Burlington Underground and Amplified.FM

Burlington Underground offers Burlington, Vermont’s music fans up to date information on all of the live music venues in the greater Burlington area. Burlington Underground was started years ago by founder Ryan Orlove and Dan Mesa with the intention of creating a website devoted to the promotion, organization, and distribution of music in and around Burlington.

The goals of Burlington Underground are to “organize Burlington's music scene into an easy to access calendar that encompasses high levels of usability,” says founder Ryan Orlove. The company also provides artist and band interviews that extend artists’ promotion capabilities. To further the services and social networking abilities of its website, Burlington Underground is now a parent company of Amplified.FM, which is the distribution side of Burlington Underground’s operations.

Amplified.FM is a paid service on top of Burlington Underground’s other capabilities. Amplified.FM allows users to gain unlimited access to albums produced by the artists whom Burlington Underground promotes. This service allows interested fans to listen to an artist and get a taste of their music before going out to a venue. Amplified.FM operates by giving a percentage of subscriber’s payments to artists whose music is being distributed. What subscriber’s gain from Amplified.FM is the ability to download CD quality or higher (FLAC) music files. If their subscription ends, users still have access to the music they have downloaded - unlike other subscription companies where you lose the music you’ve downloaded after your subscription ends. Amplified.FM is still being tested and the team at Burlington Underground hopes to release the beta-testing version within the next few months.

Ryan Orlove, of Burlington Underground, explains Amplified.FM’s subscription outline:

1. To use the service for information purposes only a user neither has to pay nor sign up. 2. To utilize the social networking tools to rate, comment and participate in other fun music related activities and giveaways, a user must sign up for a free account. 3. To access the above and Burlington Underground’s MP3 level of distribution, the cost is $10/month, which is intentionally set at a manageable equivalent to "one disc per month." 4. FLAC access, due to quality levels, is $5 more per month. Burlington Underground views users of FLAC audio files  to be highly trained audiophiles who deserve a slightly heavier hand around the site. This includes more say in similar artists and genres and various other tools around the site.

Burlington Underground and Amplified.FM hope to reach out to college students to utilize their services. “We built some standard and a lot of new social networking tools into the site to allow college students to organize their activities with each other. For instance, members have the ability to mark themselves as attending shows - which notifies their friends,” says Orlove. He also notes that Burlington Underground has had nothing but support from the community, artists, fans, and industry professionals. Check out Burlington Underground at www.burlingtonunderground.com and sign up for Amplified.FM’s beta-testing at http://amplified.fm/.