I mentioned the free music as viral marketing thing in an earlier post and thought I’d expand on it here.

I’ve just uploaded a bunch of some of the earlier versions of the 99th Floor Elevators, ‘Hooked’ for free download via MiniNova distribution. Think of it as an experiment to see if this has any effect on raising the profile of the 99th Floor Elevators in expectation of new material later this year and newer remixes of ‘Hooked’ also coming from Suesse Records.

Its all packaged as a Torrent and you’ll get five remixes and the original promotional video of ‘Hooked’ that was broadcast on MTV way back when. You can see the video on YouTube (see Elevators blog post here).

The audio files are all 192kbps MP3′s and the mixes included are:

Hooked Classic Remixes

Tony deVit Classic Trade Remix. This was the one that really made things fly for the 99th Floor Elevators, taking the humble white label original mix and stretching it into a near ten minute arms in the air club monster. Much credit must be given to Tony’s low profile engineer/co-producer Simon Parkes.

Originally a national top 30 hit in the UK before being re-issued as part of a Tripoli Trax double twelve inch remix package.

KillerHurts Remix.  DJ James Nardi and production partner Julian Dwyer, took chunks of inspiration from the OD404 and Pete Wardman remixes, added their own nails and came up with probably the perfect hard-house mix ever. Available on one sided 12 inch too if you’re lucky enough to find one.

Paul King Remix. Paul basically re-invents/updates the TDV mix for the 21st century with a monster synth riff from the Gods 2.30 minutes in that’ll have arms reaching for the sky. Previously available only as a very hard to find one sided 12inch white. Over nine minutes long.

OD404 Remix. Possibly my personal favorite mix and one I never tire of. Managed to take a Euro house gay anthem and turn it into the Prodigy with kick drums. Awesome.

Phlash Pop Edit. Only ever seen on a very limited release Tripoli Trax white label vinyl 12 and later on a CD single. Phlash! were ex-Tripoli A&R guy and DJ Steve Hill and engineer Mick Shiner (aka Nylon) and if you like your dance bouncy and radio friendly this is the version for you. Infectious stuff.

If you prefer the traditional route of MP3 download then you can grab each MP3 on my Drop.io page where you can either stream or download each track before deciding on the Torrent option.

I use and recommend UTorrent for my Torrents. Its less than half a meg download and spyware free. Install if you don’t already have a Torrent client.

Go to the ‘Hooked’ Torrent download link here. It’ll automatically open your Torrent client and you’ll get a pop up box so you can select which mixes you want and which you don’t want, if you don’t want the whole bunch. Click OK when you’re done and that’s it.

The files are very well seeded (well over 100 seeds as I write) so it’ll take something like 15 minutes to download the whole 74mb collection, depending on your connection speed. There’s a U Torrent beginners guide here and details on MiniNova Torrent distribution here if you’re considering getting some of your own tracks out and about ultra quick.

I uploaded the Hooked files to Mininova lunch time yesterday, by the time I’d left work five hours later Google had already indexed ’99th Floor Elevators Torrent’ and it was being seeded by users. A day later the package has over 100 seeders which means excellent download speed and availability.

Related Links

Mininova Content Distribution (Mininova.org)
Hey Content Producers, Get In The P2P Torrent Cloud (Lx7.ca)
Embracing The Torrent Of Online Video (BBC)
Thoughts On BitTorrent Distribution For A Public Broadcaster (NRKBeta)
Why You Must and How to Implement a Free Song Strategy (UnsprungMedia.com)

Before I started producing dance music I used to strut my stuff as the lead singer of an alternative rock band called the Fruit Eating Bears, who’s main claim to fame seemed to be the ‘unpredictable’ nature of the live gigs (ie: things tended to depend a lot on how much we’d been drinking that day). We also discovered another Fruit Eating Bears which meant we had to ditch the name as well.

In our rare sober moments we got a bit of a following in our local area of South Yorkshire, UK, played the legendary Bull and Gate in Kentish Town, London, appeared on Gary Crowley’s Radio London show, Demo Clash and even had (the then) Phonogram Record company A&R guy ringing us.

Getting to the point a little, we recorded a four track EP which never saw the light of day but which we have decided to get uploaded to iTunes to see how things go. So, starting today the ‘Uptempo Tantrum EP’ experiment begins. We decided to use the band name, the Buzzsonic seeing as its the only thing we could think of that hadn’t already been used for a band.

I got a contact to design the cover (which looks pretty neat) and am signing up for distribution using Tunecore, whom I also used for my 99th Floor Elevators remix project release.

So, step one. Encode hi-bitrate MP3s from my CD master using the CDex Lame encoder, add tags and upload to Tunecore as we speak. Now to put together some kind of readable PR sheet!

To help the project with some much needed PR, one of the tracks, ‘Remember’ has been picked up by an independent film company for usage briefly in the film, ‘Behind The Scenes of Total Hell’. BTSOTH apparently gets it premier at the Curzon Cinema in London sometime next month and is the work of film maker Andy Wilton. I think the film is going straight to DVD but there’s supposed to be a CD tie in which should be good.

Related Reading

Fruit Eating Bears (MySpace)
Get Your MP3 Tags In Order (Wired.com)
Bob Bakers Indie Promotion Blog (Bob-Baker.com)
Cyber PR (Ariel Publicity)