Philosophy

Many things can be treated as a commodity, and music is no exception in today's industrialised world. But this hasn't always been the case, in fact it only started with the ability to sell records. As such, one must be careful not to confuse this recent phenomenon with the eternal art form. Due to its ability to transcent language barriers, music plays an essential role in society among small groups as well as larger communities. This is especially true when different cultures start blending into each other. Traditional folk music, but also more recent genres such as jazz or hip hop all came into existence to a large extent thanks to their social bonding powers.

Music also matters at the individual level just like many other human activities. People don't generally practice yoga or read books with a commercial purpose in mind, perhaps unless it's their job. But even then, yoga or litterature can't be assimilated solely to selling more books and video lessons. These are just means to an end, to improve one's harmony or share knowledge. One can hope for a sincere professional artist to earn money in order to continue practicing their art, not the opposite.

There is a whole world besides the highly advertised record industry. It's music for the sake of it.

Content

All the content available on verdigris.org is free to download and was created by people who have collaborated together to some extent and like to play music for the sake of it. So this is not a public media platform, many of which are already freely available (SoundCloud, ccMixter, Jamendo, Free Music Archive, Internet Archive...).

Under the hood

This website was built with the following free software tools:

• Django as the main framework to access the database and produce web pages.
• jQuery for all the Javascript magic.
• jPlayer for the in-browser media players.