Lindzi Cox helps Lively find the right people to work in our wild Seattle office. And with her, we now have a growing, thriving, slightly weird team of talented people. We couldn’t help but wonder how she got involved with us, and how she finds such amazing people. So we’re letting her tell it with her words. Go for it, Lindzi!

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I will never forget when Lively Founder and CEO, Dean Graziano called me with his contagious enthusiasm and said “Lindzi, I am putting together something HUGE”. He said some other things, I don’t remember what, but the point is; when Dean says something is going to be huge, mark his words, because it will. I have had the honor of watching Lively grow from a bright idea to game changer in the music space.

A little about my involvement with Lively: I work for a technology recruitment firm here in Seattle called Harvey Nash. Since the beginning of building out the Lively platform, my team and I have been lucky enough to partner with the brains behind Lively to recruit and grow out the Lively team. While Dean and co. were busy assembling a company from scratch, turning a former art gallery into an office/lounge for recording, getting people like a gentleman named Keith Urban on board (just to name a few notable achievements), they turned to Harvey Nash to find rockstars to join the team. We work with many hot start-ups, and finding the right people for them is essential to their growth. The easy part is finding someone with the skills that it will take to get the job done. There has to be that passion and enthusiasm that matches the foundation Lively is built on.

We talked to many people to narrow in on the best mix of culture fit, skills, and aspirations of candidates before introducing them to Lively. Candidates were immediately interested in Lively, from it being a rapidly growing start-up, that they’re doing something that hasn’t been done before, and it’s function as a music space. (I think it’s safe to say that every human, in one way or another, likes music.) But where this spark of interest caught fire was when these people went in to interview, meet the team, see the space, and how much success this company has had in under 12 months. And the better news, it’s just the beginning! The reaction to Lively from artists, record labels, fans, media, etc. speaks volumes to Lively’s accomplishments, and candidates really dig that. Besides getting to work for a company where awesome things are happening, every employee at Lively gets to make a huge impact on the direction of the company.

Watching and collaborating with Lively over the past year has been unbelievably exciting. I am so proud of everything Lively has accomplished and cannot wait to see what the future brings!

You may remember our intrepid developer, Adam Argyle, from his post about the HTML5 Developer Conference. He’s been hard at work updating our app, and once again, because I don’t understand tech-speak and tend to crumble when people ask me questions about 0′s and 1′s, I am having him make the announcement about all the new stuff you can find as of today.

What is up my Lively show enthusiasts!
Good stuff has been released today! Interested? Read below.

2 developers have pushed 383 commits to all branches, excluding merges. On master, 649 files have changed and there have been 22,443 additions and 8,885 deletions.

That’s 22,443 lines of code written! 8,885 lines of code removed! 383 code commits have been made to fix all the things listed below.

New Features

• Welcome email for new users
• Removing library items. Now you can remove shows from your Library but not delete them, you still own it.
• Featured sections to comedy and talk
• Playlist tracks are shared with their respective package space. You used to have to download them twice.
• Vimeo player support
• Social sharing updates, way sexier social sharing
• Sticky video/audio switch (for those OS’s with this css feature)
• New clear search button
• Offline mode fixes
• New options menu for all your actions
• Back button fixes, way faster
• Search, if you try to find a band that the content is promo access only, we tell you that’s why
• Download all button fixes
• Numerous performance boosts

Bugs Fixed

Thanks for continuing to support Lively! We LOVE you!

Modern Kin L2R // Drew Grow, Jeremiah Hayden, Kris Doty

In the new year, I’m going to do my best to maintain a positive attitude about music. My relationship with music has degraded significantly over the last few years, a downward trend that likely lines up exactly with my begrudging interest in the modern music technologies that artists, labels and fans are required to keep up with to survive in the current age.

Last year I would have told you about how I feel music is becoming less meaningful as we sync it with everything we do. I would have told you that the robotic nature of a service like Pandora radio causes us to make little distinction between what is artful and what is lazy plagiarism. I would have said that our obsession with being “liked” rarely gives us anything more than a surface relationship with everything we take in, and that that degradation is why artists don’t create valuable music and why fans no longer value music; or that artists have lost their ability to communicate because the listeners have lost their ability to understand. I imagine that last year you could have overheard me talking about blogs and my belief that the lack of very knowledgeable gatekeepers in the music industry is why the music industry is dying.

But this is a new year and with a new year comes new thoughts and changes in perspective.

In the new age of music, artists are able to do so many things for themselves that were previously impossible without the help of a label or manager. The benefit of this is clear, but the difficulty comes when trying to manage time between honing the most important skills, and leaving alone the skills that are secondary.

As a musician, it’s easy to get caught up in the music industry and less in the music. This year I resolve to spend far more time in the latter while maintaining a healthy relationship with the former. The tools at our disposal are great for musicians. We can write a song and let our friends hear it in a matter of minutes and get paid for it right away if the stars are aligned. We have an instant platform for our friends and fans to respond to what we made and in this new year I hope that we as a music community would spend much less energy concerning ourselves with whether or not our friends “like” what we do and more of our time focused on what we craft in the first place. Are we content with it? Is it right and ready? Can we be proud of what we’ve made, regardless of how others receive it?

I think that music matters this year. I think it matters what we say and how we say it. It matters that we double check our work and give our friends something to sink their teeth into – but the onus is on us. The technology and the networking will keep on and so will the music if we put in the effort.

Let’s invest in great art this year.

Jeremiah is 1/3 of the Portland-based band Modern Kin, whose live-streamed album release “Hello, World” can be found on the Lively app. He also runs the independent label, Amigo/Amiga Records, and can grow a killer beard.