yearlongday

to those of you still reading, thank you, and please continue. this may be the closest thing that comes to a “history of yearlongday” type of publication (but we can still dream of something more “printed & bound”).

though you won’t be seeing us live, yearlongday is still alive. our last blog explained why the stage is no longer a viable means of generating enthusiasm and support for the myriad projects in which we have our heads and hands. the next order of business, it seems, is determining which investments of time, energy and capital are worthwhile.

in addition to live shows, yearlongday built its fanbase through the internet. four years ago this month, our myspace website was created. six months ago, our official website went online. we had profiles on ourstage and last fm. we even made a couple blips on the radar of strummer radio’s unsigned festive 50. one cannot say that yearlongday lacked an online presence, but one can certainly ask what kind of impact that presence made.

and, if asked, my response will be that the online music community has been a let down. in the beginning, we believed that the internet was an ideal forum for independently operated bands such as yearlonday because it made our home-studio recordings available to the world… quickly, easily, and affordably. our ambitions soared, but as the years passed, we felt our online presence fade into the ever-expanding crowd of DIY musicians.

to distinguish yearlongday from the dime-a-dozen artists who saturated the online music market, we launched our official website. the result of this espoused marketing venture has been quite opposite of our hopes amd aims. instead of becoming more widely recognized in the online music community, yearlongday has disappeared into a black hole of commercial and creative anonymity. the most compelling statistical evidence of this interest-depleting void is the number of fan postings on our new website: ZERO fan comments in nearly seven months!

the case could be argued that yearlongday self-destructed by choosing to decline future bookings, but the counter-claim is equally striking: most of our shows were poorly attended from the very beginning (once playing to less than a half-dozen listeners at the barrington coffee house), with “overexposure” being the common explanation among fellow musicians in the scene. hell, even our best performances to large audiences failed to earn follow-up bookings for yearlongday.

by the time we announced that yearlongday would retire from the stage, myspace was a virtual “ghost town”, and our official website was already exposed as a strategic wrong-turn. the infrastructure of enthusiasm and support around us collapsed, and yearlongday was left with the option of remaining trapped in that failure, or finding an escape route.

one method of resuscitating interest in yearlongday has demonstrated success in the past: our studio recordings. even back when i created music with radio-shack gear and released cassette demos, listeners gave positive feedback. since then, i’ve been around some trained and experienced ears, and have accumulated my own modest-yet-effective toolbox of  recording, editing, and mixing techniques. of all the options available to me now, i feel most assured by investing my time, energy, and capital into yearlongday’s next studio album.

here’s to something more printed & bound…

love on ya!

… jonathan t marlowe

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