What’s Next?

So Heat Stroke has launched digitally fairly smoothly. As of right now, it’s still not available on iHeartRadio and there’s a typo in one of the song titles on iTunes, but other than that, yeah, it’s out there. I do realize it’s been available for barely 24 hours, but even with all the promotion I was doing, hardly anyone has listened to it. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Seady007 is the only one who has listened to it. He is awesome and even paid for Heat Stroke on Bandcamp. Can you believe it? He contacted me on Twitter and told me he liked it and was worth the money he gave me for it. So that makes me feel pretty good. Another cool thing is that yesterday set the record for the most traffic on robbysuave.com. At least in the last year or so. <tangent> That reminds me: I was trying to think of what robbysuave.com looked like before the current version. Since I couldn’t remember, I went to the Wayback Machine, and judging by that, I have NEVER had any kind of site built since I got the domain in 2005! Ten years! I’ve just had a handful of splash pages, but some of them are actually kind of cool. </tangent>

On the other side of it though, and again, I know the thing just came out, but I’m getting no signs that anyone else is even trying to listen to it. All the YouTube and Soundcloud plays are likely mine. None of the Bandcamp codes I’ve been throwing around have been redeemed. No one on Twitter besides Seady007 has even commented on the album. Obviously I need to wait a week or two until I can get worked up about it, but I did expect a tiny bit more reception. I’ve gained about 30 Twitter followers in the last month, and none of them acknowledged the Heat Stroke launch. And that just tells me that they’re all bots basically. Lame.

I feel like if the album was going to get any kind of traction, ever, it would have done so yesterday. And it didn’t, so…yeah. What’s next then? Well, I can’t say I want to do a new album already, but I do have a few projects in mind.

The biggest potential project is preparing my 2011 album, Punk Rebel Renegade, to be mastered and digitally distributed. Reworking the tracks to make them suitable for mastering is going to be a chore. It might not be all that terrible since I haven’t messed with those songs in 4 years, but I’m afraid of what hackneyed recording and mixing methods I was using back then. That’s another album that took about 6 months to do, and I was absolutely miserable. It was a bit of a concept album, a personal social experiment. I deprived myself of sleep, food, fun, and anything my brain wanted me to do during that time, and Punk Rebel Renegade is sort of a documentation of it. A lot of the recording sessions were recorded after midnight. Anyway, I was just super tired and hungry during that time basically, and it probably shows when listening to it. That said, I do think it’s a pretty good album, and it can’t be any less successful than Heat Stroke, so I figure it’s at least an option.

Another thing I want to do is try making at least one music video for a song on Heat Stroke. I’ve already recorded some video for “Hotter Than a Mothereffer,” but since there seems to be some gravitation towards “A Little Disco,” I might do a video for that one instead. I submitted the mp3 to both Podcast Beyond and the Jimmy and Eden podcast for consideration a few weeks ago. I’m not sure if either one will play it, but maybe that will get some people into it. I feel like those audiences might like it.

Then there’s the possibility of a physical version of Heat Stroke. I’ve put too much work into recording the the music and the artwork to not get at least one CD made for me. But I don’t know if anyone else in the world would buy one.

Speaking of physical things, I’m also tinkering around with getting a store set up here on robbysuave.com where you could buy Robby Suavé branded shirts, guitar picks, and maybe some other things. The cool part of that is it wouldn’t really cost anything to set up, so if no one is interested, at least I’m not out any money like I would be with the CDs.

So yeah, that’s what’s swirling in my head at the moment. Is anyone out there reading this?