On a September 2010 day, an Elon University student got a text message that made his love for music much more tangible.
At the suggestion of his hometown friend, Sophomore Conor Ambrose co-founded Dirty Mexican Lemonade, a music blog that posts music reviews, links and videos.
Neither Ambrose nor Ryan Gardner, then a freshman at the University of Richmond, thought their site would gain fame.
The blog started as a place for the two friends to post links to songs from some of their favorite music artists and provide a place for fans to download the tunes. Shortly after bringing aboard Mike Swiger, a mutual friend of Ambrose and Gardner who helps with the computer programming side of things, the website went viral. The page has more than 10,000 likes on Facebook and got somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 unique visitors last month, according to Gardner.
But with the widespread popularity came the realization that the title Dirty Mexican Lemonade could bring with it negative connotations and needed to be changed.
“Right now we’re DML Music LLC operating under dml.fm, which is our URL,” Ambrose said. “There’s no more Mexicans or lemons. That’s all in the past.”
When the page views kept rising and users continued to download the music promoted on the site, people started to take notice that some of the songs were illegally shared as “leaks” not meant to get out to the public. SoundCloud, which provides the ability to share music on websites, shut DML’s account down and the company was out about $800, according to Gardner.
“We incurred a lot of copyright infringement notifications with (SoundCloud),” Gardner said. “They banned our account about three months after we purchased the operation of the site. With SoundCloud, we just posted any track if we could get ahold of it. Regardless if it was for sale on iTunes we posted it up for a free download and also mentioned the artist.”
DML now makes sure to promote music legally, Gardner said, and there’s no shortage of talent from unsigned artists to choose from.
Ambrose flips open his phone and shows 46 unread emails from people either wanting to write for the blog or wishing to have their music promoted on the site.
In addition to his role as co-founder of DML, Ambrose serves as an event executive for Limelight Records, Elon’s student-run record label. There, he met Elon student Josh Bonney, whose rap songs Ambrose occasionally plugs on the blog.
“We’ve posted a lot of Josh’s stuff because it’s cohesive to what people are looking for,” Ambrose said.
People come to DML looking for a wide-range of musical choice, according to Ambrose. The company has a staff of 15 writers that cover genres ranging from dubstep to traditional hip-hop. Whenever a new spot becomes available, a massive number of readers come calling for it.
“We put out an application, and it was so well-received,” Ambrose said. “We were so happy about that just because we got like 140 applications. We had, like, seven kids from Cornell, a couple other Ivy Leaguers.”
Despite the rapid growth of the company, DML Music LLC has yet to see much of a profit for its endeavors. Gardner says that doesn’t bother him. Dirty Mexican Lemonade was an idea that he came up with in his dorm room, one that enabled him to meet the people behind the music he loves so much.
“It’s awesome how many relationships we have with guys whose music we like,” he said.