Goodbye you old knackered donkey!

I'm refering of course to

Our Myspace Page!!

But lets start at the start and remember fondly our dearly departed social networking site.



MEMORIES
My first memory of Myspace was that of when we( in our first incarnation with a different lineup) rush recorded a glut of demo songs and hastily rushed them up onto myspace(which made the recordings sound even worse) then sat back and waited for the praise to roll in.

I remember the intense joy upon finding out that we had a new comment
Only to feel crushed when it was an advert from some promoter putting on a "dance" night in San Fransisco


I remember teaching myself HTML code and trying to make the page as beautiful as possible.I took sooo much pride in our page, it was the equivalent of my house and I had it decorated how we wanted it.


I remember the sometimes hilarious/deluded/nonsensical notes that came with "friend requests"




I remember the intense feeling of joy when we were placed in someones "Top Friends"

I remember feeling mind bendingly frustrated when I couldn't do a "page break"

I remember it being a gigantic personal statement whenever I changed the profile song on my personal page!

I remember getting really excited about how many song plays we had whenever we uploaded a new song

I remember THIS GUY being EVERYWHERE!!!!










A GOOD WORKING RELATIONSHIP

We worked well with myspace, even though a lot of bands at first seemed embarrassed to tell people that were watching them that they had a myspace page, it seemed to normalize after a while and venues all over the country would be filled with bands quoting their myspace address.

Come to think of it, if i went to see a band now and they said "you can find us on Myspace" i would have trouble determining if they were being ironic or not!


There was a time (shortly before everyone got megafeckedoff with constant band adds) when Myspace and people worked harmoniously. It was a great time when everyone was happy






THE BEGINNING OF THE END

I remember the beginning of the end. It was the day a certain Jenny Hipkiss said to me "I'm on Facebook, its like Myspace but more grown up"

I was cynical at first but uploaded myself to Mark Zuckerbergs global database of self preening.
Then Came Twitter
Then came Soundcloud
Then came Bandcamp

Slowly the features of Myspace started to get buried under an almost inexhaustible amount of better social networking sites.

Then the final nail in the coffin!

Myspace changed the way its users could do stuff.

I dont know about anyone else but after this i felt like Myspace had run its course, i was too well acquainted with it to re-learn how to re-use it and to top it off our beautiful band page had a permanent advert in the right hand corner for something like UGG Boots!




So, (for us at least) Myspace is no more!



Goodbye old friend

I am a PR Machine!

I sometimes wonder how bands got signed in the days of Joy Division.

I would imagine in the most pure way possible, by playing shows and creating a buzz. I cant believe how much the music industry has changed over the past few years.


Incase you didn't know we have a new double A-side single out in March

We are taking preorders here
http://kidnapperbell.bigcartel.com/


You can listen to both tracks here
http://kidnapperbell.bandcamp.com/



How does a band like us get this facking single into peoples ears do you ask?


I tell you.


Since we announced the single we have had a flurry (3) of emails from P.R companies asking if we need any promotion done for the single.

When we first started out we did pay a PR company £250 pounds and sent them about 100 cds to promote to their contacts.
They typed us up a (poorly written) press pack and sent our cd out to various online sites.
But because we had already done a lot of the legwork in sending out our cds ourselves some less observant websites cave us two seperate reviews.


I would hate for the reader to think that i'm making out P.R companies to be an evil in the music industry, indeed like bands there are good ones and bad ones, the ones that are good use their contacts and only work with bands they work with in order to claim some sense of pride in the material they send out!

indeed here is a good one
http://www.abadgeoffriendship.com/



All i'm saying is reeeeaaalllly given the right amount of time (and lurking on other peoples websites) theres no reason why a band putting their first cd out cant make a killing with countless reviews if their material is good!

Take a look at our Hotmail Outbox for instance






While it may not be considered Punk to trawl through websites asking people to give you time of day, its an awesome feeling when people write back and say not only that they like it but will also take the time to write words about it.