Image courtesy of Learn to Play Music.
In an age of quick clicks and immeasurable internet content, the world of quality music learning is, surprisingly often, still a difficult door to open, bolted with layers of access fees and pay-per-lesson schemes. Long time Australian music educator Learn to Play Music (LTPM) is bridging this gap, launching a crowdfunding campaign on 24 November 2014 for emerging subscribing music education platform, Apollo-M.
Apollo-M – taking its name from Greek god of music- will offer 24-hour-a-day, on-demand, subscription-based music education for aspiring and professional musicians, including online lessons, eBooks, videos, sheet music, podcasts, web TV shows and documentaries, covering every instrument, genre, style, age group and experience level.
Available on all major platforms and devices in Australia, the United States and internationally, the subscription fee of $4.95 a month will include unlimited access to advanced digital tools.
The platform will draw particularly from LTPM’s extensive collection of music learning guides, with 35 years experience as one of the world’s leading publishers of music learning books, videos and digital lesson content. Guides will cover all popular instruments, including guitar, bass, drums, piano, harmonica, saxophone, ukulele, banjo, mandolin, as well as wind and brass instruments.
With the same approach as Netflix for films and Oyster for books, Gary Turner, Founder and CEO of LTPM said that the Australian developed Apollo-M will be a game-changer to the music learning model.
‘It’s going to bring everything to the table, in a one-stop place where you can get everything music learning related,’ said Turner. ‘Some websites might do a little bit of guitar, or a little bit of keyboard or offer e-books or sheet music, however we will be offering all of this and more, and in multiple languages’.
Lessons can be streamed and cached for later use, with offline capabilities and software that can be accessed through Apollo-M includes Apollo-M Interactive Gameplay, an advanced interactive learning tool, Apollo-M Toolkit, which gives musicians all the digital tools they need to play, practice and develop their music, including recording & mixing, songwriter’s assistant, chord & scale finder, backing tracks and tuner.
The education tool also offers Apollo-M Connect, a social network focused on connecting musicians with other music professionals and Apollo-M LiveTeacher, which connects students with music teachers.
‘Apollo-M will connect like-minded musicians worldwide and also help students find music teachers via on demand live video, one-on-one, anytime, anywhere,’ said Turner.
Recent statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2009, found that children in Australia are increasingly taking up learning a musical instrument and according to a survey by the Musical Council of Australia, many adults wished they had learnt to play an instrument in their earlier years of development.
Andy Wallace, LTPM’s Recording Engineer and Digital Media Producer said that from his younger years playing in a band and as an audio producer, a platform such as Apollo M would have been intrinsic to his musical development.
‘I think if a cast myself back to when I was learning to play, it is so hard to find the right content and material,’ said Wallace. ‘There is just a huge amount of people showing you how to play something but the quality just isn’t there. In a lot of cases finding the right person and the right teacher can be a real challenge. So I think that is the biggest thing for me. If Apollo-M had have existed then, I would be able to pay a very small fee and for that get access to all I can eat’.
Pat McNamara LTPM’s Marketing & Social Media Director said that what Apollo-M will offer is unparalleled by its online competition.
‘Really it’s about providing people that want to learn to play music with a resource that has never been able to with this amount of material, knowledge and inspiration in one place and this sort of value,’ said McNamara.
‘It will be all of Learn to Play Music’s content, that’s thousands of different music lessons covering all of the popular instruments. The idea is that we will expand it as we go so there will be more and more instruments and more and more material added to the library as the project builds’.
The Apollo-M crowd funding campaign works two-fold, firstly to raise much needed funding but additionally to entice and build awareness for musicians to subscribe themselves, with the Apollo-M experience planned to begin in the second quarter of 2015.
‘Initially we are aiming for $100,000 dollars, that’s enough to help us launch the basic Apollo-M but we are hoping to raise more in the long-term because it’s quite a big project. We have already spent a couple of million dollars on it so we have a lot of content, a lot of development, a lot of software that is almost ready, we just need that final support,’ said Turner.
‘Hopefully if people like the idea of what we’re doing we will be able to do something fantastic, we will be able to raise more funds, we will be able to get Apollo-M a lot faster’.
Apollo-M
Indiegogo crowd funding campaign launches 24 November
For more information visit Learn to Play Music.
