There’s a new online music streaming service online and it’s looking good! Visit skempi.com now, sign up and listen to golden oldies, discover those hot new artists and share your heritage. All songs on Skempi are from Dutch Caribbean artists, including many artists from Curaçao.
Several months ago we saw a new fan page on Facebook. It didn’t have a lot of content yet but their proposition sounded good: “a highly innovative online music streaming service offering music from Aruba, Curacao, St. Maarten, BES and Suriname artists. Discover your musical heritage for free”. So we liked the page, subscribed to the newsletter and didn’t think any more of it. I mean, how often don’t we see ‘highly innovating’ products/services and then only hear about it again when someone says that they worked for it and left because nothing happened.. ..
But Skempi was different. We often saw them posting pictures of new artists who signed up with them, they posted music and the name kept popping up in conversation. And then this morning we received a newsletter inviting everyone to sign up at the website and start discovering.. .. Yay!
Listening to music with Skempi
When you log in at skempi.com (you can sign up with your FB account, so it’s easy and fast) you start at the ‘Discovery’ page. You can scroll down to see the latest additions (the scroll is a bit sluggish) or choose a decade to sort music from that era. The oldest song in there is the album ‘Solo Sali’ by Rudy Plaate from 1960 (and see you can even link directly to an album or a song), how’s that for nostalgic music? 🙂
We chose to first go to the artist page of KIT (Kuenta I Tambu) because we love their music and they have an upcoming album showcase at ADE in Amsterdam October 16th. It took us some time to actually start listening because the interface is not very intuitive. We selected a song and hit play on the player in the bottom of the page but nothing happened. After some time we figured out that you have to double click a song to get it to play. But when we got it to play we just sat back and listened to a flawless playback of KIT’s Jackhammer EP without any buffering.
The player is pretty versatile. You can use it to <3 a song, share the song with your friends on FB or just set it to shuffle and listen to your favorite music all day. Once you’re listening to a song the player also stays with you while you navigate the site so you don’t have to stop listening just because you want to explore. Eat your heart out YouTube! 😉
No more sitting tight; they’re here!
Skempi has all kinds of different styles of music; from Rudy Plaate to NSTPLY and from Cache Royale to Area 51 so you’ll definitely find something to love in there. They also have tons of information about the artists, you can create your own playlists and interact with your FB friends. The ads are necessary we suppose but they’re not obtrusive so we didn’t mind them being there.
A message from one of Curaçao’s music icons Mr. Chin Behilia (in Papiamentu)
All in all we give this great music initiative 2 thumbs up and wish them all the best with further expanding the service! They’ve got fans in us 😀
how to download music from your “SKEMPY” SITE??/
CAN I DOWNLOAD MUSIC, AND HOW MUCH PER DOWNLOAD?
Dear William,
As far as we know the purpose of Skempi is to listen to the music online and not to download it to your computer. There is probably a difference in usage rights. However, to be absolutely sure you should ask them on their user forum: https://skempi.userecho.com/list/18735-general/
Best regards,
I want all the music from Dutch Caribbean