JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Brian Austin Whitney Blog Friday, April 11th, 2008

Hi Folks,

So today we passed the 500,000 song mark for this year's JPF Music Awards. It looks like our album count will fall a little short of 50,000, though there's still a lot of time before the August 31st deadline. We usually get 80% of the entries at the start.. 10% between the start and deadlines and the other 10% at deadline. So with 40,000 albums so far that would suggest we may end up just a little short.

I am very excited to get started on the process. I will likely be underground for the next 4-5 months getting it all categorized, recruiting the needed judges/screeners and making sure our new digital process can integrate with our process and that we can get the CD entries into the system as well. (CD Baby having most of their stuff digitized is a big plus).

I think we're on a roll right now and I am hoping to keep it going. Next up we want put some focus on our Resources collection. I plan to run the list in the newsletter and then solicit commentary and suggestions for what is good, not so good and what we might have missed. Then once we're happy with the list and feel we have vetted it as best we can, we want to contact the folks on those lists to try and create some additional Community Partner relationships.

We do still plan to contact our previous awards nominees/winners but not until we check and see if we got entries from them already in the CD Baby stuff.

So that's what's happening on this Friday. Things are heating up around here and I expect a long weekend while the CD Baby deadline passes (I am answering several hundred email questions a day right now) and we start the screening process. I have a conference call with our tech partner in a few minutes to go over the process again.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Brian