Thursday, March 4, 2010

Warped Tour 2010...Hey, It's Possible...

One thing you should know about us, is that we as a band will usually take advantage of any means to promote ourselves so that people can hear our music.  This usually means that we'll sign up for every little contest that passes little birds whisper to us about, even if we have no shot at winning.
The first time we tried this, it actually turned out much better than we expected.  One of our biggest fans, Chandler Wride, told us about a contest that the radio station X96 was having to get a local band to open for Blink 182 and Taking Back Sunday when they played in Utah Valley.  We signed up and submitted our song "Cut Down" for their approval.  We were surprised to receive a text message from the station a short time later, announcing that we were one of the top 25 finalists for the contest, and that we would take part in a voting process to see who would win.  So our song was placed on their website and people were told to vote for the band they would like to see open for Blink, being allowed to vote once per IP address per day.  When the winner was announced, we were pleased to know that, even though we didn't win, we did place 4th out of 25 which isn't bad at all, all things considered.
Since then we have continued to sign up for any contests that pass our way, including the Rock the Roxy competition that took place on YouTube about a month ago.  The contest included submitting a three-and-a-half minute video of our band playing live, and the video with the most votes would be flown to Texas to perform at some rock show and get some other perks as well.  The competition had already started, but we submitted a video anyway.
So, why waste your time, you may ask?  Well, because even though we didn't believe we would win (unless some miracle happened...or all the other bands in the contest could suck), we were still getting exposure to people that otherwise would not hear our music.
That is the case for the Ernie Ball Battle of the Bands competition to see which local bands will play at Warped Tour 2010.  We received notice of the contest on ReverbNation and gave it a try.  I'm not sure how long the contest had been going when we decided to enter, and even though there are some great bands here in Utah that already had dozens of votes before we even created our profile, it has been great to receive comments from people about our songs who would never have found us otherwise unless they were bored on Myspace and came across our page.
Now, having said that, we still hope to do our best in this competition, and who knows, we could even do pretty well.  So, if you want to shoot some votes our way, head over to our profile at http://www.battleofthebands.com/formerlyso and vote for us.  Thanks a bunch!

Jeff  (bassist, Formerly So)

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