Ok, so the “series of blogs” John was planning to do to coincide with our 2017 releases has turned out to be a very short series indeed (so far at least). I (encouraged by Stephen, who thought it was a bit weird to have ‘FAILURE’ on the front page of our website) thought I’d share something about the day-to-day life of a band like ours while we’re waiting for the next installment.

These days when you’re releasing something, a large part of the audience you’re trying to reach hears about new music from music blogs, so we typically contact a load of blogs hoping they’ll feature our tune. Blogs, as you might expect, get floods of new music all the time and most of them are run by hobbyists who struggle to listen to it all. A website called submithub attempts to help bloggers deal with the flood – artists pay a dollar per submission, and the blogger gets a cut if they listen to a track and provide a little bit of feedback (and if not you get your money back). Most tracks are rejected, but as an artist it’s nice to know someone has at least listened to what you sent, rather than just pouring stuff out into the ether and never hearing anything back at all.

The downside is the flood of rejection you get, which … well, we’ve been doing this a long time, but by christ it still stings. A sample from the feedback from “Don’t play no game” (bear in mind that the vocals in this are mine (in the verse, it’s John in the chorus))

we did not really enjoy the singing here

I wasn’t into the vocals

Not a fan of the vocal

vocal style did not grab me

not feeling the vocals here

the overall style of the vocals simply wasn’t for me

didn’t dig the vocals much

Ouch 🙁 🙁 🙁

What makes it even worse is I was a bit on the fence about the vocals myself, but my wife says “that’s what your voice really sounds like” so it’s not just the performance nobody likes, it’s my actual real voice.

(sighs)

One or two people actually liked the vocal, would you believe, which made me feel (slightly) better

Powerful vocal and lyrics

you have wonderful voice

😮

So, the exact opposite of what the others thought … actually we’ve found this kind of diversity of opinion is pretty common, check this out

its a standard pop track for me

cool alternative rock song Stoat but a little too weird

Both rejections – one lads it cos it’s too straightforward, one because it’s too weird.

Despite the different opinions, most bloggers (though thankfully not quite all) agree on one thing – they don’t want our music on their blog. For the latest single, the one I was saving til the end cos I thought most people would like it, we got 46 rejections in 48 hours, so approx one rejection per hour for 2 days straight. Even when you’re used to them they’re like nettle stings – you can be tough about the first few, but after a bit you’re grinding your teeth, and you’d want to be in an emotionally stable place to be bringing this upon yourself

 

–Cormac