Severed Fifth

Well, after a weekend off of Sneak Peeks from Denied By Reign I want to give you the final three before I release the album tomorrow:

• Sneak Peek 9 - Ogg MP3
• Sneak Peek 10 - Ogg MP3
• Sneak Peek 11 - Ogg MP3

If you missed the others, here they are:

• Sneak Peek 1 - Ogg MP3
• Sneak Peek 2 - Ogg MP3
• Sneak Peek 3 - Ogg MP3
• Sneak Peek 4 - Ogg MP3
• Sneak Peek 5 - Ogg MP3
• Sneak Peek 6 - Ogg MP3
• Sneak Peek 7 - Ogg MP3
• Sneak Peek 8 - Ogg MP3

So, after months of writing, recording, production, mastering and development, the final album is released tomorrow. I am looking forward to getting Denied By Reign out there, and then the focus moves to the next big step - telling the world about it, and spreading a free culture message around an album. This will be the really large and difficult job - writing, recording and releasing an album is something I have done before both by myself and with Seraphidian, but the new ground being forged here will be in spreading the word around Severed Fifth and not only growing a culture and buzz around the music, but around the mechanics of a free culture album. This is when the real fun begins, and this is going to result in a lot of email, a lot of discussion, and importantly, trying to mobilise a world-wide street team. Fortunately, w already have a great bunch of people already involved, and I will focussing my own efforts on providing everything needed to ensure the street team can kick arse and take names. This includes help, guidance, only materials and whatever else.

I am also really, really keen to grow a community of listeners and fans around Severed Fifth, and you should all go and hang out in the wicked-cool Severed Fifth Forums. Lets get a party going over there.

One more day…one more day…

About Severed Fifth

Denied By Reign is released on Oct 21st from www.severedfifth.com and the entire album will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license with expressed aim of seeing how far an independent musician such as myself can push and promote an album under the new music economy of free culture. My aims are to help answer some of the questions that are unknown about the viability of a free culture music economy. For more details on the aims of the project, see the announcement.

Severed Fifth needs your help to be successful! Go and join our Discussion Forums and join the Street Team. We will need your help when the album is released to push it as far and wide as possible and just see how much juice we can squeeze out of a free culture album. If you have contacts in the music press, or you know established artists who may be interested in hearing it, do get in touch with me. I am preparing a press pack for the album which we can all send out when the album is released. Oh, and for you Facebook fanatics - go and join the Severed Fifth Facebook Group.

I just want to thank everyone for their support of the album and the project. Thanks also to the Creative Commons for their continued support.

I am pleased to make available a new Severed Fifth flyer that you can print out and stick up in your local area. Print the lovely little bleeder out, shove some tape or tack on the back and stick it up in your local cafe’s, music shops, computer shops, skate parks, record shops, old folks homes, or anywhere else. Oh, and do take a photo of where you put it up and send it to me - I would love to feature a couple of photos on severedfifth.com.

You can download it here.

Go nuts!

Thanks to Cory K for creating the flyer.

When Severed Fifth was announced, a key part of the message was the Severed Fifth Street Team, a team that has existed in name, but has not kicked into action yet. Well, now is the time to begin getting the team in place and begin growing a Street Team community around the project. To this end, I sent the very first email to the Severed Fifth Street Team Mailing List:

Hi everyone,

Well, its been around three weeks since Severed Fifth kicked off and although I mentioned the Street Team in the announcement, I have so far remained fairly silent about it. Some of you may be wondering what the plans are. so I wanted to send out an initial email first to kick off the Street Team. The reasons for the delay have largely been getting the primary site up and running and also beginning recording of the debut Severed Fifth album ‘Denied By Reign’ - there is a certain running order in terms of getting the right things in place, and now it is time for the Street Team.

Firstly, I want to say a huge thank-you to each of you who have signed up to this list. You are the forefathers of the Severed Fifth Street Team; an entity that is essential for the success of Severed Fifth both as a project and as a vehicle to forge forward the new music economy that I have been talking about. The only way we can make this new economy viable is for there to be a lot of ‘push’ and to demonstrate an ubiquity in the message of a free culture project such as Severed Fifth. In other words, we need to let the entire freakin’ world know about Severed Fifth, and the only way we can do this is to get all hands on deck across the Internet and across the world. We need to come together and seek out every possible opportunity to let the world know about Severed Fifth and what is going on with the project.

Although I have a general structure in my mind for how the Street Team works, the main intention is to allow it to grow naturally and not force it into a pre-defined box. The Street Team is a community of people who are passionate about Severed Fifth and about free culture and who want to help advocate it and spread the word, and my main aim is to be able to support you all in being able to do this instead of producing a boatload of bureaucracy that you have to wade through. I would much rather provide you with some materials to use as part of your Street Team work and provide some guidance, words of encouragement and some interesting competitions to get the word out there.

I am also really keen to make the Street Team a unique and identifiable family. I want to make each and every one of you wonderful people feel like you are part of a friendly, welcoming, fun community based around Severed Fifth. With this in mind I would love to hear your ideas on just how I can make you all feel warm and fuzzy about the project and being involved. Some of my plans include producing some merchandise to sell and give away for the Street Team, organising events, rewarding achievements in cool and interesting ways, and more. In the announcement I referred to the Street Team as a family, and I really mean that.

The response to Severed Fifth has been, frankly, overwhelming, and I am so incredibly excited about the potential we have in our hands with the project. We really have the chance to shake things up, and each and every one of you, and there are quite a few of you who have joined this list, are going to set the stage for our future successes.

So, to kick things off, lets get to know each other. Could you all reply to this mail and say who you are, where you live, what kind of things you would like to do to spread the word about Severed Fifth and anything else you would like to say. Let’s get this show on the road…

Jono

You can view the discussion here.

As the Street Team kicks into action, we need your help! Would you like to help spread the word about Severed Fifth online and in your local community? Would you like to play a part in a movement that is defining the new music economy? Well, you can make a real difference by being part of the project. To join the street team, simply join the mailing list - you can join it here.

More details on what the team will be doing will be sent fairly soon, but for the meantime, go and join up and introduce yourself.