See also: Three Stars and the Truth (February 2015)
Last week brought good news and bad for our Christmas single. On Thursday morning we learned that we’d been selected by RadioAirplay from over a thousand submissions as one of the top twenty new holiday songs for 2013. For that we were given 1,500 free airplay credits on Jango, meaning lots of people all over the world that are listening to Christmas music streams will hear our song.
However, later that day we also found out that we failed to make it to the finals of the Christmas FM song contest in Ireland. We had already made it to the last twenty, but were really hopeful that we’d reach the shortlist of six so that the public would have a chance to hear and vote for our song.
There are certainly some good songs among the six that were chosen – and of course I’m really pleased that we made it as far as we did – but it would have been a major boost for the song to get to the finals and I think it would have deserved it’s place there.
@mulledband I did, actually! The perils of a democracy… best of luck with it, guys.
— Lauren Murphy (@laurenmurphy_) December 13, 2013
We haven’t had any official feedback on how close we got, so we’re assuming we came seventh. 😉 Lauren Murphy was one of the judges and it was reassuring to hear that she, at least, liked the song. Jenny Huston, another judge, and Christmas FM both also retweeted us just after the announcement was made, so at least we got a bit of additional publicity.
We’re hoping that the good people over at Christmas FM will give the song a spin on air nonetheless. It would be great if some of our friends, in Ireland or elsewhere, could help our case by requesting the song now and again. They’re on Facebook here and you can tweet them @christmasfm. In Ireland it’s best to use SMS (50300) as that also generates a donation for Aware. (And indeed a request for the song to whatever station you happen to listen to at this time of the year would be much appreciated.)
In other Mulled news, David paid a visit to Geneva this weekend and we played two (mostly!) memorable gigs at The Clubhouse and Mulligan’s. I believe we managed four performances of A Perfect Christmas on Friday night, and three on Saturday. Yes, we really milked it.
David picked up a pair of splenid Christmas jumpers for us to wear. (Thanks Mairéad for the photo!)
We dropped into WRS FM on Friday afternoon to perform the song live on air during Tony Johnston’s show. We also had a good chat with him and he very kindly asked us to stick around and play a second song. (If I can get hold of a recording I’ll make it available here. (Edit 16/12/13: thanks to my colleague Roger, I do indeed now have a recording of the WRS appearance. Click here to listen to our live version of A Perfect Christmas.) Thanks to Tony and all the team there for making us feel so welcome – and to Phil for making the connection.
Our YouTube views crossed the 4,000 mark this weekend; we’d love to hit 10,000 by Christmas Day, but that might be a long shot at this stage. (A big thank you once again to Stephen & Co. at Lovely Toons.) We’ve sold around 30 downloads on iTunes and been streamed around 140 times on Spotify and 450 times on Bandcamp, so clearly we won’t be giving up the day jobs any time soon!! It has been a lot of fun though, and I guess there’s still a chance to generate more interest in the song in the next ten days before packing it away with the baubles, fairy lights and Rudolph jumpers for another year.