To celebrate our 2nd Birthday (15th March) we are going to go over the past 2 years at Sound Aid so far. We hope you enjoy learning about how things came to be. We will also update the playlist everyday with tunes relevant to the people we are mentioning at those periods and the songs we remember from that time!
Sound Aid - The Story So Far....
December 2005
It seems a long time ago already, but the idea for Sound Aid came about 4 months before the site actually went live. What a lot of people don’t know is that it was actually put together by 3 musicians from the artist community at Soundclick. Myself, Beth and Rob were all wanting to do something with our music for a good cause. Rob asked the folks at Soundclick.com (where our music was hosted) if they would consider having a proportion of sales going to charity, and when it was obvious it wasn’t going to happen (for whatever reasons) we decided to put our own site together instead. The idea, name and logo all came about very quickly, and it was one of those things that seemed to happen without much thought. All we needed was a charity.......
Around the same time while in America, my girlfriend at the time had given me a Heifer gift for Christmas - A flock of chicks if I remember correctly. I hadn’t heard about Heifer and did some research into them and they struck me as a charity that could really make a difference long term in curing hunger. Their idea of using livestock to pass on a gift had outstanding results and I really wanted them to be the charity for Sound Aid. So it was complete. We were all set to put together the .org site that was to be launched on March 15th with 20 bands.
March 2006
When the site first started off, it looked very different to how it is today. There was no blog or music players, and initially we wanted people to donate to hear the EPs. After a while it was clear that we were not doing enough with our music so we changed our philoposy with new music players that would stream all the music. We also made all the music free for download. The first 20 artists were: Michael Dickson, HellBus, Sponge, Blue Hound, Jeff McIntyre, Watsonica, Will Carroll, Blue Menagerie, NorthWest, Mizerable Steve, The Wots, Brucie, Lawrence Bullock, Red River, Chosen Sound, Country Rose, Fred E. Jam, The Funge and Woodstock Taylor. They are all still Sound Aid Artists today 
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Now that the website was up and running we put our out first promo CD (now very rare!). This was all due to Rob’s hard work. It was mixed by Jim Mason and was available for download online. We also started using myspace as our marketing mechanism and making lots of nice friends too.
We soon hit our first target of $1000 and was able to purchase livestock for Heifer such as a Llama and Water Buffalo! Its amazing to think that music has enabled families around the world to look after themselves thanks to the animals we have provided thanks to YOUR donations. By now I hope that the animals have reproduced and their offsping passed on to other familes as is the Heifer way....
March 2007
If we fast forward on a year, over this time we hit 100 artists on Sound Aid and got a writeup in the Heifer Newsletter entitled Moo-sic on the Web. It was a busy time since we were experimenting with new ideas. The website got a revamp, the myspace presense was growing and there was lots of work putting together playlists and new artists for all the genres. We introduced videos, a jukebox and interviews. The site was just about the way we wanted it. Beth started spending a lot of her time working on putting the next CD together.
Its probably a good point with which to thank the following people for making Sound Aid happen. Without them we wouldn’t be here:
ALL the Sound Aid artists, Anthony Vilgiate, Jim Mason, Woodstock Taylor, Rob Wot, Yesca, Kathy Reynolds, Marise Nazzaro, Pete Hamilton, Crystal Gauger, Fred E. Jam, Gem Watsonica, Amber Estrada, Joe Debono, Derek Sivers, Bill Jacobs and Diane Kelly.
July 2007
There was a very important event in the history of Sound Aid on July 14th 2007 and that was our CD launch party at Madison Avenue Urban Outlet, Oregan. To celebrate the launch we had 4 artists play live: Amber Rose, Far Cry, Mark Seymour and The Darren Johnson Effort.
Soon after we reached our 2nd milestone of $2000 raised. We then started to take a new direction on Myspace by introducing our Hunger Blog which you are probably reading now! Its only been online a few months but we get 100s of readers every week tune in to the latest hunger news.
In terms of the future of Sound Aid we definitely want to move forward with more concerts and benefit gigs. Its an excellent way to celebrate music, spread the word, and raise donations all over the world. There are a few things in the pipeline so we hope to see you at a show soon! And keep your eyes peeled for our next CD coming 2009! So for now, we are very happy to have kept things going for 2 years. We’d like to thank you all for tuning in and hope you continue to enjoy our music and help cure the hunger crisis.
Peace
Mike Azzopardi
PS. The songs below are a little birthday treat from us since they were on our first rare CD and have never been available in our flash player format before!
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