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

Hi Brian,
You'll be happy to know I have finished the first two of three catagories and am about 7 percent thru the last one.

About those broken CD Cases. I use the thin cases to submit songs. A while back one of them came back as the addressee had moved with no forwarding address. When I opened the package the CD case was broken. In this case it was the case because is was pretty weak. I have since added a buffer in the case of a sized paper towel to help prevent the case being broken. Next time i buy CD Cases I will look to see if I can find stronger ones.

Broken CD cases happen. But these often have no loose plastic shards inside the package which indicates they were broken BEFORE being placed in the envelope. = )

Brian

What? Your not going to the inauguration?{LOL}

Bob, to paraphrase a line from an old, bad movie, "Television means never having to go to an inauguration."

Joe

Hey Brian,

Was reading your blog - how are you guys going about booking the tour? I may be able to help. With my website, ticketometer.com, you can post shows for free and advertise them on here, twitter, facebook, etc. and only play the concerts that meet a specified minimum ticket sales. Or, if you're expecting some demand you could post 20 and the first 10 to meet the "set-off point" will play. Consider it a competition for fans to hear their favorite groups near them.

I also don't know how many bands/how large an audience you're talking but we are in touch with NEC UK about booking small-to-mid size events on empty nights. They own a few arenas in Europe.

I'm available via phone (702-526-8198), email (ardon@ticketometer.com), or skype (ardon.lukas) if you're interested. Ticketometer is a new start up but we have had a great amount of positive feedback and exciting news in the works. I would personally love to get involved in helping make your events a success - Let me know!

Hi Ardon,

As you can see the date of this post is quite old. (Sorry, I've been terrible about keeping my blog up to date... not sure what happened as I was once so good at it). So that UK tour happened in 2009. We're actually planning a trip to Europe right now for September 19-October 23rd but I don't think we'll make it to the UK this time. We're considering Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway this time around. Most likely we'll just be interested in meeting members rather than doing shows. We just don't have the time to put them together now less than 40 days away.

We should talk more about your site however, perhaps via PM and then via skype.

Brian