Exams over. Term over. Year over. Hope you’ve enjoyed the last 9 months or so in York, and enjoyed some of our events too.

Another end. Another beginning.

It’s been a bit of a different year for us at Breakz. We’ve had fewer events of our own, but been part of a lot more collaborations. Over the past year, we’ve worked with the Herbal Mafia, RAG, James, Langwith, Derwent and many other societies and groups to bring you a much needed fix of drum and bass through some big bass bins. And we’ve already started working with YUSU Ents (and many others) on next term’s freshers’ week to ensure the music you love continues to be represented.
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Tomorrow (26 Jun) is the Internet Radio Day of Silence. Many major webcasters like Yahoo! Launch, Rhapsody, and Pandora are taking part, along with a large (and growing) list of smaller stations.

The Day of Silence is in response to huge royalty rate increases that are likely to force many webcasters off the air. Smaller, ‘long tail’ stations – those playing the sort of music we care about – are likely to be the hardest hit, along with those offering innovative, potentially disruptive services such as Pandora and Live365, leaving only a few monoliths to play out the same Top 40 playlist-driven pop that is failing (in the US at least) to capture interest, enthusiasm, or audiences.
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Want to get involved in running some of the best events staged in York? Breakz is run by a small team of people with little in the way of hierarchy, so you really can get stuck in, take decisions and make a difference from the start.

We need:

• DJs - the core of everything we do, really
• MCs - if you can spit out some tight lyrics over dnb, hip-hop or anything else, we want to hear from you
• Organisers - booking acts, running events on the night, scouting for venues and opportunities
• Promoters - designing posters and flyers, working with printers, contacting media and other ents organisers, website, email campaigns, distribution

If this sounds like your kinda thing and you’d like to be part of the team for the next year then now is the time to get involved! Come along to the Breakz AGM THIS Wednesday (13 June) at 1515 in Derwent bar.
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The US government, through the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), recently announced new royalty rates to be paid by internet radio webcasters for the years 2006-2010. The news is not good. From the DI blog: “the new rates completely ignore the business and market realities of Internet Radio.”
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As you’re reading this, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve updated the Breakz site. Through other projects, I’ve been playing around with WordPress quite a lot recently, and I’ve wanted to move the Breakz site over to it for a while. WordPress is a great tool for managing the type and level of content Breakz has, running within a modern, (largely) standards-compliant framework.

So why should you care?

WordPress makes it a lot easier to update and manage content on the site, so we should be doing that more often to keep things nice and relevant. The new look hopefully makes finding your way around and reading things a bit easier too.

Events are automatically pulled from the forum and displayed in the main site.* Summaries of the latest gigs are shown on the home page, with full text on the events page. This gives your events a lot more exposure on the site than they may have had before.
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Hey Boy, Hey Girl… Want to be a superstar DJ?

We’ve had a great term for DJing lessons, but alas this term’s teachings have come to an end….

We will however be back next term, hopefully with ReCreation as we did in the autumn term, to educate the masses!
Exact dates to follow when we return after Easter…