IPO Show: We're spending time rehearsing and developing a setlist for the International Pop Overthrow. Most of the music is new and much of it is based off of our new album, All In A Day's Work. We're also getting the rust out of playing live, as we haven't played on stage since the last IPO, one year ago.
Razor and Die Show: We are truly excited about our first live in-studio radio performance, and are continuing to rehearse unplugged versions. There will be just four of us in the studio for the show, which is much less than the 8 that we usually have on stage!
Indie Band Survival Guide: We've long wanted to have a method of publishing interviews, and articles related to the IBSG. There's an entire new website coming that will allow us to do this. As of now, it's installed, but we need to brand it, and work out some of the details.
Google Gadget: We're trying to make a Google gadget for Song of the Day. We will hopefully have one out soon.
Song of the Day: We are constantly writing new songs, but since we're busy rehearsing, they are only stub songs, for the most part. We'll work on them later. We actually will be glad when the IPO is done, because we want to get back to the studio to do more songwriting. We've got quite a few more songs to do if we're going to meet our goal.
Beatnik Turtle website: We have longer term plans for the Beatnik Turtle website that will eventually require a redesign. As it is, we've been modifying the front page to be easier to post multimedia, such as Videos and more audio. We also updated it to have radio players for our recent two albums in addition to the mix of songs we used to have. We also added our twitter feed. We may modify the design further as we go. Eventually, we'll be redoing the entire site again
Publicity: We're working on getting someone to help with publicity. We have exhausted all of our own resources, and want to get the word out further. Let's face it, we only have 8 months left! We need to get the word out while we're in the middle of this, and we're literally too busy writing music to do a good job of getting the good word out there.
Blog: We've added this blog to the Song of the Day website. We'll also make it a little more prominent in the BT website soon. Right now, it's really buried.
Twitter: If you like twitter.com, and want to know what Beatnik Turtle is doing at absolutely every moment of the day, go here, and feel free to follow us. We try to update it when we work on band stuff, when we rehearse, and when we record.
RPM Album: The album art, liner notes, final mastering, and UPC code for the new All In A Day's Work album is now done. We will be submitting this to the music stores very shortly. It unfortunately takes a month or so after that for the album to actually be available. More news on this when we get it, but our work is largely done, and the rest goes out of our hands.
Song of the Day Albums: We are preparing albums for each month of Song of the Day. It takes time, because, as we mentioned for the above album, we need to mix the albums, master them, create the art, get UPC codes, and all of the other stuff that you put into an album. It's a lot of work, and in particular, it's a lot of work on top of everything else. But we'll try to get those out soon, because we know that people would like those songs.
The Song of the Day Website: More than a few people have asked us to provide a radio stream of all songs on Song of the Day. For a number of reasons, that's a time-consuming process. Because this is the backstage blog, I'll let you in on why:
- All of the songs have our podcast bumper on them. We need entirely different MP3's for this without the bumper, and they are not prepared yet. This takes time.
- We need to create a player, and make a playlist for it that makes sense. We have this technology, but it would probably take about four or five hours of work to get this straight.
- We'd like to provide some voice over work to connect the songs, and provide breaks from the music.
So we'd like to do this, but for now, it's a little lower priority than some of the other projects above.
Also, we're working on a new part of the Song of the Day website for podcasters, as there are a number that have wanted our music. We want to make it easier for them to get our songs. We love podcasters, and we want to help solve their music problems. They can't use RIAA music, and thus, need to get a source of music that is licensed for podcast use. All of Beatnik Turtle songs are, but we need to simplify the process that they get the music from us. More on this later in a blog post soon.
Commissions: We have a number of commissions queued up, and we haven't quite had the time to tackle them. We expect to be able to do so once the IPO is over, as we need to write more Song of the Day music anyway, and these all count as songs for the project, as well as helping someone else.
So, we're busy busy busy as you can see. Just thought you might want to know what we're up to.
