Levittown Entrepreneur Launches New Music Website

For some, owning your own business may seem like a dream. For Charles Costa, no other career path ever seemed fit.

Costa's latest business venture brought the Levittown resident into the world wide web, a vast difference from his 20-year old painting company. A new website was launched dedicated to live music, and live music only.

VoodooChannel.com went live March 31 and has quickly expanded to dozens of countries across the globe like Bulgaria, Malasia, France and Indonesia.

Voodoo Channel prides itself in high quality performances from artists in any and all musical genres, ranging from a small-town band such as The Involvement to a superstar like Lady Gaga.

"Local bands get lost on bigger sites, and on sites like MySpace, nothing was really happening," Costa explained. "I came up with the idea of Voodoo Channel as a music posting site that catered to unsigned music talent as much as mainstream music."

In spite of its growing popularity, Costa said that the Voodoo Channel concept has exploded overseas at a quicker speed than here in the United States. It's catching up here, though, thanks to a new "Meet The Artist" feature. As part of the feature, Costa and his staff recently interviewed Randy Jackson of Zebra, a hard rock band founded in 1975.

"In the United States, it is a much more difficult market," he said. "In the past few weeks our numbers have been rising steady, though. I think the "Meet The Artist" section is helping with this. Not only can people watch the bands or performers perform, but now they can hear about the artists and how they got together and evolved."

Before its launch, Voodoo Channel was in the works since early 2009. Costa owned a beverage company called Pop Fuzion that was operated out of a warehouse in Babylon where several local bands practiced in the surrounding studio spaces. 

"We all got to talking and I noticed that new up-and-coming talent really had no forum where they could show their stuff," said Costa.

In the eyes of Voodoo Channel, live music is the key to success and caters best to both the artists and fans.

"With all of the electronic audio equipment available to recording artists today, it is so easy to make a bad singer sound great in the studio," Costa said. "Any music lover will tell you there is nothing like a great live show."

"Site users get to post their videos, rate the videos and vote off any videos they feel are not up to par," he added. "It is our intent to up the ante and make our site the destination for serious musicians and fans alike."

According to Costa, since Voodoo Channel is still in its early stages, fans can expect to see rapid development from the up-and-coming musical hub.

"We want to be the go-to site for emerging musical talent," he said. "[We] hope to grow into a viable target for purchase by a major internet corporation."