So has anyone been looking forward to an update from Lipcrack? I know we’ve got a few new subscribers so I’d like to think so.
Now what’s to tell from the last month of behind the scenes adventures and misadventures. Mostly things were good for a change. The Blog sign up issue was resolved by us, surprise, surprise and mail out’s despite some of the recurrent issues,
(e.g. a complaint when an allied industry member doesn’t want to get mail) is being addressed.
The obvious thing that many people fail to recognize with the web is it’s still developing in terms of the software that runs it, the companies that compete on it and so on. We have actually spent a lot of time and money on refining our business process for mail outs and removing those that don’t want to be on the lists we subscribe to. It’s not an easy process. I’ll give you an example.
Joe Blow works for company A that we want a record deal with, he doesn’t like the band and requests to be removed from our lists, it’s done. He leaves the company a year later and Knob End join’s it. Now we have a new potential contact, because Knob End might actually like Lipcrack, so can you contact the company again, in my opinion obviously yes. Problem is of course you’ve got a new contact list with his name on it which doesn’t remove those contacts you did remove and they accidentally get mailed again because the system of managing the process is always in change.
I’m not making excuses I’m just letting people who decide to go in business on the web, know what some of the potential problems they’ll have are.
But why are you here ? Hopefully just for the music and occassional image update, it makes life easier, I can tell you that. So New’s on that.
There were a huge range of problems in working out a way to get the track we release free last month to subscribers, the usual mailing system and restrictions on mail size, only about 3MB made the conventional send it in the mail impossible.
What we did end up doing is making it available directly via Blog access and that did work. But not without problems and I’m going to mention a few of those.
1. Fake sign ups.
2. Sign up’s with email addresses that get blocked at their own server end and we have those records. As unbelievable as it may seem, all European countries emails were blocked. e.g. RU – Russia. Don’t ask me why other than the typical Iron Curtain Blocks people experience around the world. There’s also still issues with Yahoo mails and AOL sign up addresses.
We’ve actually had to take the step of removing all AOL emails to a great extent from our lists because their server bounces them back and the third party mail company we mail through get’s the statistics back on that. If we have a high number of those mail through that process get’s restricted. As a result once again an infrastructure update was needed to manage that problem.
3. We also noticed some host side tampering when the track was made available, it sound odd I know, it really appeared as though someone was trying to prevent the track being made available to sign ups.
All I can say is we did our best, if you didn’t receive a copy complain even by the blog comments page and we’ll do our best to find another way.
Boring….Boring….Boring….
So what do I consider exciting news, well obviously track release news and I know for a fact I’d be kind of disappointed if I were waiting for news and every month it didn’t arrive.
What’s the Big News Then ?
We’re still promoting the current track, but it’s been decided that the next track will come out some time next March that’s the plan and you know plans are subject to change, but we are going to try and keep to that.
Why March ?
1. Because everyone is on holiday over Christmas.
2. It’s a fairly heavy guitar rocking track so it has a more change of season feel.
3. Yes we could release it a few months before the ARIA awards, like everyone else does so it’s stuck in everyone’s mind. But we prefer to let people have an idea of what goes on in the industry so they can make better choices about what they do actually support.
So Support Lipcrack – Good Music without all the HYPE.
Lipcrack
