Thoughts, Raves & Outright Beatings

For those of you who’ve been following the progress of my CD, and are wondering why the hell it isn’t out yet, well…

• I received the masters of 8 of the CD’s songs from the mastering service I sent the them to; the guy who worked on them did such a good job, that I was able to hear some rather ugly mixing mistakes I made on two of the songs. So I remixed them, then sent them back to be remastered. I also sent him “Ringed by Lovers” to work on as well (I delayed my sending it to him, on account of changing a couple of lyrical passages - I mean, the song’s embarrassing enough as it is, really.) They should all be done by the end of the week.
• This means that I may or may not be able to set aside funds for an upcoming overseas trip AND pay for duping by Discmakers AND take advantage of their online distribution deal until maybe April 15th. I’ll watch my pennies and see.
• Today, I started my initial promoing for the CD like mad. It kinda pissed my husband off that I spent so much time in front of the PC doing this, but well, I’ve sat around and done nothing but sit in my room and write, or write and record. Now that I have something that can be called a viable piece of work put together, it’s time to, as they say, shit or get off the pot.

Things I did to make this happen:

• I updated my Soundclick page with Mp3s of 6 of the masters. Initially I was not getting any sound from the page players, until I realized that some of the ID tagging I had put on the MP3s were causing some encoding issues on Soundclick’s end. So I had to resave the MP3s but without the ID tagging, then re-upload. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr….
• Soundclick has a partnership with creativecommons.org to apply CC licenses to any song you upload onto their OMD. So, of course, given that registering a song with the US Copyright office, the last time I checked, was US $45.00 PER SONG, obtaining a license I didn’t have to pay for was a pretty sweet deal. In fact, after we get back from said overseas trip, I may just start giving them some money each month, after taking a free ride for about 8 years on their servers. After all, I don’t think anyone expected Soundclick to survive the OMD wars in the early 2000’s, and yet, here they are, creating new services, and being artist-friendly. And where’s IUMA or MP3.com (wait, don’t ask…)?
• Also, for the first time since I started my profile there, I completely wiped my Myspace profile of any and all of my songs, and uploaded ones from the upcoming CD. I did a small little bulletin, and I’ve already gotten some comments and quite a few listens. Things, right now, are going pretty good. I was even able to add a playlist widget of songs from my Soundclick page.
• Now I’m starting to feel ambitious. I recall that I had an empty iLike profile that was probably started as a result of my attention-whoring ass being all over the internet. It DOES happen. Anyway, I figure what’s good for REM is good for me, I claim the rogue profile for my own, add images, songs and albums to it - even including the little EP I recorded in 2002 and made it available solely on Artistlaunch.com. (I may need to make it available again somewhere, now that I’ve told the greater world about it in even further detail…OOOPS!). It turns out that the iLike artist profiles will automatically port over to the Facebook music profiles that were just introduced. Killing two birds with one stone. Not a bad proposition.
• iLike also works with Bebo. I then remembered that I had started a profile there some time ago. So I went there and did a search. There were 3. YIKES!!! I took the one that was accessible and did some work on it. Uploaded songs, videos, etc. Then I tried to get it featured. Which got me this message:

Your Band has been reviewed and deemed unsuitable for featuring. There are many reasons we may decide not to feature a Band and we are unable to enter into discussions on why, we just receive too many requests. Sorry!

Whatever…serves me right for not jumping on their bandwagon right away.

• Anyway…all my efforts to put my ducks in a row took about 6 hours. This includes sending emails on my Facebook network, my Myspace network, et. al. It’s frankly rather exhausting. I don’t like spamming my friends in the first place, but also, I used to do all this sort of crap when I first put my mp3.com page up back in 1999. It was the start of a massive internet addiction that took me about 6 years to break. And occasionally, I still have to fight it. It’s not healthy. Not for either my online or offline relationships.

Hopefully, I won’t have to go onto these networks every day and remind people that I exist and that I have music. OTOH, nothing would piss folks off more than a nagging wuss.

We’ll see…