Runaway Mine Train

The past week or so has felt like being trapped on a runaway mine train. My career has started to take on a life of its own and has begun snowballing. I've reached the point where I keep gaining fans off of momentum, even when I halt promotions. Around the same time that this happened, my mixtape dropped (with many mistakes), I got cofirmation that reggae artist Dutch Diamond will be on my album, and I came across a good rehearsal space. Also, I started to pick up celebrity followers on Twitter and I'll tell you one thing: when somebody with a verified account follows you, expect to see a spike in followers!

The song with Dutch Diamond will be called "Up At The Club" and will be a club banger geared towards people on their way to the club, with value as a dance floor song as well. I'm going to use some of the songwriting tips that I've learned from Ralph Murphy's video lectures. Hopefully, it will have serious radio potential.

I had a few days where I went out and fliered most of Louisville with the ads for the old mixtape just to get rid of them. I kept about 600 of them just so I'd have a few for merchandise tables at shows or trade show booths. I noticed that there are far less community bulletin boards in stores as there were when I started rapping. The stores feel more cold and corporate, less warm and community-engaged. I miss the bulletin boards because they had a much higher conversion rate. If I fliered total strangers on the street, maybe 1 in 50 people would show up. With the bulletin boards it was more like 1 in 20.

Lastly, my song "Don't Stop Now" ft/ Big Beat is on 'Coast 2 Coast Mixtapes Presents: The Indie Top 50 EDM Edition Vol. 1', which was released on 1/10/14. I've worked with Coast 2 Coast back in the past when they were establishing their brand with good results, but this time around is something totally different. There was a voting contest to see who would be on the top-tier mixtape, the rules stating that the top 5 songs would automatically be on Coast 2 Coast EDM Vol. 7 w/ DJ Dysquo. I came in second place, only to get a form letter in my email saying that I wasn't selected but if I paid them $75, they would put my song on the mixtape that I had supposedly won a slot on through the voting contest. When I replied that I wasn't going to pay $75 after going through a long drawn-out voting contest that I won, they immediately (in less than 2 minutes) had my song on the second-tier mixtape as the first song after the intro.

If that wasn't bad enough, the second-tier mixtape has generic cover art and only streams (no downloads). After playing email tag with several of the people at Coast 2 Coast mixtapes, I have come to the conclusion that it's not very organized over there. Nobody seems to know why only 23 of 50 tracks will download, or have any idea at all about how to fix the problem, or even care, for that matter. It's almost like nobody understands coding and troubleshooting over there. I'd send detailed error reports and get incoherent replies like "you gotta use a computer dog". WTF?

Until Coast 2 Coast fixes the problem, I'm taking my foot off the gas pedal on promoting the mixtape. We reached 25,000 streams which is okay. If everything was done properly, I would have no problem getting the mixtape to over 500,000 streams once the full force of my street team focuses in on it. But if nobody can download the song, what's the point? It's basically just an internet radio station with only 50 songs that always play in the exact same order.

Unless Coast 2 Coast rectifies the situation, I'm done dealing with them directly unless a REALLY popular artist hosts it. I'm still down with a few of their affiliated DJs (no beef towards them, for the most part they've been great) and will continue to do their mixtapes, but I'm not down for Coast 2 Coast's annoying vote contests followed by demands for payola, and bad coding.

But anyway...at least I have a second mixtape coming out this month and I have much more faith in the DJ releasing that one. Peace.

PS: A big shout out to The Artist Formerly Known As DJ Dietrich for hosting such a dope bourbon tasting party last night. It was a blast!

New Mixtape!

This week has been hectic. I've begun changing my photos on social networking sites to transition away from the pimp image that I had. So far, I've changed the pics on Twitter, Facebook (but only the main pic), and ReverbNation. In favoring visually exciting backgrounds over relying solely on female eye candy to draw attention.

I've also amassed enough quality beats to do 3 albums. I will be in a recording frenzy for the next few months. My goal is to have a commercially released full-length album on my own label and a 2014 wall calendar ready to go by the Kentucky Derby (early May). Live performances will not be a major focus for me during the first half of 2014.

I've started to dabble with search engine optimization. I have two street team members working on optimizing the keywords for my sites. Hopefully, it'll help me get on the first page of Google searches more often. I've added backgrounds, headers, and themes to a few pages and I have 3 intro videos made. Next, I'll work on a YouTube channel introduction video. I already have the spokesperson, I just need to get it done.

I have a song that will be released on a mixtape later this month. A remixed, remastered version of "Get Ya Where I Want Ya" featuring The Event will be on DJ Bankrupt's new mixtape 'The End Game', which drops Sunday, January 26, 2014. The original version of the track was from a live performance at Highlands Taproom back in 2003. I found a surviving copy of it on an archived mirror of one of my old websites. After touching it back up, I figured why not let people enjoy it? So I decided to throw it on a free mixtape as opposed to letting it continue to collect dust.

I'm thinking about throwing a mixtape release party at a local strip club as opposed to a music venue because I don't really want to have to come up with a few sets of songs and carry the entertainment for the entire night. At a strip club, the entertainment is already there and there are enough people that will come anyway, regardless of wether there are any special events or not. As long as a strip club can spin a few of my songs during the course of the night and possibly allow one song to be performed, I'm cool.

I've recently started to receive some very interesting fan mail in my email account. A few female fans are starting to send me pics and even twerk videos of them dancing to "On Lock" (maybe I should make a YouTube video for "Drinks Up"). It got me thinking that maybe I need to start a new online show. Nothing like "Godhand's Casino of Gold" or "Godhand's Counsel". The new show will be similar to an urban take on the Howard Stern type of format. It will be more free wheeling and will involve eye candy. I'll probably start featuring the fan pics and videos in a segment of the show.

I recently had a producer send me a track that was subpar and I mentioned it on Twitter this week. I'm actually not that mad anymore. I've decided to simply use the beat as background music for suspense scenes in films (free use in exchange for screen credit). One of my personal assistants is working on contacting film production companies.

There have also been a few scrapped projects. I've scrapped the idea of writing an erotica e-book. It just doesn't work with the image change and doesn't provide enough of a boost for how much effort would go into it. I will, however try to complete a cookbook this year (proceeds of which will help fund the family reunions).

But aside from all that, the next big project will be getting professional quality promo photos made so I can fully change up my image. I will try to find a relative that does photography (in order to keep it all in the family) before turning to Deal Chicken, Groupon, or any of the other big discount sites. Once that is done, my digital graphics team will have something to work with.

Until the next time...

Godhand Black

@Godhand502