Here’s the elevator speech: Today’s search engines filter out websites if they are not:
A: Mobile Friendly, and
B: “Secure”, i.e. secure for web commerce
Many of us don’t even know what that means! We’re musicians, for crying out loud, not trained marketing professionals! Unfortunately, what it means that most web sites in the folk genre will not be found. Fans looking for your music will not find you. Festivals looking for new acts will not learn your name. Collectors looking for your music won’t buy your CDs.
We created the MMDI – which IS mobile friendly and IS secure – so that fans and the press and gig managers can all find the great maritime-themed bands and venues! We want all of these new fans to hear our music!
And the MMDI is doing all of this for free.
The Maritime Music Directory International (MMDI) is a nexus of information about maritime music that is free to access for the public and the press. The information is user-contributed from individual performers, music groups, and venues from all over the world. Information to be found:
- Maritime-themed venues, which include everything from multi-performer festivals to single-group concerts to local sing-outs and house concerts.
- Maritime-themed musical groups and solo performers, including both professional and non-professional groups such as shantychors or choirs.
- Members of maritime-themed bands: a list of the individuals contributing to the maritime music genre, past or future, that are members of a musical performance group (see above).
- Maritime-themed musical recordings, past or future, as associated with either the maritime-themed venues, or maritime-themed musical performers as cited above. This will simply be a hyperlinked list of names of the recordings that will allow visitors to the MMDI to follow the links off of the site to purchase this music elsewhere.
These listings will be thoroughly cross-linked to each other so that venues can indicate which music group performed at their event in a given year, for instance; or, what music groups an individual was a part of in any given year. The purpose of this is to allow musical scholars, fans of this class of music, and the press to have greater access to the genre and its history as a whole.
About The Site Staff
The Maritime Music Directory International is a website conceived by Dean Calin to foster a greater awareness of the maritime music genre as it exists today. In the early part of the 21st century there exists a healthy collection of festivals, bands, recordings and a culture around the music celebrating the seas, tall ships, and the life of those in and around them. Maritime music is a focused sub-section of folk music, apart from other musical forms like rock, ska, bluegrass or country, and is very much alive in modern times. In the period surrounding the Covid-19 Pandemic, only a half-dozen groups and individuals were receiving attention for their work in this genre. With hundreds of other groups performing, Calin realized that there was no source or advocacy group for the maritime music genre of performers – no place for the press or music fans to go to for source information. Along with a career in sales and marketing, as well as over two decades of performing professionally as a maritime musician, Calin began a project to develop a user-populated data source for the genre – a free reference for everyone to discover the excitement and popularity of maritime music.
David HB Drake (www.davidhbdrake.com) is a life-long folk singer, songwriter and sailor based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He directs Organic Arts, a not-for-profit organization, for the benefit of local performance artists. As a coordinating entity, Organic Arts acts as a fiscal receiver for grants and sponsorships. As a maritime music performer himself, Drake understood the synergistic value of working together with the MMDI. Organic Arts is providing the MMDI the organization and support needed to launch a Kickstarter campaign for the creation of the database-driven directory and to market it to the bands, festivals, recording studios, publishers, press and other organizations that will benefit from it.
Our researcher, Jon Peterson, is a maritime-themed musician, an historical reenactor and an environmental theater performer with years of familiarity with the genre. Retirement has given him some spare time which he has elected to share to help along the MMDI project.
Our volunteer database specialist, Andrew Janke, recently joined the team with the objective to solve the many-to-many linkings required for venues to and from groups, groups to and from their band members, and displaying the linked list of recordings from both venues (commemorative CDs) and groups (original music collections). Andrew is a music aficionado from Chicago who moved to New York for his day-job where he develops analytics and trading platforms for the finance industry. He has been kind enough to share a limited amount of his free time to help us out.
Trained as a historian, Jean-François Blais has worked for more than 25 years in the communication of history through shows, workshops in schools and Internet capsules.
In 1994, he played the role of Pierre Lemoyne d’Iberville on the museum ship “Le Pélican d’Iberville”. There he received training as a historic rigger who instilled in him a love of sailing and the ancient navy. A few years later, he embarked as a sailor on a ship that shuttled between Quebec and Montreal. It was during his studies on an author of the Middle Ages that he discovered the world of tales.
Since then, he has embodied several sailor characters for various museums in Quebec and Montreal and, in particular, for “Les Fêtes de la Nouvelle-France” where he played a filibuster native of Montreal. It was in 2002 that he began to tell stories of sailors intertwined with traditional songs.
And in 2006, he created “Bordel de Mer – the sea shanties podcast” with Gwenn Amice. In addition to his other pursuits, Jean-François has assumed the mantle of project designer for the MMDI as of July 1, 2022.
In addition to Marianick Pichon‘s impressive, professional resume – she is currently a learning experience designer for Groupe Aecon, Inc. – she is also an original member of the acclaimed Breton vocal group, Les Pirates. Marianick has helped us with translations of instructions for our French-speaking associates, and will also be providing video tutorials for filling out group, individual and venue profiles for the Mark II version of the MMDI.
Justin Marcinkus hand-coded the original Mark I version of the MMDI. He has moved on to other projects.
Kurt Niedrauer contributed extensively to the data input for both the Mark I and Mark II versions of this web site.
Organic Arts is a registered 501c3 educational, non-profit and tax exempt organization, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is an affiliate member of Folk Alliance International.