I uploaded five music tracks onto ArtistSignal,com on Friday 7th February. Most of my blog friends will have heard all the tracks before because they’re in the side panel of my blog, but I thought I’d let you know how I’m progressing with this new experiment.
The site describes itself: “ArtistSignal is a free social media platform, it allows listeners to vote for a ‘Top Artist’ each month and they give the ‘Top Artist’ $10,000 which allows the listeners to propel talented artists to the top of our platform and gives artists an entirely new avenue to grow their fan base. Another $5000 is split between all remaining artists based on the amount of votes they receive during the month (excluding the #1 artist).”
When I joined the site I was listed as number 1688 and the current #1 artist was already on 13000 votes and adding around 2000 votes each day. However, it has been quite exciting as I have worked my way up from a rank outsider to #88, I currently have 4350 votes.
All five of my songs are in ‘Discover’ , under the title ‘Top Songs’ that have been listened to this month. It is great as all five of my songs are currently in the top 20 listened to 🙂
8th Amor Commanda
14th Do Not Go My Love
17th O Waly Waly
19th Per La Gloria D’Adoravi
20th Widmung
Not bad to have all 5 of my classical/opera songs in the top 20 across all genres on the site 🙂 so even if you can’t vote as you have no Facebook account you could drop by and listen to my tracks and help propel me to the top of the ‘Top Songs’ league. My brother did the maths when I asked him to vote for me and he said that it was impossible for me to win this month but I have been happy introducing many more people to my music. You have to find different ways to catch people’s attention and help them rediscover the beauty of classical/opera music.
These are all songs I worked on in my first year at the conservatoire; they were recorded in one short session in June 2013 at the RCS, with the help of my piano accompanist and friend Danielle DiDonato on the grand piano and studio technician Tim Cooper.
Amor Commanda is an aria from the baroque period opera called: Floridante Act 3 Sc5 by George Handel in Italian.
Do Not Go My Love by Richard Hageman, a child prodigy; he was a concert pianist by the age of 6. Hageman was born in the Netherlands but moved to America and eventually became an American citizen. Do not go my Love is an ‘art song’.
O Waly Waly is also sometimes called The Water is Wide, it is a folk song of English origin, based on lyrics that date to the 1600s. If you want to sing along here is my sing along version 😉
Per La Gloria D’Adoravi by Giovanni Bononcini, is from an Italian opera called Griselda. This is probably the most famous song from the opera and was written for a Tenor called Ernesto.
Widmung (in English ‘Dedication’) by Robert Schumann opens his song cycle Myrthen (Myrtles) which features the setting of a poem in German by Friedrich Ruckert.
To help raise awareness of what I was doing I put a post on Facebook in the evening of 7th February and got 5,391 people to “like” the post. But then I figured out you are supposed to share a “link” so that the two sites could talk to each other.
My first link went on 11th February and achieved a further 3,221 “likes” but the likes don’t convert to votes sadly, so on the 15th February I posted another link to thank everyone for helping me reach #126 with 2251 votes in just one week 😉 . I’ve figured out that as voters can vote more than once, but only once per hour, there are groups of dedicated fans promoting other professional artists who are currently working across the industry; my target was to get into the top 100 which I’ve achieved in just four days which is brilliant. I got a further 2,370 Facebook “likes” too on that post.
Hopefully I have encouraged a few more people not to write off classical/opera but to give it a chance and discover, as I have, the true beauty of the songs and the enchantment that they can create.
What do you think about this idea? Do you think it is a good platform for a trainee classical/opera singer to promote classical music ? Does anyone have any ideas for me on how to get my vote out, my own parents can’t vote for me because they don’t have Facebook 🙁 lol otherwise I’d have racked up another 300 votes by now 😉 so they have to persuade my family and friends. Have you got any reservations about the concept? if so you can leave your comments here, direct message me on twitter or e-mail at enquiries@charlotte-hoather.com.
UPDATE – here is an update on final outcome after just three weeks 🙂
During the competition I received many messages of encouragement from friends both old and new and I was excited to see my position change as I climbed through the chart. By the closing date I managed to make position #25 with over 11,000 votes and over 30,000 individual Facebook likes.
In their classical chart my five songs took the top 5 places and in their overall chart they were all in the top 9 ‘Top Songs’ for the month. So a big thank you to everyone that got behind me 🙂
