Over the next few weeks I’ll be asking for your favorite tracks from 8 of my albums. Each poll will only be open for one week, so vote while you can and let me know what songs you’d share with someone who’s never heard me before!

Over the next few weeks I’ll be asking for your favorite tracks from 8 of my albums. Each poll will only be open for one week, so vote while you can and let me know what songs you’d share with someone who’s never heard me before!

Over the next few weeks I’ll be asking for your favorite tracks from 8 of my albums. Each poll will only be open for one week, so vote while you can and let me know what songs you’d share with someone who’s never heard me before!

Over the next few weeks I’ll be asking for your favorite tracks from 8 of my albums. Each poll will only be open for one week, so vote while you can and let me know what songs you’d share with someone who’s never heard me before!

Over the next few weeks I’ll be asking for your favorite tracks from 8 of my albums. Each poll will only be open for one week, so vote while you can and let me know what songs you’d share with someone who’s never heard me before!

Over the next few weeks I’ll be asking for your favorite tracks from 8 of my albums. Each poll will only be open for one week, so vote while you can and let me know what songs you’d share with someone who’s never heard me before!

Over the next few weeks I’ll be asking for your favorite tracks from 8 of my albums. Each poll will only be open for one week, so vote while you can and let me know what songs you’d share with someone who’s never heard me before!

Traffic Jam Session

The first and most easily followed result was website traffic. Thanks to Google Analytics I was able to watch real-time numbers throughout the day. Sometimes I’d see a tweet or a G+ post and go check out the stats to watch the bump, but more frequently I’d see the traffic number suddenly spike and then go look for what caused it. Many, many thanks to FurAffinity for all the traffic they sent my way, you were easily the #1 driver for this event other than myself!

Overall, traffic to my website jumped (wait for it) 1,058% yesterday. Obviously the majority were fellow Amercians, but the UK and Canada nearly tied for second place with Germany and others close behind. I was a little surprised to see a nearly even split between Firefox and Chrome browsers cruising the site since, to my knowledge, people only use Chrome for Google+ Hangouts. Eight of you were still using IE 6 (seriously, wtf?)

But you don’t really care about traffic, you want to hear about charts.

Bombs Away Part I: iTunes

The most difficult chart to follow was the iTunes Music Store. Like all things Apple, they don’t announce how often they update their charts, how they calculate positions, where an album is likely to end up, or what it takes to get on the front page. We just sort of had to stumble across the results whenever we could. I don’t know if anyone else saw a higher peak than we did (please let me know!), but when we finally did see movement, The Lives of Dexter Peterson hit #85 on the iTunes Rock chart (by the time I took a screen-cap it was at 87). As of this morning, it’s sitting at #127, but damn… we broke the top 100!

To give some perspective, that #85 put me higher up than Elton John, the Foo Fighters, and The White Stripes. While I only take pleasure (no small amount) in besting the latter, that should clarify the kind of league I was playing in. This is why I was pushing so hard for support from the community- to quote Oliver Platt from The West Wing, “this isn’t Arena League, this is NFL football.” The fact that I’m even visible on the rock chart at all right now is a victory, but breaking the top 100 is a badge that the Robot Army should wear with pride.

Bombs Away Part II: Amazon

I’ll start with the good news: As of this morning, The Lives of Dexter Peterson is currently the #1 best seller in Amazon’s Adult Alternative category. Boom! That’s far more than I expected to happen with this little stunt. In fact, the album hit some incredible milestones yesterday, but what matters most are the lasting effects. Amazon’s charts are updated hourly, so any victories could be rolled back in less time than it takes to watch Serenity on Netflix.

The current standings for the album:

• #1 in Adult Alternative
• #6 in Miscellaneous (seriously, that’s a genre?)
• #44 in Alternative Rock (think Green Day or The Black Keys)
• #225 in all of Amazon MP3

Think about it for a second. I am nobody (just like my Manifesto says). I do not have a record label, management, a publicist, or major investors. All I have are people like you who are reading this long, boring wrap-up because you like my tunes. You’ve put my new album in the top ten of a couple genre charts, the top 50 of a particularly competitive genre chart, and the fact that I’m in triple-digit standing in all of Amazon’s music catalog at all is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

As for the single itself, “I Wish I Were”:

• #1 in Miscellaneous (there we go again…)
• #4 in Adult Alternative
• #38 in Alternative Rock
• #382 in all of Amazon MP3′s singles

One thing that the iTunes charts lack is a “Billboard Hot 100″ equivalent. Amazon, however, calls it their “Movers and Shakers” chart. Thanks to the efforts of a ton of people yesterday, the album is still #5 and the single is #2 on the Movers and Shakers chart. This one, by definition, is temporal, but if you want to measure a surge, this is the best place to look. Oh, if only I could conquer the music world at 18,827% growth for the rest of my career. Hell, for the rest of the week, even.

My Conclusion

I have no conclusion yet. After 24 hours, I’m humbled, stunned, and excited all at the same time, but God only knows what this surge will mean in the long run. I will certainly try this again the next time I release an album, but as one fan suggested on Twitter I will not do this for more than a day at a time. The amount of prep, coordination, and flat-out spamblasting involved just isn’t sustainable. People seemed excited enough about joining the effort for a day, but I’m pretty sure I’d lose a lot of friends if I did this all the time.

The one solid conclusion I can come to is really a confirmation of something I realized years ago: I have the best fans ever invented. Thank you.

(Oh, and if you’re still reading this, please do me a favor and leave a review on iTunes and Amazon if you liked what you heard. Thanks!)

Preorder The Album Now!

The recording, mixing, and mastering are already done, at this point al that remains are the artwork and duplication. After that I’ll be shipping out discs like AOL in the 90′s. Hopefully these things will be a bit more welcome than they were.

Two Flavors of Preorder

Autographed CD Packages

This time around I’m trying a couple of different approaches, one for those ready to buy now and one for those who want to wait for the official launch date. I’ve listed a variety of preorder packages at www.matthewebel.com/preorder which range from a full-quality album download to a concert for your friends in your backyard. No, seriously. I don’t know if anyone will go for that level of sponsorship, but hey… it couldn’t hurt to lay it out there, right? Most of the packages in between are just annual subscriptions to Matthew Ebel dot net. After all, everyone who’s paid for an All-Access or higher membership has already pre-ordered the new album in some form or another.

Chartbombing

And then there’s Chartbombing: Sign up now, put no money down, and just wait for the official release date. When the time comes, I’ll drop you a line via email or SMS to go buy a specific track (or the whole album). With any luck, enough people will chip in that I’ll make it into the iTunes and Amazon daily charts… sort of a self-sustaining bit of publicity since a lot of people skim the charts for new music.

Many moons ago a couple of bands tried something similar called “Bum Rush The Charts”, but this one’s taking place as an official release date event and, hopefully, will work better now that people can buy music from their phones, tablets, cars, refrigerators, etc. And hey, even if you pre-order the album now, it’d be all kinds of awesome if you pitched in 99¢ for the Chartbombing effort later!

You see, if SOPA passes, I want to own Grooveshark.com

It’s not about fairness or liberty or innovation, really. My support for SOPA comes strictly from the fact that it wouldn’t be difficult for me to own Grooveshark once these bills pass.

If you’re not familiar with Grooveshark, here’s their business plan in a nutshell:

1. Allow users to post and distribute MP3′s of any band they like
2. Whatever the users don’t post, Grooveshark will post for them
3. Ignore DMCA takedown requests, court orders, and lawsuits
4. Don’t pay any royalties to labels or indie musicians.

Don’t ask me how a site like this gained any legitimacy, but for some reason tons of people think Grooveshark actually supports the music it’s using to sell ads and subscriptions. There’s a reason they’ve been sued by every major label and why independents like Zoë Keating have had to issue DMCA takedown notices upwards of seven times. Just like the United States Congress, Grooveshark has become a respected batch of pirates that nobody seems to sense as a threat.

How SOPA Can Help

Under the terms of the SOPA bill (yes, I’ve read it, have you?), pretty much any site on the internet becomes a site that facilitates piracy. My dad’s blog about shit he finds on the beach in Washington? Total pirate haven. Forget YouTube, Wikipedia, and of course Grooveshark, any site with a comments section falls under this bill’s definition.

All I’d have to do is issue a notice to sites associated with Grooveshark under the new law. You read that correctly, I don’t even have to inform the site I’m attacking. At that point those sites have 5 days to stop servicing Grooveshark- Paypal, Google, whomever. If Grooveshark doesn’t somehow sense they’re being targeted via some disturbance in the force, they’ll probably keep violating copyrights and ripping off musicians as though nothing had happened.

At that point, I can literally own their domain name through a simple court procedure. I wouldn’t get their bank accounts or assets, but think about all the traffic I could funnel directly to my website through their more popular name. Hell, I could just point Grooveshark.com to my Pandora Radio station since Pandora actually pays royalties to guys like me.

If Grooveshark bothered to notice and tried to defend themselves, it’d be even better. Since every site- even mine -is now a Pirate Bay, they’d be perjuring themselves the second they tried to claim otherwise. That means jail time for their directors and executives, but SOPA adds a bonus: They would immediately be responsible for my legal fees. I could hire the ten best lawyers on the planet and let Grooveshark pick up the tab.

How You Can Help

You too can help me own Grooveshark.com – it will be a simple matter. Besides, if you don’t help me, I’ll just own your domain name instead. It will be far, far easier than you can imagine and you will have no legal recourse to fight these claims.

If you doubt any of this, I suggest you educate yourself on SOPA/PIPA right now… though I wouldn’t recommend it. Congress and their friends at the MPAA/RIAA are counting on you NOT knowing what the hell is going on in order to pass these bills.

So you’re better off joining my quest to own Grooveshark. Just tell your representatives how you feel about SOPA/PIPA and together we can make this happen!