Severed Fifth

I am pleased to announce the availability of a third Sneak Peak from the forthcoming Severed Fifth album Denied By Reign.

This sneak peak is the opening music of the song Beating Heart - a rhythmic, double-bass drum laden anthem that is quickly followed by crushing mosh-friendly riffing. Written about the pulse of a political system and how it is often taken away from the people, Beating Heart represents another showcase song from Denied By Reign that is designed to not only give metal fans something to bang their heads to but to, but to also champion on the free culture cause, providing all the music from the album under a free license.

Go and listen to the Beating Heart sneak peek here.

Thanks to the excellent work of Cory K, I am pleased to show off a bunch of Severed Fifth website buttons that Cory has been slaving over for the last day or so. These buttons are all available in a bunch of standard banner and button sizes, which should make it simple to add them to your website.

DOWNLOAD: 88×31

DOWNLOAD: 728×90 · 500×62 · 468×60

DOWNLOAD: 120×90

DOWNLOAD: 88×31

Go and add them, and be sure to post a link to your website here so we can take a look at it.

I am pleased to announce the availability of the second Sneak Peek!

This sneak peek is some of the music behind the track Dollar Plague - a song written about the over-commercialisation of religion. It is a pretty upbeat, thrashy song, one that will be fun to get people moshing to when I take Severed Fifth out on the road. Go and check out the sneak peak here.

I am pleased to announce the first sneak peak from the forthcoming debut Severed Fifth album, Denied By Reign. The sneak peek is of the beginning of the song The Lake and shows the kind of style and direction of the music. These sneak peeks do not represent the final mix of the music, but they will give you a taster of what is to come.

Go and listen to it here.

Hello from sunny Turkey! I just wanted to provide an update on some of the artwork that has been in the works for Severed Fifth. Firstly, I would like unveil the official Severed Fifth Seal:

This was created by the legendary Michael Evans, who has worked on the Severed Fifth website. Expect to see the seal in a variety of different places, on t-shirts, stickers and other merch.

I also thought it would be nice to have a few wallpapers with some art on it. Each of these is in 1280×800 - when I get some time I will make them available in a range of sizes:

I would love to see some more wallpapers be produced. I will be getting some source imagery online soon so you can create some Severed Fifth art.

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.

Quickie news item - I have been digging out some stats on severedfifth.com, and it resulted in some interesting facts for the site, which is now 20 days old:

• 4,494 unique visits from 89 countries with most people coming from the USA, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and The Netherlands.
• 30% of visitors seem to be returning to the severedfifth.com for regular visits.
• Most people have been looking at the main website homepage, with the gallery also getting a significant amount of attention as well as the news and the blog.
• The severed fifth announcement has so far had very nearly 1000 unique people reading that page, and the opening blog entry had very nearly 500 unique people reading it.
• 11 search keywords, including severed fifth, the severed fifth, a severed fifth, severed fifth announcement and severed fifth jono bacon netted over 940 page views. Only Google and Yahoo! seem to have been recorded as search engines that people have used.

Good to see that the site is beginning to grow, with it about three weeks old. It is still very much early days, and promotion and publicity of Severed Fifth has still been very much focused on the Free Culture community, but I am pretty stoked with the growth so far. When the album is ready, we can also bring in some general metal fans and build out the project in both directions.

I just want to thank everyone for their support of Severed Fifth so far. Frankly, you kick arse. You really do. Keep up the good work and tell your friends to come to severedfifth.com.

Well, it seems that Severed Fifth has been making its way across some of the news sites recently. I figured it would be useful to fill you all in on some of the sites that have picked up the project and to also ask you lovely people to contribute to some online documentation about the project. Read on…

Firstly, I did an interview with the Wolverhampton Radiophonic Institute radio show, a local show in England that also goes out across the Internet. We talked for a little while about the project and they played Beating Heart. Thanks to the CC license, I have chopped out the segment, and you can hear the Ogg or MP3 of the interview. Thanks to Matthew and Neil.

Thanks also to Ryan Paul of Ars Technica for the excellent write-up of the project, and the associated Digg. This has clearly brought a number of new people over to the Severed Fifth website.

Thanks to Martijn van de Streek for letting me know about the dutch site Tweakers write-up of the project, in which they said:

“Ondanks succesverhalen, zoals de onafhankelijke webrelease van het laatste Radiohead-album en digitale weggevertjes van Nine Inch Nails, lopen bands die het pad van het ‘give it away and pray’-model willen bewandelen, de nodige risico’s. Bacon wil dit aan den lijve ondervinden, door onder de projectnaam Severed Fifth zijn soloalbum ‘Denied By Reign’ onder een Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licentie uit te brengen. Door dit licentietype krijgt iedereen het recht om dit werk te kopiëren, te distribueren en te veranderen, bijvoorbeeld door het te remixen”.

…which I am assured is good.

Help document Severed Fifth

In related news, I was also pleased to see that Greg from the Creative Commons mentioned Severed Fifth in this blog entry about the new Creative Commons case study site, specifically linking to Severed Fifth. He also asks for help for people to contribute to the Severed Fifth Case Study page on the Creative Commons wiki. Anyone want to help with this?

Speaking of which, I think Severed Fifth is begging for some wikipedia love - anyone want to help with this? Documenting the project on wikipedia is an excellent way of tracking the progress of Severed Fifth for the general public, but I don’t personally have that much time to work on it, so a willing volunteer would be a great help.

Well, the big recording session is almost upon us. Everything is in place and I am all set to get in the studio and produce Denied By Reign. I just wanted to write up a short message to remind you to keep your eyes and ears on severedfifth.com for daily updates about the recording as well as keeping an eye on my twitter feed for additional updates. I can’t wait to get these songs in front of your ears when the time is right.

Stay tuned folks…

Around a month ago I headed into Birmingham with Scott Thompson to do the first Severed Fifth photo-shoot. Much of this was your fairly atypical metal faire - posing in front of brick walls, throwing the horns at the camera etc etc. With a little post-processing, Scott got them to me a few days back and I have updated the Gallery.

Go and view them here.