Written by Paul Miro

Created: 10 July 2018

It fills me with an incredible sense of achievement to be able to say, with the release of Broken Angels, that the Sinombrè Vol I & II cycle is complete.

In 2014, when I originally conceived the concept and started sketching the story arc, I anticipated it being one long album. However, the Sinombré universe quickly developed a momentum and life of its own and I realised that it would take at least two long albums to tell the cyclic tale. 

And, four years from that original idea that two album cycle has seen two spin-off bonus albums, together with three additional stand alone tracks which all have their place in the story. It would take a completist who has been on board since the beginning of the first pledge campaign to calculate exactly how much material has been released and shared over the Vol I-II launch periods.

The recently completed campaign for Vol II: Broken Angels has proved even more exciting than its predecessor. In part, this was because I chose to run it directly from my website, rather than through the ‘big name’ crowd fund Pledge Music platform. Inevitably, this meant an even higher-maintenance and time-consuming campaign, and also meant that it  would be entirely reliant on the reach of my posts on social networks to get the message out. It would also rely heavily on fan support – re-posts, shares, people spreading the word. And, as most of you are aware, it has become increasingly difficult to promote your wares via social networks.

From the outset, the response was incredible. The first week went beyond my expectations. There then followed a scarily quiet period. Analytics showed that only a tiny percentage of FaceBook friends were seeing album-related posts. The discovery that FB changes the default ‘follow posts’ setting on an artist’s page to ‘unfollow posts,’ explained this. There would be no point posting a request to people to change their settings to follow my posts, as the only people who would see such posts would be those who already followed my posts. Targeted paid ads are merely farmed out to click farms in Malaysia where people click repeatedly to say they are people from the UK/Europe/USA who love rock music. 

And that was then the true power of crowd support kicked in: an unbelievable effort by those who support my musical endeavours, sharing posts with friends and messaging their friends directly completely turned the campaign around. 

The end of campaign statistics make strange reading – hundreds of people who normally buy my albums never got to hear about the campaign, never saw one of the hundreds of posts I made between March and July. I am still receiving messages from people asking me if I have plans to release Broken Angels at some point in the future.

But, to counter this, a tremendous amount of people who are new to my music did get involved, with the end result being that, for the first time, I almost sold out of the first run of CDs before the album was released.

An outstanding result. Words fail when it comes to me trying to express my appreciation in new ways to everyone for the level of support you continue to show. Those sentiments never change, and so the same words will have to suffice. The independent music community is strong and indefatigable. In a disunited world, together we are strong. 

And, of course, the story is not over. The cycle may be complete, but the concluding third volume of Sinombré is yet to come…