Refractions

Thank you to everyone who took part in the survey from last time. The response was overwhelmingly in favor of...

20 tracks!

A few people marked 18 and a few marked 16. Then again, a few other people elected to use the freeform response to let us know that 40 was an acceptable number.

So, with 86.84% of you interested in 20+ tracks, it looks like that's what we're doing! (Well, the 20 part. Not sure on the "+", yet.) This means we're likely looking at delivery sometime around June.

Physical Black Prism CDs

Everything with regards to the album and liner notes has all been approved by the Weeks team. This means that physical Black Prism CDs are now being manufactured. The manufacturer (Discmakers) gave us the following info:

Estimated Arrival Date: Feb 10 - 20 (in our warehouse)

We'll keep you updated both of any changes and of when the albums arrive.

Status of All the Things (in one spot)

OK, so just to see everything at a glance (and because I'm visual), here is the list of where we are with everything:

The Black Prism digital copy: ✓ delivered
The Black Prism physical copy: arriving in the warehouse Feb 10 - Feb 20, 2023
The Black Prism wider release: see below
Reflections digital copy: ✓ delivered, mostly*
Refractions digital copy: estimated June 2023
The Black Prism artwork: estimated end of February 2023 (though we may send this out in two parts, with part 1 sooner)
Tales of The Black Piper: campaign prep is in full swing. More info soon!

* Refractions: we do have a bonus track we'll be sending out in the next little bit. One additional backer/patron granted us permission to include it, so keep an eye out for that.

The Black Prism wider release: We just signed a distribution deal with Symphonic as our distributor, which is something that we're excited about for a few reasons:

The first is that they actively promote their catalogues. This is something we haven't done a whole lot of - leaving this mostly up to word of mouth. (We've focused most of our resources on the work, and haven't been able to promote as much as we'd love to.) This is why it's incredible that we currently have 24k+ monthly listeners on Spotify! Still, what would things look like if we had active promotion? Definitely a question we want to get answered.
Second, and much more importantly (though you may or may not find it interesting), Symphonic has a revenue sharing model that will allow us to easily "split share" with our composers and other parties. This will make the capturing of funds, royalty distribution, and reporting 100% automatic for our collaborators. With all that we have to tackle, both on this and upcoming projects, the more automation we can take advantage of, the better! And also, if things with Symphonic work well on this release, we'll likely be looking to move our other releases over, so we can take advantage of what they have to offer.

So, anyway, what does all this "wider release" stuff mean for our fans? Well, simply put, it means that The Black Prism will be showing up on Spotify, Apple Music, and everywhere else very soon - both for streaming and purchase. My guess is that we should start seeing it on a few platforms sometime in February. So, be ready to share with everyone you know!

We're also debating a wider Reflections/Refractions release, though we haven't had much feedback on Reflections yet, so we're still noodling on whether to roll out as well.

Well, I wanted to keep that brief, but... that's all for now.

As always, thank you for everything, and let us know of any thoughts or questions or comments you might have!

All the best,
Michael & The Team @ The Black Piper

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