases each song on the new album as a strand of DNA containing sounds, videos and images that make up the songs. Fans will be able to track the creative process for each song in real time, from inspiring moments on the road to new sounds from the studio and meetings with labels.

“The idea is to show the genesis of music in as many ways as technology allows,” said Dagan. “You’ll be able to ‘open’ songs and trace them from their beginning to completion, checking out the writing process, the specific sounds that go into a song, pictures and video of the crew at work as well as of landscapes and scenes that inspired us — anything and everything that goes into the process,” he said.

Dagan is well-respected in the music world. Working as j.viewz since 2004, Dagan has worked with dozens of other artists, and his video for rivers and homes was nominated for an MTV O Music Award and a UK Music Video Award. His latest release, Far Too Close, has been nominated as Song of the Year for 2014 by Israeli music station Galgalatz.

Dagan said he got the idea for the project when he invited someone he met on the subway to come to his studio and jam with him. “Besides the great music we made, it was also a really great creative process and a story in and of itself. It’s a story I am going to tell on the new album.”

While everyone will be able to view the progress of the project on the website, subscribers will have first crack at downloading the finished product, and have an opportunity to get in on the creative process themselves, by submitting digital art, sounds, or other media that could end up as part of a song’s DNA, or on the album itself. Bigger donors can get a signed vinyl version of the album, attend a private listening party when the album is finally done, get their names on the album credits, or even spend a couple of days hanging out with Dagan during the album’s studio recording. Dagan will also be holding a “Geek parliament” online, in which donors can talk with him about the tech side of music production.

“This has been a longtime dream, to develop a platform that allows access to the pieces that make up a song. I’ve often felt that a song has more dimensions than just the ‘final product’, and I’ve never had the platform to unfold these dimensions,” said Dagan. “Thanks to the Internet and Kickstarter, now I do.”