Jody Whitesides

Tag: Independent Music Journey

  • Inside My Creative Chaos: Tech Failures and the Utah Mammoth Anthem

    Inside My Creative Chaos: Tech Failures and the Utah Mammoth Anthem

    At what point did the world make such a strange turn? Have you seen Stranger Things? Are we in the upside-down? Or are we in the matrix?

    I’m one of those people where the world generally tends to make sense, but in the past few months there’s been some little things that seem like the world is going off on a bizarre tangent. Such is my week.

    As this week is getting started I’ve had one issue after another that has set me on a path of putting out odd fires that shouldn’t have started in the first place.

    To start, my distributor failed to add some pertinent information in to the last 5 weeks of releases. That is easy to rectify, but it shouldn’t have happened due to the fact that they acknowledged the information prior to release. Argh.

    Moving on to two nights ago, my podcast website had a crazy issue with only one table in the database. It stemmed from the transition from the old server to the new one. The table appeared to be ok, but after several weeks of use, it proved that everything worked but that one table. It took 5 hours to solve. It should have only taken 1 hour or less.

    Next up, there’s another tech issue I won’t bore you with, it was working and suddenly got hosed without any intervention. Needless to say it’s going on hours of wasted time attempting to get it working again.

    Earlier yesterday, I was in a need to restart my computer after working with a musician friend over screen share. During which my headphone output suddenly stopped. This was a software issue. The restart got the audio output working again, but it caused my workstation software to require being authorized again.

    In the effort of getting the software authorized again, it wasn’t working. A quick call to a friend had me restarting the computer again. Upon the 2nd restart – all was working again. What in the world?!?

    I’d say this also translates to the recent switch made by an NFL team. The coyotes moved to Utah last year. They spent a year being the Utah Hockey Club – ooh, there’s a real winning name (not). Then they decided to throw a few names out to fans.

    The end result is the Utah Mammoth. Which is a tad strange because Utah is not known for mammoths. Snow, yes. Mammoths, no. Either way, in my recent updates of all things sports, I’ve finally gotten around to doing a version of Do You Want to Play Utah Mammoth.

    Am I happy there is a professional hockey team here now, yes. In fact they do off season training in my home town. Will be nice to run into some of the players from time to time.

    Here’s to fixing old issues and resetting to the world to right-side up!

    Stay tuned…

  • Next Steps

    Next Steps

    What a wild rush. I’ve been working on so many things in the past month that it’s a literal whirlwind of musical mess.

    My weekly releases are well underway. So far they’re scheduled all the way out into June at this point. Hard to imagine based on the number of years I’ve been in this journey. Once upon a time you spent time creating a full album. Spent even more time working on the marketing, the release, a tour, etc. Now it’s more like constant creation. Which is fuckin hard.

    The largest recent change has been the website. I had roughly 95% of it done when I wrote the last update. As of Monday night 2025/03/10, I got another major bit solved. That bit… being able to load lyrics and song information with a click on the title on any music page.

    Places like Genius, MusixMatch or Lyricfind are awesome resources and I do attempt to keep my lyrics passed along to them. However, what better place to get the actual words I sang on something than right here on my website.

    Beyond the lyrics, for those nerds like myself, there is a plethora of additional information for my songs (not necessarily for any covers I may have released). You can find running time, copyright information, ISRCs, ISWCs, registration codes, etc. It’s the super geeky shit.

    On the underside of the music pages there’s going to be a rotating video background. It’s harder to see on a phone which is fine because it’s probably a bit more distracting than it should be. However, on a desktop or possibly an iPad you get the fuller experience. I will be changing them fairly regularly going forward.

    Still working on the storefront / shop area, but it is in working order.

    Musically speaking, I’m about to be getting full on into 360RA mixes. Those along with all the Dolby mixes I’ve finished will be releasing in the future. Likely towards the end of the year. Immersive music is really damn cool and starting to get really good even for headphones.

    More good things coming…

  • Songs, Stories, and Swag: A New Kind of Musician’s Marketplace

    Songs, Stories, and Swag: A New Kind of Musician’s Marketplace

    Little by little, bit by bit, step by step. It’s a different storyline that is starting to develop here. I’m setting up shop. Here’s the proposed roadmap…

    I’ve never really been one to blatantly sell merchandise from my website. From a show, sure. But not from my website. At this point I’m looking back at things and thinking to myself – I’m a moron. If someone is interested in what you’re doing, why the hell not offer something in exchange for a little cash?

    I’ve had this long standing view of it always being about the music, only about the music. In one sense it’s noble, in reality that’s stupid. A lot of missed connections with you. It probably has left a cold feeling between us and I’m a much warmer person than that and I know you are too.

    Getting into this world of e-commerce is a process, at least for me. I’m learning as I go. Don’t we all? I know I need to keep it simple and I should be proffering things on the front of the store that are directly related to my latest release. They probably teach that in Marketing 101, setting up shop 101 or something of that nature 101 at university.

    However, I’m not that organized outside of the music. Which means, you’ll have to bear with me as I slowly add things to the store and figure out how to sort them appropriately. The easiest thing for me in this initial phase is transcriptions of songs. Namely my songs. If you’re a musician and you purchase things like Guitar Magazine for the transcriptions (something I used to do when I was a budding musician), you know that often it was hard to get super accurate transcriptions. The beauty of my transcriptions is that they’re exactly what I played on the recording, because I’m the one doing them and I’m pretty sure I know what I played. I better, I wrote this stuff. And if you’re really into it, MP3 downloads of singles. Of course I’m offering them at a price that makes sense – the amount I’d make if you didn’t buy it on iTunes or somewhere else where they still sell music downloads. The store front makes this fairly easy for me and for you. So that’s a plus.

    My next steps as I add more transcriptions and singles is to do Deluxe Digital albums. You know, kinda interactive like. With original album art, liner notes, lyrics, photos, some videos and full blown audio with the stories behind each song. As I’m sitting here writing this, I’m thinking I should do this for singles too.

    I’m also going to be setting up shop for limited run T-shirts. Meaning you can be one of a lucky few to get a particular print of a shirt before they sell out and can no longer be found. Add baseball caps to that as well. For the sports minded fans of mine, I’m going to be doing Jersey’s that can be customized with your name on the back.

    This is just the beginning. There will be more.

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