After all these days of preparation it is about time to put the finishing touches on the album itself. Still missing: the final cover version(s), band infosheet, label infosheet, heaps of changes for all our websites.

My main tool at work is photoshop and yes, i DO KNOW, it is a program for picture manipulation not for doing printstuff, that is what indesign is for... blablabla clever talk, i do it in photoshop anyway, i know my way around it best.

After blowing out several final and final-final designs (even final-final-final ones) everyone agrees on the one i call "my old school bible", something no one understands, this picture might explain why (yes i kept all my books from school, nostalgia, you know it):



Everything works like a charm, crammed all the pictures, lyrics to the songs and the credits into the 16 page deluxe booklet. CD label, CD tray inlay, all no problem - what did you expect? pro at work!

First slight problem after exporting 16 single pages as pdfs and stitching those together in acrobat - the frigging booklet is 130 megabytes huge :-O. So the artwork ist twice the size of the actual album - hmmmmmm - maybe it wasn't that brilliant to do it in photoshop in the first place. do it again in indesign - costs me one whole day - pro at work! - ROFL.

while doing all that stuff i blog, post bulletins and change my status on myspace like a berserker. at least twice i day i tell my 3200 myspace homies that the album is coming, that it is free, that it bloody fantastic and that the release day will be a release minute: FRIDAY 23.59. I always have been into cheap drama and to stage a big bang for a free album without any airplay and 140 peeps on the band's mailinglist is cheapest drama at its very best i think.

The day has come .. Friday 23.50

Captain checklist!
All album versions - Check!
Paypal donations page - Check!
Dedicated download pages - Check!
Automatic remailer - Check!
Upload album zips - Check!
Albums on rapidshare - Check!
Newsletter prepared - Check!
Myspace bulletin prepared - Check!
Myspace blog prepared - Check!
Myspace status prepared - Check!
Popistan Blog prepared - Check!
Rockistan Blog prepared Check!
Rewriting of all pages' codes - Check!
Google analytics inserted - Check!
FTP client open and connected - Check!

23.59.00 according to the Braunschweig atomic clock.
I change the index page of the download page, the images for all websites upload very fast.
23.59.10
The remailer tells me the first person has submitted his email to receive the download link :-0!!!!
i press update on all blog submission buttons, i update my status on myspace and post the bulletin.
23.59.30
i press send - the newsletter is submitted.
23.59.50
All done!!!!!!!!!!

23.59.55
Mail from the first person who received the automatic replymail with the link:
NO WORKY! oooooooooooops wrong link in that reply mail - hehe - pro at work! - LMAO!!!

Quickly reconfigured the download page's name, change of the downloadlink in the automatic reply mail.

Saturday - 00.02.00
Everything up - everything running smoothly - Herr Schmitt is a happy camper now and is having a well earned fag.

The download page for this episode can be found here:
http://t11-circles.rockistan.de/

Don't miss episode 3:
The marvelous results of the first weekend.

Labels: Guerilla Marketing, Myspace, Record Distribution, Social Network Marketing, Thorn.Eleven

Here we go! What's it all about.
There is this nice little band Thorn.Eleven i have been involved with for years now. After years of trouble with records company, drummers and management they finally managed to get out of their contracts. (you wont believe how hard that can be once you have some).

HEY FREEDOM... Nice, but what to do with it???

Their record 'Circles' was completed over a year ago. Now what? Search for a new deal? Nah, bad idea, seen one, seen all.
Long, long, very long pause.
So we, they, us decided to release the thing for free.
Sounds stupid, but considering the fact that they have sold roughly 10.000 copies of the last two albums and received roughly ZERO euros it is not so stupid on second sight.

Okay - Free Download Release - Not so Stupid - But Now What?

Tell it to the people. (next but) but how. Others did it on myspace, etc. so will do it there as well. Bloody brilliant idea my friends, so i started my quest.

Step 1: the virtual record company
We founded our own small label 'VUP Recordings (Very Unimportant People, brilliant David :-) ).. that was easy - did a logo - did a website - created a new myspace account.
Number of friends: 1 (yes you know him: 'annoying myspace tom').
Where to get some friends? Easy as pie. I checked out all myspace-friend-adding-tools. These all seem to kinda work, i decided to use the easy adder.
It has a nifty feature that scans another person's profile and adds all existing friends to a profile id list.
Okay done... 10.000 potential friends... add a nice message to my request add.. hit the send request button.
Born on the naive side of life Herr Schmitt. Myspace has a fantastic feature, it is called capture code. nearly all new requests require you to type in a stupendous amount of numbers and characters displayed on a completely unreadable graphic.

But there are solutions for every problem - a captchakiller - which does work brilliantly - NOT.... it recognizes shit :-). it is a free service - so why do i moan. but hey there is a paid service as well. 1000 capture codes for 33 dollars.
I didn't take that way, because i am 100% sure that in a badly lit cellar somewhere in Xīnjiāng there are some 12 year old kids ruining their eyes while typing 500.000 horror myspace capture images. Instead i chose to simply skip all requests using a capture code. (apart from the fact that myspace forces you to type these in from time to time, that worked).

So final results of the first episode:
Record label.
Myspace Account.
10.000 potential friends.
Too many capture codes.
Actual sent out requests: 5091
Capture codes entered manually: about 500
We have now 3222 myspace friends.
which leaves 1869 open or rejected requests.

Coming in the next episode:
The uber-fantastic releaseday.

Labels: Guerilla Marketing, Myspace, Record Distribution, Social Network Marketing, Thorn.Eleven

I did what i could do.
THORN.ELEVEN`s new baby CIRCLES was released this very minute.

Go to the Rockistan THORN.ELEVEN downloadpage and grab that thing.

Due to the fact that it is a free/cc/donation based release we all (especially i am) very curious what will happen.

Over the next week i will post what we did and what the results of our actions were, so check back tuesday when the first results are in.
(gets his pocket calculator ready)

That is all for tonight.
Sleep well (i know i won`t ;-) )

Markus

After a long and tedious journey thru CDRom Driverstan and Encoderland
our travel will come to an end this friday night.

Release date for Thorn.Eleven's Circles Album will be friday 23.59
(middle european daylight saving time). And I am a happy camper :-).

everything is set...

the record is done...
the cover is done...
the new website layout is done...

the 'recordlabel' page is done...
the 'recordslabel's' myspacepage is done...

but now it is time to get some friends to spread the word how unbelievably nice and incredibly cool we are. this is were the real fun starts.

















so far i have sent out 1283 friend requests, got 520 accepted and by now i think i already know all the myspace security captcha images...


10000 friends before the release would be nice....
which means another kazillion captcha images when sending out the messages and comments ...
hooray!

while you were out and having fun, i stayed in and had fun too.




No, this device isnt't stolen from cern, it is used to switch from hyperdrive to warp-speed :-)

Doubletime, Doublebass, Doublecheeseburger!