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We’re still not technically in the studio yet, but most people would agree that what we’re doing right now could be considered “pre-production,” so I’m firing up the old “Studio Journal” category again.

So far we’ve been just been writing. We record everything we do, so we can go back and listen and make notes about where Mike fucks up so we can give him shit about it. It gives us something to do besides writing the next great American rock album of all time. We’re up to somewhere around 9-14 new songs, depending on how you define “new” and “finished.”

Actually none of them are really finished (even the ones we’ve played live already), but they’re getting pretty close. As you can see in the following photo, we have a lot of stuff written up on the big board.

New songs. Old songs. Arrangement ideas. It’s all there. You can practically hear the new album just by looking at this photo. Here’s another shot of the arrangement board for a new song called “Targets on the Range”:

That’s some groundbreaking shit right there. A, B, A, B, then an OUTRO! In the middle of the goddamn song! An OUTRO! I won’t even tell you what’s crossed out there either. You might die just from hearing about it. When you finally hear the actual song you’ll shit your pants either way, but just be thankful we didn’t leave what we had in there. It most certainly would have killed you all.

There’s no telling when or where this new material might appear. Not exactly the news you want to hear, I know. We’re planning on being in the studio over the summer. That may actually happen sooner or later than we’ve planned. You know how it goes.

For now (and in case you can’t read Mike’s sloppy handwriting in the photos), here’s a pretty-much-up-to-date list of new song titles:

1. Instructions: How To Die
2. Greenlight
3. Gods & Profits
4. Shine
5. One More Time
6. Speaking in Code
7. Novelty
8. Over Medication
9. Easier Said Than Done
10. Targets on the Range
11. Pancake Day
12. I Told You I Was Sick
13. 3 P’s
14. Hershey Squirt

Until next time, I’ll leave you with a couple more photos taken at a recent rehearsal. You can view the full set here.

Are you the kind of Sinch fan that’s always pushing your friends to listen to our music? We hear that from a lot of people and we’re finally able to give a little bit back. So, now instead of just working for free you can actually make money by helping to sell our music!

We’re proud to announce the Sinch Affiliate Program!

That link will take you to the E-junkie Affiliate sign up page. Register for an account and you’ll get unique links you can use to send people our way. If they buy something, you’ll get credit to the tune of 10% of the selling price. That’s $0.99 for our full albums and $0.49 for our EPs. It also counts towards our new package deals, so for those you’ll make even more.

On top of the affiliate percentage, we’ll be keeping an eye on who’s helping out the most. I can’t say exactly what the benefits will be at this point, but we’ll definitely be taking care of anyone who sends a lot of people our way.

You can post your affiliate links on your own website, Myspace profile, Facebook page or any other place you can post stuff online (forums, etc). You can even just email the links directly to anyone you think might be interested.

So, get your account created and see what you can do. I’ll say right up front that we really appreciate anyone who takes the time to do this. I know our fans have been helping spread the word for years, so it’s about time we let you guys get something out of it.

Let us know if you have any questions or need help with anything.

Up until now this whole Sinch thing has pretty much been a one-way street. We make music and you guys listen. We’ve received a few things from fans over the years: an acoustic version of a song here, a piece of artwork inspired by the band there… but we’ve always wanted more than that. So we finally got around to doing something about it and set up the Sinch Sound Share Project.

How it works is pretty simple:

1. We release packages of sounds/samples from our music on ccMixter.org
2. You download them
3. You use them in whatever way you want (as long as you’re not selling the result)
4. You upload the result to ccMixter
5. Everyone listens.
6. ???
7. Profit!

We’re really excited to see what everyone can come up with. Whether you know your way around Pro Tools or have never touched a piece of audio software in your life… give it a shot. You might be surprised.

To kick things off, our very own Mike the Bass Player did a remix of the first song we’ve released the sound files for, “Cutting All Ties” from the Subdivisions EP.

Listen to Mike’s remix here.

In classic Mike fashion, it’s not working how it’s supposed to but you can still get to the file with that link so you should be OK. It should be available on his ccMixter page, but for some reason it’s not. As you can see there are no uploads even though according to his profile, he “has 1 remix.” Classic.

Anyway, you can find all the downloads along with links to audio software on the Sound Share Project page.

The new site design seems to settling in quite nicely. Surprisingly, aside from a last minute configuration issue, there haven’t been any problems reported. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I’m glad that whatever it is didn’t happen.

As I said, we’ll be adding more features to the site, and are really trying to get the actual content coming out at a more regular pace. There are two new features on the site right now that I want to give some more attention to:

• The new Sinch Music Store
• The Sound Share project

As you can probably tell by the title of this post, I’m gonna be talking about the store for right now. But definitely check out the Sound Share stuff. We’d like to get as many people involved as we can. We’ll be posting more about it soon, but it’s up right now and available for your remixing pleasure.

So what’s new about the store?

Well, first of all, thanks to the new site design, it looks a bit nicer. But more importantly, we’re using a new hosted service called E-junkie for all of our digital downloads. The old store was a php application that we had to install (and maintain) on our own site and it just required too much of our time to keep up with. If you personally had any issues with the old store (links not working, etc) you know what we’re talking about.

We’ve also tried to make things a little easier to find. All our releases are on one page, and for the ones that you can’t buy directly from us, we’ve provided links to a bunch of places where you can find them.

To celebrate the new store (and since we don’t have any new releases to sell yet) I thought we’d have a little grand opening sale. We put together a couple of different package deals so you can pick up a couple of our releases (or all of them) at a much lower price than buying everything separately:

The Grand Opening Sale!

Featuring:

• The Double EP Package
• The Old School Package
• The BIG Package

All sales in our store go directly to the band and the money is used for stuff like equipment, studio time and Jager Bombs. So if you want to see a new album any time soon…

We’ve been talking about a complete redesign of this site for at least a couple of years now. I’m sure some of you doubted it would ever happen. I think I probably doubted it myself a few times too, but it’s finally here.

It’s still a work in progress, but we finally got it to a point where it was usable so we figured we might as well let everyone start using it. We have plans to add a lot more to the new site, including a lot of the content that (for the time being) is missing. Stuff like the FAQ, Inspiration pages, Lyrics and mp3 downloads haven’t all been moved over yet, but we’re working on it.

The newest addition to the site is the brand new Sinch Music Store!

It’s been completely redesigned and is built on a new download service which should fix some of the problems we were having with the old one.

As always, the money from the stuff you buy here goes directly to the band. And we’ve also included links to other sites where you can buy the stuff that we can’t currently sell ourselves. Moving forward, everything that we release will be available in the new store, directly from us!

There’s some other new stuff floating around, but we’ll let you find it on your own. And if there’s anything in particular you really want to see on the new site, please let us know.

A few months ago I posted a video of a cryptic trailer that was playing in theaters before Transformers. It’s a new super-secret project by JJ Abrams, the guy who created LOST. It’s still hard to tell exactly what’s going on but this new trailer sheds a little more light on what you can expect when the movie hits theaters in January.

As you would expect with something from the creator of LOST, there’s a ton of speculation as to what this movie is actually about. It’s most likely very inaccurate, but still kind of interesting to read.

Yes, that title is a really lame Samhain reference. But, it is Halloween today, so I guess I can maybe sort of get away with it.

Anyway, I just wanted to officially mention our two upcoming shows here on the blog. I should have done this sooner, but I’ve been overwhelmed lately with the amount of places I end up posting our shows (our site, Myspace, Purevolume, Upcoming, etc.) so some of them slip through the cracks.

The first one is this Friday night (Nov 2) at the Moose lodge in Doylestown, PA.

And then after that we’ll be playing our first ALL AGES show in a really long time (Nov 24, to be exact) at Siren Records, also in Doylestown, PA.

As always, you can grab the code on our Myspace page it you want to repost these flyers or send them to your friends.

The internet tubes have been a-buzz for the past few days with the news that Radiohead’s forthcoming new album, In Rainbows, is available for pre-order directly from the band. They are not currently under contract with any major label, so you’re actually buying this album from the artists themselves. What’s more, the digital download version is available for the fan-friendly price of “whatever you feel like paying,” although there seems to be an upper limit of around $200. Those of you feeling super generous will have to just send them a check for the difference.

A few other artists have experimented with this flexible pricing approach, but none as high-profile as Radiohead. And while they’re still likely to sign with a label at some point, this is definitely an interesting step towards shortening the gap between major artists and their fans.

In a related story, Trent Reznor just announced Nine Inch Nails‘ departure from Universal/Interscope:

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed.

From NIN Hotline

Not much in the way of details, but I’m sure those announcements he mentioned will be very interesting. Can’t wait to see where this goes.

And on a more Sinch-related note, all of our future releases are likely to be available directly from us (in case you didn’t know that already). We’ve felt this is the way to go for a while now and it’s good to see some major artists going down a similar path.

This is the best photo I’ve seen in a while:

photo by Alex Brown

Amazon just launched the “public beta” of their new “Amazon MP3” digital download store.

This is pretty big news. Besides EMusic, all of the other digital stores are using some form of DRM, effectively locking out users of certain hardware and/or operating systems. iTunes sells some stuff in unprotected AAC format but it costs more and from what I have seen the selection is somewhat limited.

“Amazon MP3 is an all-MP3, DRM-free catalog of a la carte music from major labels and independent labels, playable on any device, in high-quality audio, at low prices,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President for Digital Music. “This new digital music service has already been through an extensive private beta, and today we’re excited to offer it to our customers as a fully functional public beta. We look forward to receiving feedback from our customers and using their input to refine the service.”

Link to article

Amazon claims to have 2,000,000 songs available and with most songs priced at $0.89 (10 cents less than iTunes and most others), I’m sure I’ll be buying a few albums, if only to test out the service.

Whether or not they can compete with iTunes, I think this is important in that (if people use it) it will be a great example of how giving people what they want (in this case, unprotected music files) can actually be a more successful business model than trying to have control over the content after it’s purchased. EMusic has been doing this for a while, and been quite successful, but they don’t sell a lot of major label stuff. The fact that a lot of the major labels are on board with Amazon is what makes this interesting.

If you want to see more stores selling mp3s and other unprotected formats, I would recommend giving some serious thought to supporting this new venture. The rest of the industry is no doubt keeping their eye on how this all goes down. And you now have the power to send them a message by only spending your money with companies that respect their customers instead of treating them like potential criminals.