Miles Suter '11 and Adam Boardman '11 started to get tired of finding e-mails in their inboxes from friends asking for songs which, more often than not, the pair had just e-mailed to someone else. This simple problem caused them to create in a web site that today has a large and growing campus following Biggreenbeats.com.
Big Green Beats, founded and operated by Suter and Boardman with the help of several friends, launched in March of 2009. It has since exploded in popularity, receiving as many as 50,000 page loads and 20,000 unique visitors per month, or roughly 667 unique visitors per day.
The blog features mostly music you'd hear at a party, with some more mellow, alternative cuts thrown in. The highest-rated song on the home page, for example, is Kid Cudi's "The Prayer" (featuring Band of Horses). The songs featured on the blog often reflect Suter's own taste in music.
"I have to like the song a lot personally in order to put it on the blog," Suter said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "I check a lot of blogs to see what's popular, but if we don't like it we won't put it up. We try to give a good variety of stuff I'm really into the electro-mashup stuff now, in addition to hip hop, classic throwbacks and underground songs that people haven't heard that we think they'd appreciate."
Both Suter and Boardman were surprised when the blog's popularity began to increase rapidly.
"We set up the Facebook page, where we have 1,000 fans already for the few weeks it's been up. The word of mouth factor is huge I look at the people who are fans on Facebook and I don't know half of them," Suter said.
Big Green Beats now receives visitors from all across the nation and even gets some international hits, from South America, Paris and London to name a few, Suter said.
As Big Green Beats increases in popularity, some artists have actively sought out Suter and his friends, asking that the blog feature them as a means to gain listeners.
"People have been reaching out to us lately to ask us for exposure, and if they're talented we'll try to help them out," Boardman said. "If you get big exposure on blogs, you can start performing on college campuses. There's no way to not have your music downloaded online, and I think a lot of artists are starting to take advantage of the Internet instead of seeing it as the enemy."
With a rise in popularity, however, comes added concerns surrounding current music-industry buzzwords, including "fair use" and "copyright law."
These concepts have become increasingly complex as an increasingly large group of consumers turns to the Internet as a means of listening, while artists begin experimenting with the creative capabilities of the Internet (perhaps best seen through the somewhat recent mashup craze).
While the web site explicitly states that "[tracks] are intended for promotional use only and are provided for online streaming, as a sample," some students have begun to download their favorite songs.
Yet, according to Suter, such behavior is not unique to his web site, considering the rampant illegal downloading that characterizes the dot-com generation.
"When it comes down to it, if someone really wants a song, they can find it on the Internet," Suter said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth.
Further, the Big Green Beats team is careful about the content that they post, he said.
"Most of what we put up has been distributed online for free anyway," Suter said, echoing Boardman's sentiment that artists and record labels have begun to see the Internet as a tool. "We stay away from big-name people and stuff that would lead us into problems, and a lot of what we post was intended to be on the Internet for promotional use."
Suter also said that he sees the web site as a "mutually beneficial" situation a fact that is reflected by the artists that ask to be featured on the site.
Though the popularity is exciting, the blog remains nearly unchanged from when it was first founded. According to Suter, both the blog's format and the way it functions have not changed.
"There's a team of us that put up songs, probably six to eight of us, and it's usually the original people that started blitzing songs around in the first place," he said.
Though the founders don't want to make any major changes to the site, they still have ideas for its improvement and expansion.
"I think the next step in improving the blog is generating more discussion about the songs," Boardman said. "It's not about illegally sharing music. It's about sharing artists and putting up their music to expand their fan base."
The creators of Big Green Beats said they have also mused about expanding the role that the music blog plays on campus, from a destination for students to locate new music to a more interactive space. Through the blog, they could work to bring up-and-coming artists to perform on campus, Suter said.
"At the beginning or end of a term, we could have something like a Big Green Beats event. If we can bring in X' amount of people, its pretty easy to get sponsors for events like those," Boardman said.
With Suter, Boardman and several other members of the Big Green Beats team graduating in 2011, some students have asked what the future holds for the web site.
Because Suter is double-majoring in economics and philosophy and Boardman is studying economics and sociology, neither has settled on music as a definite career of choice, they said. Still, they wouldn't rule out the field as a future profession.
"I've always loved music," Suter said. "If I could do this as a job, I would but you can't put all your eggs in one basket. At the same time, I wouldn't close the door on anything."
