December 2014
This was a hectic period. A lot of time spent on promoting the single "Merry Christmas (Have some fun) / Down on my knees". We also had to finish the songs for our own streaming portal since we want to complete a collection of songs every year. As much as we would have loved to dwell on every mix of this compilation called "Capturing Sensations" there was simply not time for that. With a lot of songs waiting to be published the following six months our priority had to be promotion. Hence we also felt obliged to make lyric videos for the singles to be released at the digital stores.
Teaser
The tools to reach out had grown from our mysterious website, YouTube and sending emails to yet another website, a more conventional one, and Facebook. The new features came to place after the first interview with Arroe Collins. We had to appreciate the fact that his interest in our work and the airtime he'd given us, plus the fact that now several radio stations all over the world were playing our music, called for more promo action on our behalf. We started making short versions of our lyric videos to publish on YouTube as teasers before each single release. This meant that we could send out emails to radio stations with teasers on beforehand. We could publish these links at Facebook on beforehand, then the links to digital distributors as the single was released and finally we could go out two more times with each full length lyric video. Hopefully this would help creating more attention.
2015
Our Xmas single went fine by our standards, but it's a long way until our music will pay our bills, or until someone out there will get in touch asking us to write songs for them. In January we made a new interview on iHeartRadio to promote the single to be released February 25. This is still so special to us that we really can't believe it. We had to three-way the call as we were in different parts of the country, but by this time we knew how that works. This interview also included an extra song track that we sent exclusively to Arroe - the acoustic version of IRL that we made a year earlier when we weren't really sure of what the show "Unplugged and totally uncut" was. The new single was distributed to radio stations that have played our music before. We made arrangements to visit the Los Angeles area in California in June to write songs, meet friends and do some promo work. We got some contributions for our sticker project from friends that put them on their cars and prepared more business cards to be spread.
New York
One Yo was to spend a week in NY and hence we put promo material together to deliver to radio stations and record labels there. The unbelievable cold of the late February evening was making him wonder whether he'd be able to spend any time at all out in the streets. Watching the morning news the next day Yo realized these were record-breaking temperatures! It was still cold day two but manageable as he started walking the streets of Manhattan meeting with people in the business hitting mainly record companies, publishers and radio stations.
Some visits were planned in advance and others weren't. No problems with the first category of meetings. But it was interesting standing outside some of the classic headquarters in the business that we hadn't contacted; Yo couldn't help himself, he just had to get in and talk to some of these companies as well:
-Good day, How can I help sir?
-I've got music.
-???
-Music.
A wonderful thing to be able to say.
The trip turned out to be a really nice one in the end with lots of interesting meetings during the days and cool music in the evenings. And the coffee and the steaks really are the best in the world!
Promo, Radio & TV
The efforts on making better lyric videos paid off in February. A TV station in Italy (Antenna Sud Pop TV) wanted our lyric video "Kicks" for broadcast. Reaching them was the result of posting the teaser at Facebook and we also got in touch with more radio stations this way. We were also starting to get fans all over the world - no, not vast numbers but anyway. It's just great that there are people in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, Australia, US and Canada that seem to like what we do. This might be quite normal to all of you, but for guys like us that have been a bit skeptical about the social media phenomenon it's a whole new feeling. A lot of time was spent on using Facebook as our promotion tool and our business card adventures went on. We put some business cards in Las Vegas, Memphis, Florida and Denver. Pictures of these business cards were posted at Facebook a.s.a.p. so that it would be possible for someone in the area that might see the post to go out and find the card - just our idea of having fun.
Joint session, release party!
Next single was scheduled for release on April 1. We chose that date because we thought it would be fun. It turned out that it also meant that we could get together and celebrate this single release together. We were lucky to be able to get another interview with Arroe Collins (iHeartRadio) and had a blast talking about movies and music, the new single, and Yoko Ono (we placed some business cards to add to some of her art pieces at an exhibition some years ago). It ended up with Arroe attaching our interview with one he had made with Yoko - we couldn't be more honored. Great food and drink was on our schedule just as taking some pictures, playing some songs and this time no one got sick and no car broke down. We then finished the lyric videos for the last single to be released this year "Good Game / Two way street" and started to spread the teasers. A student TV-station in Australia wanted our videos and some new radio-stations started to play our songs. Next thing up - California.
California.
Meeting up with good friends that had fixed a whole house at our disposal. We were hitting the L.A.-area daytime visiting all the places we found interesting. We spent evenings with our friends and played some songs for them. We filmed some, took photos and of course we approached some record labels and radio stations. We had a bunch of business cards that we placed and posted pictures of and our sticker ended up at a few places as well. An embryo for a new song was created in a guitar store but the music inspired from this trip would be created later on. After an intense week one Yo headed to the UK and the other Yo went to meet up with friends in Ohio and then went back to California to catch up with even more. All in all we had some fun - and that's what it's all about!
Contagious Guitars
The remaining part of this summer was about creating the new collection of songs named "Contagious Guitars". The first songs for this collection, "Unrefined", "Walking on the moon" and "You got them moves" was made in January and, since we have quite a few songs just laying around and not part of previous collections, we could easily reach twelve songs for this compilation. One of these was called "Feed me a little" but we decided to change the title to "Poison" later on. The new songs that all had some kind of California feeling to them and that was recorded during this period were: "Great reward", "In my room" and "My latest me". As always we would send the songs back and forth, making small changes here and there all autumn. The order was set in November and when this is written (mid-December) we're about to upload the new collection to the streaming portal here.
New name - Yoyo xno
During this fall we realized that we had not received a penny from the airing of our songs and so we had to start looking into that. We also needed to do something about our band name. When we started out we didn't know of anyone using the name Yoyo, but as we started searching for our songs at the digital stores we found ourselves being a rapper that was rather famous in the 90's. In order to make it easier for everyone to find us we started up a new account and re-issued all our singles under the name Yoyo xno. The Yo-yo or Yoyo singles will remain for about a year but after that we plan to take them down and continue this journey as Yoyo xno.
The closure of 2015 - promo year
We're getting close to celebrating Christmas Day and during this fall some more radio stations have started playing our tunes. We also got the tip to send a song to something called "The Akademia" and so "Merry Christmas (Have some fun)" went there and was number one in it's category in December with the nice quote 'Yoyo Xno delivers this uplifting holiday rock song with consummate songwriting skill and musicianship; we could be looking at a new holiday classic here - it's that good.' Unfortunately we missed out on an interview with Arroe Collins in December - our bad, but sometimes things don't work out as planned. A new single is on the way and we have great expectations for it (as always). "Unrefined"/"Poison" - yeah, that's why we changed the title of the second song. At the moment we're wrapping up everything accomplished so far and we're wondering what will happen next...