#19 Tis the season...

So it's nearly the end of another year so I just wanted to put out a little message of thanks to everyone that's been in anyway involved with my musical activities this year. The only resolution I ever tend to make these days is to try and make sure that the next year was better than the last, even if it's just a little bit. So far so good. This year I had a single get into the top 10 on the UK Singer-songwriter iTunes chart (Shipwrecks), released my second EP (Battles), went on my first self organised tour, played Glastonbury Festival, and got my first ever national airplay on BBC6 music.

A lot of these things simply wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the support of those around me and those that for some reason or another like what i'm doing musically. I say this a lot mostly as I really mean it! There's no record label throwing money at me to make records or organise tours or getting me on the radio etc. And having people sharing links, buying music, liking/following pages etc really is invaluable to a) allowing me to continue doing so and b) my own sanity! ;-)

In short, THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT! :-)

Here's a free download of a track called "Things you don't know" (which makes the title of this blog make more sense). It's got an email unlock thingy, but I promise not to spam you with stuff. I reckon the mail out will be about as regular as this blog! ;-)

Hope you all have a wonderful Christmas & NYE. See ya next year! :-)

Aaron

#12 Say whaaaaaaaaaat!?

Hello! Well this week has certainly been interesting! As you may already know a brand new recording of "Shipwrecks" was released as a single last Monday (3rd). On Wednesday morning I found myself browsing through the UK iTunes singer songwriter charts as I was curious to see how far the chart goes down to. As I scrolled down towards 300 (where it ends) I saw Shipwrecks sat at 274. I have a tendency to play things down unless they're amazing to the point of ridiculousness. As such I posted this picture onto my facebook page mostly tongue in cheek.

What followed was quite frankly ridiculous. The facebook post got a lot of "likes" and a few "shares", and within a few hours Shipwrecks jumped up to 95! I posted another picture.

This post got a few more shares and likes than the last one. Shipwrecks moved up again. This time it hit number 40.

At this point the "shares" & "likes" increased exponentially, I started getting congratulatory messages and texts etc, it was all very surreal. Now the realist/pessimist in me decided that top 40 was probably about as good as it was going to get, so I decided that I didn't want to take over people's facebook pages with my updates and said unless something insane happens I wouldn't post again....

Then this happened....

Then it went higher still.

It was getting late by this time so I decided to call it a night. I woke up the next morning fully expecting Shipwrecks to be back in the 100's. So you can imagine my surprise......

Never in a million years did I expect it to hit the top 10. This photo probably got the most attention and within the hour I took this final photo.

What transpired over those 2 days is one of the things I love about the world we live in with regards to social networking, the internet, our ever changing music industry, and people in general. I'm not a fan of most "get me to 1 million likes and i'll....." type things as I believe that in most cases your "likes" & "shares" on facebook don't really hold any gravitas in the real world. For the musician/artist however it really does. The reason I got to number 6 is because of good old fashioned word of mouth. The further it went up the more family, friends and friends of friends, and fans got behind it because it's nice to see friends succeed.

So basically thank you to everyone that bought the single, thanks to everyone shared the statuses to their friends & family, thanks to everyone that got their friends and family to buy it, and massive thanks to the people that haven't got a clue who I am and were just following the instructions of said family and friends! I LITERALLY couldn't have done it without any of you.

We had a little launch party last night and tomorrow we're supporting the really rather good Brother & Bones at The Exchange in Bristol, so i'll give you all the details of those next time around.

The single is still available to download for 0.79p from iTunes here:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/shipwrecks-single/id829587343

Big up yo bad selves! ;-)
Aaron