Andrew Kortina created PhilaFunk after the record label PhilaFunk hired him to make a website for them. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania after studying philosophy and computer science. Visit his PhilaFunk page here.

What is PhilaFunk.com, how did it get started, and what advantages does it have over competitors such as Myspace?

The best way to describe PhilaFunk.com is as a social music store. Although the site has a lot in common with other social networking sites like Myspace (you can add people as friends, message them, create events, post profile info, pictures, etc...), PhilaFunk has a focus on music and provides its users with a service beyond simple social networking. We provide a platform for any unsigned musicians to distribute their music digitally and a place where music lovers can discover new music. Plus, we give musicians the best distribution deal I know of: for each $.99 song they sell, they keep $.80. It's free to signup and within about five minutes anyone can upload and start selling songs.

The fair deal that PhilaFunk.com gives artists is really the driving force behind the whole site. In college, I knew a lot of people trying to make a career out of music, and this past summer I watched as one of my good friends struggled to get signed only to realize that a 'record deal' meant giving up all the rights to his music and agreeing to keep only a small portion of his record sales. His experience motivated me to try to come up with a way to help out musicians in the same situation. I ran some numbers on bandwidth and storage costs, figured out that I could provide digital distribution at a very low cost, and started building a music store.

Now, at about the same time I started planning out PhilaFunk, I was also considering trying to build a social networking app. I realized that social networking would be an extremely powerful complement to an online storefront, so the from the outset PhilaFunk has had social networking features integrated with the store aspect of the site. Right now it is this combination of social networking with music distribution that is the main advantage PhilaFunk has over simple social networking sites like Myspace. Once Myspace allows musicians to begin selling music, we'll compete by providing musicians a better deal and trying to make our site more enjoyable and easier to use.

What is the software and hardware that power PhilaFunk, and why?

I programmed a good portion of PhilaFunk.com in local coffee shops and free wifi hotspots on my iBook. After programming on OS X, I don't want to program using any other OS. It's got the Unix terminal, an essential for programming, a nice GUI, and Textmate, an amazingly well thought out, quick little text editor. Firefox with the Web Developer (for live CSS editing) and Firebug extensions has been quite useful, and SVN has been indispensable. SVN's integration with webdav was extremely useful for keeping files in sync across two laptops and dev server during the development phase, and I take comfort in the fact that I can view each version of any file in the project at any time (in case I screw something up).

As for the software and hardware that actually run the site, I chose Rackspace for our hosting provider because I can call tech support 24x7 and actually speak to someone on the phone who knows what they're talking about. The PhilaFunk website runs on RHEL with Apache as the webserver, and the application itself is programmed in Ruby on Rails. This is my second Rails application, and right now I'm in love with Ruby - it just seems to fit my brain better than PHP ever did. Before starting the application, I was also considering using Django, a Python framework, but it seemed like the community of Rails developers where I could seek help was bigger and more easily accessible than the Django community. I haven't yet been disappointed with Ruby or Rails.

The database is MySQL, which I have used for every web app I've done. I considered switching to Postgres for PhilaFunk, because I had heard good things about it, but I went with MySQL because I was more familiar with it and Rackspace seemed to have better support for it.

How is the music industry changing, and where do you see it going 10 or 20 years down the road?

I think that my views about the future of music distribution are probably in line with what most people think - music will be increasingly distributed digitally, more accessible through mobile devices, and listened to primarily on devices that can store a huge library of tracks at once - so I'm going to focus my answer to this question instead on some of the social trends I see in the music industry.

One of the unfortunate changes I've seen in the past years in the music industry is a devaluation of the artist's work, of the music itself. It seems like people are increasingly unwilling to actually pay for music - live or recorded. I know a lot of musicians who are grateful to get an unpaid gig - they are just happy for the exposure they get by playing live, and the venue pays them little if at all. To me there's something wrong when people are willing to go drop 10-12 bucks on a movie and then complain about paying a few dollars to go see live music.

I feel like the same attitude is creeping into the digital music scene - people are coming to expect to be able to listen to music for free because there are so many easy ways to avoid paying for it. It's almost easier to steal music than it is to buy it - transferring an album from your friend's computer or iPod takes less time than opening the packaging on a physical CD. I think a lot of people who steal music justify it by telling themselves they're not really stealing from the artists, but rather stealing from the record companies. One of the goals of PhilaFunk is to make it clear that when you steal music you're actually going to hurt the artist more than the some big corporation. When you build a community where consumers can interact with the artists on a more personal level, consumers attach a face and personality to each song and feel less distance from the artist than when buying an album at Tower or Amazon. I hope that by giving the artist 80% and giving people a chance to interact more with musicians as members of the same community, PhilaFunk can foster a little more respect for the musicians responsible for making the music we all listen to and love. And when any musician can get a deal like the one we offer, I don't see how record labels in their current form are going to survive. When anyone can distribute their music to a global market by means of the Internet, and keep 80% of the sales revenue, why would they want a deal with a major for 10 or 15%?