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!
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