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

Actually I didn't say we'd gotten 50,000 albums... I said we were going to fall short it appeared.

We partner with CD Baby. They are handling Digital entries. Anyone on CD Baby is allowed to enter if they join JPF. I don't know how many are new and how many are existing JPF members until I get the sign up list. CD Baby tells me that they've already had nearly 35K CD's signed up through them. Last time we did this, they had 22K, 6K of which were brand new to JPF. I suspect this time around, 9-12K will be new to JPF which will climb our membership numbers that many once we have the list. It's also pretty common to get 2-3-4-5-6 CD's from any given member. (Last year we had several send us more than 10.. their entire catalog).

I have over 5K already sitting here which members have sent us in the last 2 years or handed us at Roadtrip shows in person. A lot of folks release an album every year. The numbers aren't really all that surprising and as I indicated, it's actually lower than we expected based on previous awards years and percentages entered via CD Baby and JPF. We're getting about 100 a day right now in the mail as well. That will tail off until the deadline where we normally get 500-1000 via the mail the last week each day. We'll have to see if that happens this time around. Between now and the deadline our members as a group will likely release another 20K CD's, but I have no idea how many of those we'll get.

We'll be posting the entire list (as we have every year) and you're welcome to count them up for yourself if you'd like. Most of our members have multiple CD's released. You can't use the message boards (as I have said literally 100's of times but some don't seem to listen) as an indicator of what's going on with JPF. It's a very specific subsection that like to use message boards and has little to do with the general membership. Most active touring/performing artists don't have time between rehearsals and gigs and day jobs to post on boards. We typically have a lot more of the songwriter only or occassional performer crowd here who do their work on the boards rather than in a rehearsal space or venue.

Oh, and you're also mistaken. There's never been a rule that music has to be released this year. The only rule is you can't enter the same music 2 times.

Brian