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 :-).