Hey Dan - You seem like the guy on the web dev. side of things so I figured I’d bring something to your attention…

I just tried loading up my Clearing the Channel disc to finally access the exclusive content (haven’t even thought to try before!). I’m getting an “access granted” then it switches to “access denied” saying that www.sinch.net/cdextra isn’t redirecting or whatever. I went to the blog archive to see the post about the malfunctioning discs and the link there is also dead. Is the CD Extra section down?

You’re absolutely right.

If I were in the mood to bore everyone with computer nerd stuff I’d tell you how some new mod_rewrite rules that we created were trying to redirect in a way that would never complete (an infinite loop, of sorts). And honestly even if you were able to get to the page, it looked like shit because it was trying to use the old site template which doesn’t exist anymore.

So, I pulled everything together and put it on a brand new page. It’s not really “exclusive” anymore (whatever that means) but if you haven’t had a chance to check it out (or never knew it existed because you want us to fail and never bought Clearing the Channel in the first place), you can now find it here:

Clearing the Channel Bonus Content

There a bunch of stuff there including a behind-the-scenes video, desktop wallpapers and all the lyrics from the album (since they aren’t included in the liner notes).

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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But we have a better solution.

Now you can post (almost) any Sinch song on your website!

The site we mentioned a couple weeks ago, iJigg, allows us to post as many songs as we want. And they all come with codes that let people embed them anywhere on the web.

So far we’ve posted all the songs from Subdivisions, Clearing the Channel and Sinch, and we’ll be posting more soon.

If you’d like to post one of our songs on your website, go to the new Post Music page and grab the code for whatever song you want!

It should work on any website, but let us know if you have any problems.

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In the US, you can click here to go directly to our artist page on iTunes.

Outside the US, you’ll have to find your own way, but they should be available anywhere you can buy digital music. Please let us know if you have any problems finding it.

In either case, you may find that your store of choice is not displaying the album covers correctly. We’re working on getting the problems fixed, but in the meantime you can find better versions below:

Live Cuts 2005 cover image:

Clearing the Channel cover image:

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Check out our new E-Card for our upcoming online-only release, Live Cuts 2005.

Live Cuts 2005 will be available worldwide wherever digital tracks are sold on Dec 6, 2005.

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On November 29th, we’re releasing the new album to “digital music service providers” (DSPs) WORLDWIDE! That means it will be available for download at places like iTunes Music Store in Canada, Australia, Europe and anywhere else digital downloads are sold!

We’re still working on getting actual CDs in stores outside the US, but this is a big step forward! We really appreciate the support from all of our international fans. And now you have a way of showing your support (if you want) without having to spend $30+ dollars on an import version.

Also…

Starting in December, we will be releasing a couple of “digital EPs” through all the same digital downloads services. These will be available only online, so there won’t be CD versions.

The first of these releases is called “Live Cuts - 2005” and features 3 recent live performances of songs from Clearing the Channel.

1. The Power of Suggestion (Live)
2. Identity Theft (Live)
3. The Last Scene (Live)

Live Cuts will be available December 6 (for just under $3!) wherever digital tracks are sold.

The next EP, scheduled for release in early 2006, will feature some
“re-interpretations” of songs from Clearing the Channel. We’ve been calling them “remixes” up until now, but they’re really more than that. They do use elements from the record, as you would find in a typical remix, but we’ve done a lot of new recording as well, so they almost feel like completely new songs.

We’re really excited about this new stuff and hope that you will be too.

A lot of our fans have expressed frustration in the fact that we don’t do a lot of touring. We totally understand. So we figured in the absence of any major tours, the next best thing we can do is give you some new stuff to listen to (and watch… more on that soon).

We think you’ll like it. Stay tuned.

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The first one available is “All That’s Left Behind”

Click here to find out how to get it!

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