Thanks to everyone who's backed so far to get us to where we are now! And, if you're still unsure, here's a message from Shao telling you where we're at, and why you shouldn't hesitate to join the Genki Dama!
Hey all, thank you so much for following and backing the Genki Dama Tour Campaign so far! Thanks to all of you, we cracked 50% funding!
Now that we have our sights set on even greater numbers, we've created a brand new ACHIEVEMENT to be unlocked: when the Genki Dama grows to 75%, EVERYONE from the "Lend me your Power" tier and up will receive a BONUS Kansha-Do sticker set!
So, if you haven't backed yet, now's the time to jump on board and lock in your bonus stickers! If you're already backing, you can visit the "Add-Ons" page to see if there's anything else you might want an extra of.
Also, don't forget to vote in the SHIRT DESIGN BATTLE Poll! Krissy Diggs made a couple of cool designs for your perusal, so once you've made your pledge, let us know which shirt designs you like the best!
-Kurt The Genki Dama Tour Manager and Occasional Genin
Thank you for all the support so far! We hope to hit even great power levels by the end of the week, so if you're been following the campaign and haven't backed yet, please consider lending us a bit of your energy!
Thank you to everyone who joined the Launch Party yesterday! It was a blast helping Shao answer questions, watching him deprive the chat of a rightful trivia victory, and sharing the Genki Dama Japan Tour campaign with everyone!
In just one day, we've hit 10% of our initial funding goal! That's awesome! And like Shao said last night, if you believe int he vision of this project, please don't hesitate to share it with friends who might be interested in the cool merch this project has to offer!
More updates will be forthcoming, including add-ons, polls, and achievements to help grow Shao's Genki Dama. Stay tuned!
Hey BackerKit, my name is Kurt, and I'm the humble Project Manager assisting Shao Dow with trying to make the Genki Dama Japan Tour become a reality. よろしくお願いいたします! m(_ _)m
If you haven't been to the PreLaunch page since signing up, CHECK IT OUT! There, you'll see a personal video from Shao telling you all about The Genki Dama Tour, and why you should consider backing it from Day 1!
THE LAUNCH PARTY Join us for a Launch Party on Wednesday, October 25th, (a little before) 19:00 UK Time! We'll be doing a LIVE STREAM featuring Shao Dow, the inimitable artist Krissy Diggs, and myself!
At Launch, all the rewards and pledge tiers for Project Genki Dama will be revealed, and you'll have the chance to ask any questions you might have about the campaign! We're also coming up with some Launch Party activities for the audience to engage with, so please look forward to that as well ~
Keep an eye out for another update here tomorrow on BackerKit, and/or on Shao Dow's social media platforms!
And what should you expect from a Genki Dama Launch Party?
Well, we plan to start with an AMA with Shao Dow himself, followed up by a fun lil' SHONEN ANIME TRIVIA GAME that pits Shao Dow vs THE CHAT!
Then, after celebrating the campaign countdown together, we'll run down all the cool pledges and rewards we have to offer to our cherished backers! You'll also have plenty of time to ask questions about anything you want to know about the Genki Dama Tour, and get advice about which pledge tier might be right for you!
We're preparing the packages (signing CDs, etc) as we speak. These will all be going out in the next couple of days.
Due to a massive spike in costs, the liner notes on the physical albums is very simple. So, we'll be sending out (through BackerKit) a digital liner notes. Keep an eye out for both the CD and the PDF.
Tales of The Black Piper CAMPAIGN
In one of our recent updates, we put out a call for authors, and we've been getting a good response! The campaign launches in just over a week, and we're currently at 64% funded. So, be excited!
We'll be sending out a few messages this week preparing you for what's to come - highlighting rewards and other good things. So, keep an eye out for that.
And if you're an author and would like a link to the page early to get familiarized and get your pledge in, let me know!
All the best, Michael & The Team @ The Black Piper.
I hope you're all well! I have a few bits of exciting news for you!
The Black Prism - Digital Release
Before I jump into the CDs and Tales, I want to mention that The Black Prism | Lightbringer Album 1 has released today! If any of you feel so inclined, we'd love for you to go have a listen on your favorite platform to help the album gain visibility, and leave the album an honest review! That would be extremely appreciated!
The Black Prism - CDs
Great news! I just received word today that the CDs have been completed by the manufacturer and are now being shipped. We should have them next week, and we will get to work signing and shipping them out to you as soon as we get them!
So, keep an eye on your mailbox!
Tales of The Black Piper - Early Access for Writers
And for more exciting news: we have finished the campaign page for Tales of The Black Piper, and we are giving it some finishing touches. While we're planning on launching publicly in March, BackerKit is allowing us to open up early access to the campaign to writers. We want to make sure that you are able to check out the campaign and secure your position, and we also want to give you time to prepare your friends, family, fans, and acquaintances for the big day.
For those who are interested and/or planning to join as a writer - please send me a message, either via email or social media (Facebook messenger via The Black Piper, Discord DM, etc.), and I'll get you access!
I hope all is well with you. We have a few updates for you.
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
I hope you are all doing well and that you had great holidays!
I wanted to send you a quick update, now that we're back in the swing of things over here.
The Black Prism - Physical CDs
We are working with Brent's team to finalize the liner notes. We just received some direction from them today on our previous version of the notes, and we should have a new version back to them for review tonight or tomorrow.
Once we get their approval on that, we'll send all the materials to the manufacturer, and from there it should be just a couple of weeks before we are sending them out to you.
Refractions
This album is coming along, and we're really excited about where it's headed. There will be some energetic, fun, moving, and a few epic tracks on this album. Given the nature of the project, it's going to be a rather eclectic collection, with things like heist music, electronic, gypsy, and quirky piano jazz just to name a few.
It's a bit more intensive to prepare than Reflections was, as Reflections had a lot of the legwork already done. As we're digging into the material, we're finding that so many of the Refractions tracks need some serious updating/overhaul.
Here's our current state: Finalized Tracks: 4 (with 1 more in the final stages) Tracks to Arrange: 2, possibly 3 (or more, see below) Tracks to Mix: this depends (see below)
Refractions - Timing
So, the question about total tracks and how many we have left to arrange/mix is an interesting one.
When we put together our potential track list for this, we had a lot of songs. Some of that was easy to whittle down - some songs are tied up in rights, some were songs whose original files we don't have access to anymore, and some songs would only be redeemable with a lot of rework (far more than the songs that made the list.)
But even after that, we still have enough tracks to put together 2 or 3 volumes of 12 to 20 tracks each. The trick here is that so many of the tracks need so much love. So, the question about total tracks comes down to: would you rather wait longer and receive more tracks, or get a nice 12-track album sooner (possibly as soon as the end of the month)?
If I were to estimate, this is what I think the delivery timing would look like, given where we are and what we are looking at:
8-track album: next week 12-track album: January/February 2023 16-track album: March 2023 18-track album: April/May 2023 (these two additional tracks will take a little bit, as they are full-blown rework/arrangements.) 20-track album: June 2023 (same story for these two, with one of them needing some extra recording.)
Here's where you come in. We could make a decision. (Well, it's tough, because I love a lot of these tracks, and if it were up to me, I'd be happy to spend the rest of the year polishing and getting you a 40-track album....) But your opinion is important to us. Would you rather get fewer tracks sooner, more tracks later, or some kind of in-between?
Were you all able to receive your copy of Reflections (those who ordered it)? If not, let us know! Also, we'd love to hear what you think of the album and the stories that went with each song.
Tales of The Black Piper
We have a few active queries out to some potential veteran authors with a few promising options we are really hoping work out. (I'm itching to tell you all about it!) Waiting for final answer (and contracts) will potentially place the campaign in March, but it will be worth it if we can secure their participation. In the meantime, we are making good progress on the preparation, and we are extremely excited to get started!
Well, I think that's everything! Looking forward to any thoughts, questions, and feedback you all have about all the above, and I hope you have a lovely week!
All the best, Michael & The Team @ The Black Piper
