JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Brian Austin Whitney Blog Monday, January 19th, 2009

Hi Folks,

The month is flying by. We're behind on screening but we're banging away at it. Only about 1 in 100 judges have finished their assignments at this time so hopefully folks will get movitated soon.

We got the last officially entered CD checked in this morning. I know our staff is glad about that. (Searching packaging for info and typing it all into a spreadsheet is annoying work since about 50% of the entrants don't follow the instructions. I know that some paid contests automatically reject entries that don't follow instructions and keep their money.. and industry folks accepting submissions who have guidelines that aren't followed usually put their CD's directly into the circular file. We're not like those folks even though we're doing it free. But I have to say when I come across someone who can't be bothered to follow directions it makes me think they obiously don't care about their own music, so why should I? We get blank CDR's with no contact info quite a bit. We get smashed up cases (like the folks gave us the damaged ones since they couldn't sell them) and I guess that would be okay if they at least checked to see if the CD's was damaged, which they rarely do and often the CD's a broken or damaged. And it didn't happen in the mail because the outside packaging is fine and there's no little pieces of broken plastic in the envelope.

But we did have more people do it exactly as we asked this year than ever before.. so that's a benefit. And I will also say that the music we received directly has been far better, on average, than the music that was submitted on line via CD Baby. Not sure why that is, but it's nice on our end since all of the 2nd round screening for direct mailed material is happening here at JPF HQ.

I'll be heading out on the road for the first time in 2009 to Washington, DC. I might even sneak over the Philadelphia, but I am not sure yet. I've been contacted by a music conference there happening the weekend over our DC visit so it might make sense to stop there on the way back. I'll let folks know if that happens.

We're also getting excited about our UK tour. We don't know how many shows we're going to do having never visited there. We might do 1 in Scotland, 1 in England, 1 in Ireland and one in either Amsterdam or Paris. We also want to meet members along the way and of course visit some sites since we've never been to the UK. We're hoping after this trip that we can do a longer All Europe and UK trip that is more similar to the US Roadtrips where we often do 25 cities in 30 days. Our response so far has been encouraging.

That's the scoop!

How's your week starting off?

Brian