Last week I began the tale of Growing Old Disgracefully and the EP's progess into the digital distribution system. We had just started to use GarageBand.

Since then, I have been hard at work getting tracks up for streaming and out to be reviewed by others. Uploading a track is a bit more than $6 per. However, once you get the track up you can enter it in "a contest" to see what others think. Now you can either pay for the pleasure, which is about $20, or you can review other band's material. Now, this is not American Bandstand-esque "love it or leave it," it's more complex. Many bands are asking for specific information about the track including levels, lyrics and individual performances.

Now it would be rather daft for me, someone who has been writing reviews since the early-90s, to pay for anything I can get for nothing. So I have spent much of the last few days reviewing oodles of tracks and writing my little heart (yes I have one) out. At one point yesterday I was up to 5/5 stars for the quality of my reviews; currently about 4.5/5. One of my favourite reviews was of Cry Freedom, which suggested it might be good for a beer advert. Considering there is a sodding great Budweiser sign on the top of the site; we were rather pleased.

There is a bit of bother with some who think that we didn't place our music in the "proper category." Even thought we consider ourselves hard rockers, it has been suggested that we are country or blues, but not hard rock.

The site is very easy to use for the musician. It loads well at peak times, and the streaming audio sounds great. You can generate HTML to post streaming audio of your tracks on your site. You are even able to have your own wee podcast of your favourite tracks from other bands. There is all sorts of help on the site for budding muses ranging from basic advice to marketing and promo stuff. It's slick as hell and does the business. I am very impressed with it and it's very much the complete opposite to the amateurish feel of My Space.

In other news CD Baby has informed us that the tracks are on their way into the digital system to get to sellers. Amusingly, they were already posted on the site in our area quite a bit before we were sent the e-mail. We will soon have a page with a list of all the places the music is available.

Side Note: Congratulations to our guitarist and musical funnyman Mitch Benn and his wife. They have successful delivered a Benn sized little girl called Greta at 11:11am on 11/11. Growing Old Disgracefully and I hope all of you extend its best wishes to the entire Benn family.