Devil Rears It's Ugly Head... (Part 1)

Ok, so we had a few problems with other local muso's just not digging what this band does. And that's all good. It doesn't bother me that other musician's don't dig it. In fact, it wouldn't bother me if the public didn't dig it - let's get real, Bon Jovi might have 80,000 fans in New Zealand that love them!! But they'll also have 80,000 people that hate them, and probably another 80,000 that really just don't give a damn.

Every band will have their share of haters and those that don't care for it, so it didn't bother me too much that there were half a dozen muso's that visited and ran that local forum that hated the band I manage.

Anyways, I sent out the press release after that forum saga just letting them know about this bands album release etc. The next day I received an email from the main local newspaper's music editor asking if I would send a copy of the album in to them - he would pass it on to one of his reviewers to check out and review.

Of course I saw no problem with this because, even if you didn't dig the music, you could still hear the calibre of musicianship in it, so I sent him a copy. A week later, I received an email suggesting that they shouldn't print the review as it was so bad that it wouldn't do the band any justice with their first review being so bad.

That same day we received some emails from a guy (locally) stating how he thought the music "rocked" and how great it was. However, we thought nothing of it because we have received many of those emails - albeit many are generally international. So we wrote back to him - as we reply to every email/message we get.

We ALSO received that same day, an email from a Hotmail account that was in the name of the band I manage!!! I knew that we hadn't created a Hotmail account, so read it and it was one of the worst hate-mails you have probably ever seen! Ok, that's cool, didn't bother me. Just left it. But then we got more... and more!! All over the next day or two and he assured us he would "contact every reviewer I know in the North Island" to ensure the band don't get a good review. After reading them, it was pretty easy to see that he was the one that had reviewed the album.

I then decided to contact Hotmail to let them know what was going on - as I didn't know if this person was contacting others in the name of this band. And that was the only thing that really worried me…. [.. continue here..]

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "Other people can stop you temporarily. You're the only one who can do it permanently"