If you hear the track playing anywhere, please report! 
I can't listen to all the radio stations at once, so if you hear it tell me

  I would also like to be notified of people mentioning it in news papers,  web sites, and other media. 

 we need more CDR copies!- if you can burn some let us know!

  We still need to get this onto all the campuses, Download the MP3 track and make copies to tapes or CD's and pass them around, local demonstration sites, radio stations, newspapers, pubs, discos, and everywhere you can think of. If you do this please report as to where did you give the track, so I'll know to put it in the status report. 

  We also need media coverage, possibly as items in relevant radio or TV shows (news shows, internet shows) and in the news papers. if you think you can help, or know someone who might help, please do.  feel free to give the contact information to anyone who might be interested, and can help us. 

If you mantain a website,   Link to us!http://studentim.site.co.il 

what ever you do, please report!

thanks,

Eitan.

    The student struggle started about six months ago, as a result of the governments decision to raise the tuition fees for students. This was the last straw since students in this country usually don't get support for rent, and other relevant issues, most of us have to find work while studding. In addition most of us have to spend some of the year doing reserve duty at the Army, which is not helpful towards our academic goals. The government thought it could get away with this since students did not have a strong lobby in this country. 

    The student council warned that unless this issue would get resolved by the end of the summer vacation, the academic year would not start. 
    What happened is that they were a lot of demonstrations and some of them heated up, causing a few Police personnel to loss their calm and injure students, also a lot of students got arrested. The government acted as if the student struggle was not legitimate and ignored the claims to start negotiations.. 

   Then, the academic year started (25/10/98).. well, not started actually, yet. 

  One of the main points of interest here is that the we are getting support from all over the political spectrum, from the Ultra Right wing students to Arab israeli and left wing groups, it went even further.. in the demonstrations political people were NOT allowed to speak, including the head of the opposition, so the A-Political nature of the struggle would remain. 

   This issue, which nobody thought will become a big story, has turned into a cultural event, demonstrations at some campuses, in the evening, turned to dance parties and social venues. 

    On sunday I got the idea to make a dance track for it - after being present when a student demonstration was going on, I thought that music using samples could be made to accompany the struggle, and would be appropriate - somebody could do it - hey! I could do it.. . I caught Lior Rotbart's speech on the radio, and I knew it had to be done. But I had other things on My mind so I postponed it. 

  On Tuesday I heard on the radio that there would be a big demonstration in Jerusalem "in two hours". Since I had nothing better to do I decided to get the track done for this accession. 

 The basic track is from something I made a few weeks before, called 'take it', which is mostly influenced by Prodigy style stuff. The tracks drum and Bass parts are done on Propellerheads ReBirth 2.0 using the PBE mod (running at 142 PBM), the synth pad and sequenced Oldfield like bell part was done on my Casio CZ5000 synth. 
. I did the vocal sample insertion (using sonic foundry Acid), but I had to adjust the speed of the track to match the voice, so the track in the final form was speeded up to 147BPM. 

   Since I had so little time to make the track (about an hour), elementary things like Noise Reduction on the sample, and EQ levels on the tracks, were left out.. I'm kind of sorry about that now, but, hey.. that's life, and since my hard disk died I had no way of reconstructing the track and bringing it up to the production standard I'd wish.. However, for this project quality was not a important factor anyway. 

  I burned the disk and got as fast as I could to the demonstration, where it got played to a crowd of thousands, who went wild. So wild, in fact, that the track had to be stopped after 30 seconds.. the first time. 

  It was played a few more times at the demonstration, between speeches, and so this story begun.
 

  Added a link to my mp3.com page. and it's about time..

14/3/99:

 (the answer is no.)

 I've got an active account in MP3.com (which is something that I should have done years ago). Including the student struggle track. So I've decided that MP3.com will be the only active link from now on. Feel free to check some more of my stuff on mp3.com.

 more to come later.

6/12/98:

  (is this the last update?)

  Gal Samuel's MP3 mailing list this month was all about this track, feel free to go and read it:

 If you can't read hebrew you can read this article, which I wrote, and basicly says the same thing.

  Thanks to everyone, feel free to mail me feedback, and such.
 
 

3/12/98:

 The strike has ended, nothing got signed.

 The fact that the strike has ended is actully good, since the semester will not get canceled. but the question is: "what will happen now?" 

 It seems like the people on the student council are busy acussing them selves and people in the govrement, instead of continuing demonstrations, and other activity. I don't see why everything has to end just becoase the strike is finished. 

1/11/98:

  Maavak.co.il now has a link on the front page that goes to a site with five differant protest songs, including my own (high quality download), yup now there are even more unmonitored files on the net... I'll guess I'll never know how many people DLed the thing.. :-)

  I've discovered another "struggle" MP3 file

30/11/98:

 Gal Samuel informs me that more then 800 people have downloaded the file from israeliz.co.il.

 Tal Shachar said that another 255 people downloaded the file from the naked truth, and that adds to another 130 downloads from site.co.il to a total of more then 1000 confirmed file downloads.

 The actuall number is, probably, much higher since the default Download location is geocities. I have no way of knowing the number of downloads from the geocities server. I guess that a conservative guess would be 5000 downloads.

28/11/98:

 Yesterday I was at the procession in the streets of tel-aviv, the track got played several times. very nice, the Dj's apparently liked it...

 when it was played, in the actual procession, it actually got applauded.. totally spontaneous, since nobody announced it, or knew that I made it, this is, to me, the high point of this bizarre campaign.   :-)

 Guy Havardi has linked his geocities site to this site, and to the MP3 files, thanks!
 

26/11/98:

  The track can also be downloaded from the "naked truth" site which is a nice site with photos from the various demonstrations.
 

25/11/98:

  I made about 25 CDR copies that are being distributed through the students union press relations. Thanks to Gal Haspel for helping me reach them.

  I still need to get the track on the radio as much as possible. If you have contact with anyone at ANY radio station, nag them to put it on.

  Gal Haspel told me his target is to have it on every radio station all the time, so Netanyahu will not be able to turn the radio on without hearing it.. :-)

  We need to distribute more CDR/tape copies to places were the track can get heard- radio, TV, discos, record shops, whatever.. 

  currently there are about 30 CDR copies that I made and a few more that were donated by other people, not including the MP3's people DL'd, of which I don't have any definite statistics since I have no way of counting how many people DL'd from Geocities. the download from site.co.il have passed 100 downloads, most of which are high quality. 
  since it is not the main link, I guess the actual MP3 distribution numbers are at least 10 times that.
 

22/11/98:
 

  I learned that a student has made a video clip demonstrating police brutality, which uses the track. It was played on the screen at the demonstration last week, I didn't know this until yesterday. It was also played on the morning program at channel 2, last week. 

  maavak.co.il's link page is finally up, and they linked to this site. 

17/11/98:

  Mike Darnel just informed me that the track got played at the demonstration in Kikar Saphra today. I was informed by him that the demonstrators reaction was very good (there were aprox 20,000 demonstrators there). 

 Alas, I wasn't there to whiteness it. 

  From my past experience I now know that the track works very well at demonstrations, the bigger the demonstration, the better the response.. :-) 

  A local Israeli MP3 distribution site, The MP3 Hebrew Center,  runs a local mp3 mailing list called P3  , which discusses MP3 related issues and news in hebrew, They will mention the track in their next web update, and on the next installment of the Mailing list. Thanks! 

 If anyone else wants to link to my site, feel free, just let me know, so I can return the favor.

 I also noticed that the location of the Main's site of the week changed, in a rather weird manner.. It this weeks site of this week as well.. Bizarre, my guess is that it was supposed to feature in today's Captain internet Haaretz multimedia supplement... Again, just like last time, it didn't make it, Bizarre.. :-| 

 But it's always nice to look at the bright side.. how many sites get to win the same "site of the week" award for two different weeks.. :-) 
  Should I now consider this site to be the winner of the first  coveted "site of the half-month" award..? :-) 

7/11/98:

  Yoav Ben-Dov of the Tel-Aviv university has sent me a email, in which he observed that my track is not really a trance track. I agree, it isn't (I never said it is, by the way). He liked it anyway. 

  He also put a link to this site, that can be accessed from his own hebrew portion of his site, which is great, since it allowed me to learn about his wonderful site. It is full of interesting articles he wrote, books he published, TV educational programs he contributed to and other stuff about all sort of subjects I happen to be interested in, such as chaos theory, the internet, quantum theory and the current Trance war.. 
  Check it out, in English or Hebrew. 
 

6/11/98:

   Due to various personal reasons I didn't spend much time over this project the past few days. 

   I just heard on the news that the chief of police, Yehuda Vilk, has just blamed the polices incompetence in stopping today's bombing in Machane Yehooda (two dead, probably the suicide bombers), on the students struggle, as he is forced to allocate police personal to keep the peace in the various student demonstrations (his actual words were about screaming female students..). 

   What an asshole. 

3/11/98:

   Ido Amin, has kindly bestowed the coveted Site of the week award upon this humble site. he has written a report on it which can be read in Hebrew only. it was the first item on his internet report. 

  mp3.com has mentioned this project in their daily new section, it's small, but it's there.. mp3.com is the biggest MP3 related site in the world with millions of hits per week. 

  I added more info to the about the track section, which now also gives background about the actual student struggle, and is in the front of the page, as it should have been from the start. 

  I got some more reports that Jerusalem Radio has played the track at least two more times in the past day.. (thanks Mike), please continue to report! 

   I also learned today that at my collage (unlike the universities) the strike has stopped since yesterday.. I j was not informed. With this turning of events I find it rather difficult to continue this project , but I'll do my best to continue anyway.. 

2/11/98:

   I've just decided to cancel the idea of making a cd-single pressing of the track, since Izhar Ashdot (a prominent Israeli musician and producer) kindly advised me that such a project would just take too long to complete in time for it to remain relevant (about three weeks), Thanks Izhar, this gives me more time to concentrate on other avenues that will yield better results in a more expectable time frame. Izhar also gave me some more insight into what might be a good way to distribute the track, thanks! 

  Today I'm working on getting information about the track on the major news sites on the net, I Already sent information about it to various news sites including ZDnews, and C-net. 

  MP3.com should mention us on their daily news section today or tomorrow, If you spot it there please let me know. 

  I added a about the track segment which describes the way the track got conceived and produced. 
 

1/11/98:

   We still need help in regard to getting the track out as a single, and further distribution, please help.. 

   No demonstrations today (for good reason), and I doubt that the track will be played on the radio or anywhere until this evening, when the memorial day is over. 

   I just got off the phone with Ido Amin, who might mention the track in his weekly report on reshet.co.il and in the Captain Internet supplement in the Haaretz news paper on Tuesday. 

  One of the questions Ido asked was "how would you define the track? drum and bass?" 
  this particular track has influences from drum and bass, techno, and trance (and obviously Paul Hardcastel's '19', and a dash of a Mike Oldfield type sequence thrown in..) 
   I get people asking me the: "what exactly -is- your music" question,  a lot. The truth is that I do what I do, and what comes out -comes out. And That's it. Music making for me is only a hobby, so I don't have to make 'genere-type' music. I let other people define it, I just make it :-) 

  The track will also be an Item on Mp3.com's daily new section, when it's updated. 

31/10/98:

  Last night (friday) the track got played at the Campus club in Jerusalem (Mike got them a copy), I was there... nice. 

  If you know of any other venues in which it got played- please report. 

  Sunday is going to be a quite day with no demonstrations as it is the memorial day for Rabins assassination. The strike will go on, though. 

  Thanks to a good net friend of mine, St.Einar of Norway (who is the best E-mu customer in the world :-) , we have yet another mirror site on his musaic server.  I think four download site options is enough for now..  thanks to everyone who helped us in this department! 

30/10/98:

  I want to get this track out as a single on one of the major record companies urgently. I need help!

  I Redesigned the web site, it looks fit for human consumption, now.. (no offense, Ira.. :) 

  Eran Tromer has mirrored the low quality Mp3. thanks again Eran. 

29/10/98:      (written: 30/10/98) 

  Got the only high quality cd version that was ever burned (which I gave to Lior Rotbard at the knesset demonstration), I made 15 copies of it and gave them to Mike Darnel who will handle their "normal" non internet distribution and PR. 

  I also replaced the "high quality MP3"- with that version. (thanks Ira). 

  a bag full of thanks to Shachar Tal and Eran Tromer who have helped by distributing these track to radio stations and demonstration locations up in Haifa. We still need help to reach the other cities and campuses. 

  And also to Ira Abramov for providing the cool domain name.. and other help. 

28/10/98:      (written: 30/10/98) 

  The track got played as a item on Tal Berman's show on Army-radio (galatz), he talk to Mike Darnel, since I was not reachable at that time (I think I'll finally give in and get a cell phone.), and by the way, may name is 'Shefer', not 'Reshef', as was said on the airwaves... 

  I also got air time on local stations in Haifa (thanks, Tal!) and Jerusalem (thanks Mike!). And should be on reshet Bet and reshet Gimel as well. 

27/10/98:        (written: 30/10/98) 

  Made the track, just in time to make one CD copy for the demonstration that was taking place near the Knesset. went to the Knesset demonstration and got it played, the reaction was very good. 

  There I also met Lior Rotbart, who is the guy I sampled, and gave him the disk as a souvenir, thinking I'll just make more copies at home..   BIG mistake.. 

  At home I managed to fry my Hard disk. By fry I mean that smoke and noise and stuff was coming out of that device. At first I thought that that was the end of that, but luckily I had made a tape copy before I left (I wasn't sure if they would have CD players at the demonstration. 

I sampled that tape to hard disk, Mp3ed it and started the distribution. 

progress reports, feedback on the track and web site, email and stuff:

send to my email address 

I check it when I can, at least once every three hours. 

I reserve the right to post any comments sent to me on this site. 

                            Eitan Shefer. 
 

          Mon, 30 Nov 1998 05:15:15 +0200

Hi,

  So, a month has passed since I started that whole Student struggle MP3 dance file thing, it pretty much fulfilled it's desired objective, that is, to become a symbol of the struggle and get played at all the demonstrations.

  However, there is one point that I and nearly everyone else who noticed this story missed..

  This was the first use of Internet MP3 distribution in a public struggle in Israel (and I am not totally sure, but maybe the first time in the world too). 

  The guy who I'm crediting to this scoop is Gal Samuel, who is the web master of the Israeli MP3 center site, check it out: http://www.israeliz.co.il/mp3

  he actually wrote the words "the first use of the MP3 standard in a public struggle" in the 17th of November.. at first I didn't pay attention to that statement, then I thougt that it is a silly thing to say, in fact I ridiculed it. 

But the truth of the matter, now that I look back and see what has happened, is that this is a important angle to the story. Actually I think it's the biggest achievement of this dance track, and the reason it might be remembered in future.

  Why is this MP3 thing important?

  Well, during all of this I hardly left my house.. I don't know what other way I could have gotten the track to be so widely accepted in the student circles - where it really matters. At the beginning I didn't think much of the MP3 angle, since for example, The first time it got publicly played was at the demonstration next to the Knesset, when I went there and gave then the track on CD. on the second day it got to the Tal Berman show using "normal" distribution methods, that is, Mike Darnell PRed the track, and it got in as an item to that show.

  BUT, that's about it, as far as "normal" distribution goes.

  The track hardly got played on the Big radio stations since it is a very NON radio friendly track.. it's tempo is extremely fast (147 BPM) it isn't something that can be easly labled, (it's not trance it's not techno, it's weird) the production is poor as the speech is full of noise, and there is even digital clipping on thet sample the track, in audio production standards, it sux.

  Sending most of the cd's to major radio stations was a mistake (two out of three CD's). it didn't get played as much as I hoped it would, it hardly got played at all after the first few days. I can't (and I don't) blame the people at the major radio stations who make these decisions, I think it is news worthy, they think it's noise, whatever.. 
  their interest is to get people to listen to their programming - By putting this 147 beat per minute monstrosity a lot of people would simply turn to another station- I understand why they didn't want to put it on. 

  This is where the MP3 standard saved the day.

  I had a limited amount of disks at first, the first days, I only had three CDRs in circulation (which I made..) by the end of the first week I made 10 more, but they didn't get distributed until TWO WEEKS later, due to some mixup, I nearly abandoned the project then and there.

  Basically, there were three CDs: one went to galatz, one to channel 1 TV, and another one stayed with me.

  So only two CD were in circulation in the first week, without getting played, this looked bad.

  But this didn't matter.. because ALL of the major cities student councils already HAD the track ..

  This is because the MP3's started to spread around. it got to the technion thanks to Shachar Tal and Eran Tromer, I'm still not sure how it got to tel-aviv, but it did. Jerusalem got it using "normal" distribution methods (through Mike Darnell), though I'm not totally sure, maybe some clever CS student got it off the net too and gave it to them, I don't know.
  I'm not sure about other locations, but by the time I got hold of the 10 CD's that were never sent, the track got played at the big demonstration at Kikar Saphra in Jerusalem, and later I heard that one Student from Betzalel actually made a video clip for that occasion, how did he get the track?.. I really don't know.

  I got another pleasant suprise when I saw the news journal (Yoman) on channel 1, at that week's weekend. 

  They had a big item on the student strike, and in one shot there where a few students shouting " Anachno nofia kan kol yom" - without my track (a-kapella.. ? :-) Which was a interesting proof of the fact that the track caught on where it was supposed to. That is, the striking students themselves.

  In the demonstration I was in (fridays march) The chanting of "Anachno nofia.." has became another one of the main student mantras, in popularity it was between "Ten lo Ba-schar Limod.." and "Gam Avner Ve-Gam Yair.." :-)

  The point of all of this is that non-controled-semi-pirated internet distribution of an MP3 file worked more effectively then a controlled CD distribution to radio stations. 

  When I started this, I thought that the best chance I had was to try to get the track out as a REAL single, but I dropped that idea since there was no way I could have done it in an acceptable time frame (and there are other issues, that Ishar Ashdot was kind enough to point out). But even If I had, I'm not sure that would have worked better then the MP3 distribution of the track.

  I'm saying that the independent MP3 distribution of the track worked better then if a major label would have been behind it.

  This is a very grandiose  point, and, this is the proof:

  A group of students (I think they are from Rimon, the musical arts school) made a student struggle track too, it's a reggae track kind of like "no woman no cry". they got it out as a REAL single on a REAL record label, they even got it on Tal Berman's radio show too (as the official student struggle single).

  I heard it only once, on that very same Tal Berman show. 

  At the march on friday that reggae track didn't even get played once, my track was played at least three times.

  This is not because my track is better, indeed I'm pretty sure it isn't (definitely not from a proffesional audio point of view), but because my track got distributed better, and got where it was supposed to go, fast, through the net (and one or two other sources) as a MP3.

  Interesting story all of this.. 

  Using MP3 was the only real option I had to distribute it. And it was the only one that really worked.

  It also didn't cost me anything other then time, and a few CDRs my brother donated (and one hard disk flambe)

  Thanks to everyone who helped on this one, feel free to distribute this to whoever you want.

Eitan.

http://studentim.site.co.il