YOYO Docs - What goes down must come up! Spring 2013 we continued working on the songs for this years project. Three of them were completed by April and we thought of ways to showcase these songs. We were still sending out our business cards with username and password to the streaming portal at
our website and had those delivered in Spain, Germany, New Orleans and at hotels in Sweden in connection with Eurovision Song Contest there. It still felt like an exciting and fun thing to do though the response wasn’t all that great. The next thing we wanted to try was a website called ”Songquarters”. It would make us get easy access to a lot more record companies, A&R’s and other music industry people that might be interested in our fabulous work.
DIY
During this period we also had mail conversations with people in connection to the music industry in various ways. A woman in New York pointed out that the industry will not be interested unless you create your own popularity. Facebook was a recommended platform to use but anyone that has listened to our song ”IRL” on youtube will understand that we’re not big fans of the various platforms out there. Then again our primary goal isn’t to become well known artist but rather to present ourselves as pretty good songwriters. We’ll see how that goes and if we can manage to achieve our goals without the vast variety of social media platforms. Someday someone might find this homepage – and we did it ourselves.
Recognition
In contacting people that we found through ”Songquarters” we still used our website as a way to showcase our music. It’s constructed so that we can see wether the username and password has been used and thereby we can tell if the people we contact actually has listened to our material. It’s probably not very surprising to anyone that most of the people that we try to reach don’t bother to listen. The ones that do listen often get back to us with kind comments of appreciation of our work and that’s always great. We just need to find someone with the network that may turn it all into paychecks. Towards the end of May we thought we finally had found that person. A CEO at a label in Canada wanted to get in touch with u sto discuss the matter. At the time our workload was incredible and we had to set a date in June to have this conversation. (Yes, this is still a spare time project.) The songs presented to him were our latest work at the time and not on ”4groups R out” and we made them with the intetion to fit anyone out there. The conversation went fine and we sent more material via our website and sketched on a plan to meet up in Paris later on in the summer, but somehow it never came to that. As we see it, we are getting closer and it’s some kind of recognition.
Versions and final versions.
As before we continued to develop many of the songs we had chosen for the collection ”What goes down must come up”. A few of the songs were made during project 12 but lacked something that we now tried to add. Other songs just needed some final polishing to the sound or the balance of sounds. We gradually become better at creating the sound that we want and regard these new songs a bit better with regard to production compared to our first compilation. We received the news about J.J. Cale passing away and decided to finish a song much similar to his work. We made it during our joint writing week in the winter 2013 but didn’t intend to do anything with it – it was just a fun song. Now we thought differently and made a final version that we sent to the three producers that we’re keeping posted on our progress. For the remaining part of 2013 we kept polishing the 14 songs that would constitute this years song collection to have them all available at our website by the end of the year. We almost made it but the first trial with username and passwords to friends and family showed that that in some cases the music wouldn’t play and that would have to be solved further on up the road.
We couldn’t help ourselves but to write a few new songs during fall 2013, but they will have to wait for production until later. We also contaced more radio stations and record labels with the link to IRL on youtube and one of our new songs via our website. We found that several labels have private drop boxes on soundcloud and used that way of presenting one song to. IRL was requested from yet another radio station – this time in California. Another response we got was ”don’t ever send me an email again” which we are inclined not to do – just didn’t think an email would cause that kind of reaction. We were also discussing to launch about six songs on wimp but before we got to deciding which song we would chose, we stumbled on the opportunity of having one song published on Spinnup, Amazon and iTunes for free. Being a spare time, low budget, mainly fun project it was an easy choice. It was also easier to pick out one song rather than six. Hence we rounded up the year with the launch of our song ”Goin’ Out” which is quite different from ”IRL” and now there are two of our songs out there for anyone to enjoy. Now we will havet o put some effort into raising an interest for this new song and start up a new collection of songs. So far we haven’t decided on a title for it so we’ll just set off into Project 14 without a name for it and perhaps this year we just might make it to the studio and do some of our new songs there.