A humbling aspect of releasing recordings in the SCA world has getting a proper sense of scale to judge success. In a world where YouTube sensations can go viral, get millions of views, and score a deal with a label, a brand-new bardic record is a smaller thing to measure by several orders of magnitude. The neat thing is that 21st-century Web technology gives me access to see what’s going on with the songs I’ve put up in different spaces, and while I may only get a handful of people listening to my stuff on a given (good) day, it is possible to enjoy surprise at a micro-trend in the data. I’m seeing one this week.
“Call Me Will”, an early song of mine, is one track from Hidden Gold that I haven’t promoted at all as a “single”. It’s not that I don’t like the piece, but I figured you can’t push every song. Still, there are a few things about the recording that make this one special. I got to feature Nuri Olsen (aka Finnguala) on this one (she’s on a couple of others as well). Her sweet vocals as the young girl help make the song as haunting as I’d wanted it to be. This is also the only song that has all the featured musicians on it: Paul Butler, Dave Lambert, and Don Levey on the intro.
At any rate, it so happens that this week, for some reason, people have started playing this song more than the others. Again, this is micro-data, it’s possible just one or two people like it…but I’m seeing it get play on Bandcamp and Soundcloud, and of my tracks, it’s jumped to fifth most popular on Spotify this week (from eighth last week). If you haven’t heard it yet, I invite you to check it out and let me know what you think.
[Update 10/12: It’s up to #2. As I said, small data set…]
[Update 10/26: It’s actually #1. Somebody really likes this song.]
The weird little joys of our technological moment…
Drake Oranwood 