VNUE, Inc. (OTC: VNUE), announced today the appointment of Tony Cardenas-Montana to the role of Chief Technical Officer, in addition to his existing role as Chief Creative Officer. Tony’s long tech career started as soon as he laid his guitar down fresh from touring with his platinum-selling Capitol Records recording act, Great White.
“The first thing I did was to brainstorm ways to use computers and user interfaces to change the way we interacted with machines,” said Cardenas. “I started my first company, bought some seemingly disparate pieces of hardware, hired a coder, and we began to build my vision.” That company was Nethercomm, whose first proponents were Nordstrom and Easy Spirit, and was based out of Seattle, WA.
Entrepreneurialism has its ups and downs, and Cardenas wouldn’t experience real success again until he co-founded and developed DiskFaktory.com in 2002, a precedent setting ecommerce site that was the first to offer CD and DVD duplication services over the web.
“We (DiskFaktory) were the first. All aspects of the nascent business model required new approaches and out of the box thinking. From the web-based ordering system, the light manufacturing aspects, to the marketing and recruitment of business partners like Guitar Center, Musician’s Friend, and FedEx-Kinkos. All of it was new ground and it was exciting to be part of!”
To Cardenas, it was simple – the notion that anyone with master files, with whatever content they produced, should be able to have professional retail ready looking products to offer to their market and audience. DiskFaktory.com was included in Inc. 500 magazine’s list of “500 Fastest Growing Companies” in 2005. “We were growing quickly and in lockstep with our partners and producing millions of units,” said Cardenas.
Then, in 2010, Cardenas who was doing a quick stint as a fill-in musician with Guns-n-Roses guitarist Slash on his solo tour in Asia, met fellow musician and techie, Zach Bair, whose company was producing instant live discs on the Australian leg of the tour. Their obvious mutual interests led to a partnering and continued development of what has become the VNUE brand of entertainment-based subsidiaries.
“We have always had big plans for VNUE as the umbrella brand to usher in all kinds of disruptive tech, and to provide real solutions to rights holders, performers, and venues of all sizes,” said Cardenas, who took over the development duties for Soundstr, VNUE’s music recognition subsidiary. “We’ve taken what started as a noble effort to track the real usage of music in any environment so that rights holders are fairly paid and so that users are charged accordingly, and developed it into a multi-functional, rich data producing system with novel applications. I look forward to moving VNUE forward and to bring all of its subsidiaries and technologies into a streamlined intake process where rights holders, performers, advertisers, and corporations looking for new ways to reach and monetize their markets, can find exactly what they need to leverage music and performances.”
About VNUE, Inc. (www.vnue.com)
VNUE, Inc. is a multi-faceted music technology company dedicated to monetizing the live music experience for artists, labels, writers, and publishers, with products such as its set.fm instant content distribution platform, exclusive license partner and “instant live” pioneer DiscLive (www.disclive.net), and protecting the rights of artists and writers with the company’s Soundstr music recognition technology (MRT) (www.soundstr.com). VNUE also recently acquired StageIt (www.stageit.com), one of the oldest and most well-known ticketed livestreaming platforms. The veteran entrepreneurs, artists and songwriters behind VNUE, led by music and tech entrepreneur and recording artist Zach Bair (www.zachbairmusic.com), are passionate about the future of their industry and ensuring that rights holders’ value is not lost amid always-changing technology.
