Intuitive Music

We are happy to announce the launch the 5th version of Intuitive Music since it was born in April 2000. The web site has gone through numerous changes since then, and the different versions included flash, as well as content management systems such as Joomla and Mambo. This latest version is in WordPress, which we pick because we found it the best option for the current necessities of the web site. Intuitive Music has also gone through some changes on it’s content.

When Intuitive Music started six years ago my idea was to create a platform of information to cover the lack of information on the internet about different styles of creative music, including experimental, minimal, electronica, advanced and progressive music. This is what I decided to call “intuitive music”. The project, was original conceived as a business for which I started with a large investment and I personally decided to dedicate to it as a full time job.

Part of the plan was to be able to make Intuitive Music run by offering publicity services oriented towards the music business and to invest part of the profits in creating a record label oriented towards experimental music. The first two years of work were hard and exhausting and the expectations for the business were not being fulfilled. After so much effort, in 2002 the answer to my problems came when the corporate Internet company Terra offered me a contract to implement a custom made version of Intuitive Music into the new MTV Area that was going to be born at the company’s web site, after they bought the rights from MTV.

This MTV area was supposed to include five different areas comprising of different music styles. For experimental and electronic music, they decided to get Intuitive Music in the picture. After a year of negotiations with Terra, in February 2002 I was told that the deal, which was the time was also including BMG, was not going to terms due to the difficulties that Terra was going through at the end of that year when the Internet bubble burst. This let down added to the lack of publicity and incomes resulted into a personal and business crisis for me and Intuitive Music.

I had been working on the web site 18 hours a day in the last two years to be able to keep it alive. In a couple months, I lost about 20 kilograms of weight (which really needed to do), lost my relationship of twelve years with my partner, ended up in a depression and figured out I was a work-alcoholic. It was getting out of my hands and I realized that I needed a big personal change. It was during the hardest period that I got to know my current wife, Naomi, from Colorado.

She started collaborating with me in Intuitive Music and eventually we built such a strong relationship that she decided to move to Spain in 2002, where we created the wonderful team that we have today. With Naomi’s input and fresh energy we started taking control of the situation and finding a way to renew Intuitive Music and find different ways to make it work financially. We started getting publicity and eventually, recovering my old profession before Intuitive Music as a designer and illustrator, we decided to start Intuitive Designs design studio as our main income source and keep Intuitive Music as a parallel activity.

In 2005, trying to recover the original idea of giving birth to the Intuitive Music record label, we worked with the idea of turning Intuitive Music into an MP3 shop oriented towards experimental and creative music. For more than a year the web site was projected to this future change and it’s design and content was oriented to test the interest of the audience in a future shop, and most of the web site content was oriented towards new album releases.

For several months we built a detailed business plan and the expectations for the future were really good. Sadly, we didn’t get the financial support on time and by 2006 we estimated that it was too late for it and we had lost the train. After this, we decided to give another turn into Intuitive Music’s content and project it to the independent and personal recommendation of interesting music and artists.

We can’t avoid saying that in our 6 years experience, we have felt extremely upset and disappointed about the lack of feedback and support in the independent music business, which has mostly just been interested in getting free exposure throughout our web site without no interest in investing any money in publicity. It is this frustration what made us take the decision to quit working for free for them by working hard writing about their releases, doing reviews, and posting their press releases.

Intuitive Music will keep showcasing good music, but we won’t be doing free promotional work for labels and artists anymore and we will decide when, how, and what to feature in the web site only in the spirit of sharing our musical taste with you. So the new version of Intuitive Music is more oriented towards the recommendation of interesting music from our humble and subjective point of view. Our spirit is still to remain with an independent criteria and to give exposure to the most interesting music in terms of originality, innovation, personality and experimentation that is not commonly covered in the mainstream media. We hope you enjoy this new step of the web site and find interesting music for your ears.

Intuitive Music is developed and designed by Intuitive Designs.

For those interested in the British scene from 50’s to 80’s, we also run another web site, dedicated to recovering the history of the most important club in the history of British jazz, blues and rock music, the renowned Marquee Club.