http://www.indiegogo.com/vensenya
I did and donated 150 Euro to the project because I think it is just great what Simon plans to do.
I know Simon from a summer academie in Guidel 2008 after he received his master in Biology fighting cancer he decided to join Tech First a model very similar to Tech for America. This is a program where so called high potentials are supposed to teach children with bad social background for two years and help them to find an apprenticeship. I loved his decision and applied for the same position two years later. While in the application process I got my PhD position so I did not pursue the application. Anyway I already wrote about Simon’s older projects in my article: Why education should be a human right.
Now I am happy to see that Simon really is about to found a social entrepreneurship so I was more than happy to support him to realize the first prototype. Together with a friend they plan to create photo stories which should help young people to be motivated and have goals rather than saying: “I won’t be able to do this anyway.” They want to follow the principles of Stanford’s renowned psychologist Carol Dweck This sounds very ambitious but with his two years background of teach first I am very confident that he knows what he is going to do!
Also their plan seems very sound to me:

1. They want to do a design thinking workshop together with researchers, psychologists, and of course young people that are the receivers of this kind of education. In this workshop they are about to develop the idea for their first photo story. 
2. A professional editor is going to write a transcript based on the results from the design thinking workshop.
3. Once this is done the shootings will take place
4. A communication consultancy will create a web 2.0 media strategy to bring the content out.

All this for just 3000 Euro. I am sure that Simon already worked hard to get all these services and people together for such a low price. So I hope I could convince you as a reader of my blog to also support Simon’s project. If not why don’t you have a look at the small video he created:

Thanks a lot Rene

have a look at the app here:

Features and Problems

• works on facebook and on any other webpage
• enables setting more and more songs free for streaming while more people install the app (in order to spread the word)
• users need to connect (with facebook or via email adress) in order to listen
• some lightweight statistics
• encrypted flash player (not open source yet) that makes it hard to download the music (Though I myself have some moral problems with this kind of feature. But well it is how the industry works…)
• Slideshow of pictures to improve listening experience
• optimized usability for high conversion rates

The app runs on PHP, MySQL, JavaScript (MooTools) and you will need your own webspace in order to host it

A kind warning

The App was developed with a lot of time pressure and we had some nasty bugs that needed to be fixed. That is why the source code is messed up with some really fast and dirty quick fixes. Afterwards I never really had the time to clean up the source and make a good documentation. As my PhD progresses this situation will not change in the foreseeable future. Since my prediction says that Facebook will be overrun by Google+ within this year it is more than time to share the app!
The good part: most of the stuff can be reused once Google+ opens its API and the app can be transformed to a great social network.

Source code on google code

http://code.google.com/p/in-legend-facebook-music-streaming-app/source/checkout

Motivation: Compare theoretical reach and cost of youtube ads vs print media

• The current situation in youtube is the following. Right now you pay 1 Cent per person watching your video / listening to your piece of music after he by himself has choosen to click on it by seeing an interesting title and description.
• In print media on the other side you pay 500 Euro for a quater page of advertising. At least that is the number that I know from Metal Hammer which is read by 40’000 people. This means you pay 1.25 Cent per Impression! 

You think this sonds like a similar price to you? WRONG! That is much more expensive! Let me tell you why:
Not only 1.25 Cent is more than 1 Cent. But recall that an impression in a magazine full of advertising is not seen by many people. Also we know that even the people who see it don’t take an action and buy your CD or search for you on the web. On youtube again every Click means that a person spends at least 4 minutes with your music and you have the chance to score some points. Think of your self! Do you become fan of a band just because of a silly ad in a magazine or after watching a cool video and listening to a great song?
I have to admidt thogh that there is the positive fact that ads in magazines give rise to stories in mags which have a huge conversionrate and a reach that probably goes far beyond the audience of the mag. Well on the other hand sharing a Youtube video with you friends also has a huge reach that goes beyond the  audience you payed for.
So we conlude Youtube Promoted videos is the much more superior, efficiant and much cheaper way to reach new fans!

what is going on on youtube and what do you have to watch out for?

Let me first explain the difference between Conversion rate and Clickthrough Rate (which is called viewthrough rate = VTR in the context of youtube):
View through rate:  In the dashboard of your youtube ad campaign google tells you about your VTR and says the higher the VTR the better. Well that is technically true but there is one little thing missing. A high VTR is helpfull for Google/Youtube. You don’t have to care. VTR means how many times does Google have to show your video as a promoted video untill someone sees it and you have to pay. so if your VTR is 1% it means that after 100 display ads you have one person watching the video and you have payed youtube once. Let’s assume the rate is 2%. Well then with the same amount of impressions youtube has earned the double amount of money. You should not care about this rate. As long as you get the viewers you payed for everything is cool
Conversion Rate: A metric that should be of your interest though is the Conversion rate. Unfortunately this is hard to track and google does not really help you on this. It tells you how many of the people your reached turn into fans / recommend the video / sign up to your newsletter / buy an album to make it short take any action. You are interested in a high conversion rate since it gets you the maximum out of the viewers you payed for.
This rate is probably increased by choosing good keywords and being really honest in the ad text about what to expect. Despite what youtube is saying you’d rather have a lower VTR and increase your Conversionrate!
Ads within the video. As soon as you have your video in a promoted campain you can controll the ads that are displayed within your video. This enables you to display something in the video with a link to an external website which is impossible otherwise! The funny thing is if the campaign is paused due to the fact that your google adsense account is runnin out of cash those display ads are still visible. I will write an entire article about this nice little trick!

My personal Experience

I have the feeling that on my first test on youtube I did not get a high conversion rate. Only 0.8% clicked on the download this video for free link! (but most of them actually registered to the site an downloaded it)
I was lazy and made a campaign with 150 different keywords (which I choose as popular metal related words from metalcon (mostly band names)). all ad’s had the same ad with the same title and text. For example I bought the keyword: “hard rock” well our music is not really hard rock. Since we also used this word in the ad text I guess a lot of people have been disapointed and did not convert.
Since youtube seems to favor ads with a high VTR (this happens if add text and the keyword you pitch for) are similar (because users think the video is of interest to them) we recieved 40% of our views on hard rock which is as I said not even a good keyword at all.
Next time I will group keywords together in smaller groups and make ads particularly for these groups in this way I push VTR which is good for youtube but I also find fans on keywords that will convert better and I can drop off the campaigns for keywords like hardrock…
Overall I have to say that I bougth 1000 clicks per day for 10 Euro a day for a German audiance. Which was nice overall. I spend 80 Euro for 8 thousand views which gave our video a nice little push. 

Summary of my Experiences

• I think Youtube ads are very cost efficiant and are a great tool for musicians. It is a product where advertising really makes sense / not like a tv commercial for diappers or some other FMCG…) It is especially good for small musicians that need to introduce their music to many people.
• Right now ads on youtube are totally undervalued (which will most certainly change over time). I cannot imagine that in 5 years from now youtube ads will still be that cheap.
• However youtube has the problem that high quality advertising material is rare. so maybe the price might stay low for a pretty long time.
• Youtube ads can probably be even more efficiant if good keywords are selected!
• If it was my decission for a band as small as in legend I would buy advertising on youtube for thousand till two thousand euros.
• I would not need to depend on any label or promo company or any other person to reach a very large audience at a rather cheap price! I would have real people who spend time getting to know my music!

in other words we again see a situation in which the web can help people to solve a problem. A new comer can reach out to hundres of thousands of people at very low cost and independent of other people!
So tell me what is your experience with youtube ads?
 

• the dvd enables us to advertise our products (concerts, merchandise, records, online activities…)
• the lyrics of the songs can be displayed
• the dvd will help us to keep the user with OUR videos and not keep on surfing to some other related content
• Pleased by our good experiences with the free Pandemonium Download In Legend agreed to make the videos available for free download on their website which will contribute to In Legends viral marketing!

I am really excited to see how the idea with the Youtube DVD will develop. How the videos will spread and if the users like and understand the menu! It’ll be also interesting to see if other bands will adopt to the idea. If people are interested I will post some instructions how to create such a Youtube DVD. If you guys have any suggestions comments and thoughts I’ll be happy to hear about them!

1. I am reading Eli Parisers book about the filterbubble. I don’t want to review it until I am done which happens hopefully somewhen soon. But it has a connection to the other thing I am doing
2. I am promoting my Band’s first album ballads n bullets that just came out

I was able to convince my band that money invested in Google Adwords and Facebook is probably a better deal than spending money in print campaigns. Online is much more efficiant to reach our target group and introduce them to our music. So far so good! But sometimes you discover the worst or boldest things while doing something.

Some Background

As we all know facebook is filtering your social newsstream. Recently we did an update and send a reminder to all our fans on facebook (2000) and reminded them about the upcoming release. We got 2500 Impressions and received 100 clicks resulting in 6 sales. Not so cool!
Right now – just by my experience of watching impressions in facebook and several websites und seeing how much traffic comes from facebook to our homepage I am about to belief that Facebook counts ten impressions to your status update if one user visits his facebook news stream 10 times and was therby ten times able to see your news update.
Apperantly it seems that I am not mistaking with my guess. Have a look at Tim Wilson’s post on how Impressions are counted on Facebook:
http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2010/01/27/facebook-measurement-impressions-from-status-updates/
Let us think again what it means to have 2500 Impressions of a status update. Could it be possible that these 2500 impressions have been generated only by a couple of users – let us say less than 200?

See how bold facebook is!

While booking ads facebook is offering me a deal that made me sit down and look twice! I am now able to buy visibility of my own status updates in the social news stream. If I pay for each click my status update receives Facebook will not only show the update to all of our fans. But they will also show the highly filtered interactions of them to their friends!
To make buying advertising even more attractive Facebook is telling me that our friend of a friend network has about 206’000 users that could be reached with the status updates of my band. Up till today my status updates only reached a visibility of 5500 impressions. The 206’000 that facebook offers me is only 40 times as much. Assuming that every user produces only one impression and we know that a user produces many more impressions.
A factor of 40 or higher is an amazingly huge number. Probably the number every marketing person has in mind when he decides that everyone has to be on facebook now!
Isn’t that insane! Facebooks user experience suggests us to be there because we get think that we get this incredible high reach. but the reality is that we get nothing but our premium customers if we don’t pay facebook. Facebook should pay me that I produce such a great content on facebook!

What should I say? It is a curse!

Everyone jumps on the facebook train with the totally wrong expectations. No not everyone and all of their friends see your advertising and status updates!
Of course if something really sepcial happens facebook really makes you viral but most the time you have no advanage by using facebook in comparison to other marketing methods. Especially the only one that is winning always is facebook. I have hardly seen any brand in the world that was printed and promoted on so many flyer / poster / and mags and even tv commercials. Amazingly facebook did not even pay one Cent to appear on all these media. Everyone pushes their own facebook channel – hoping to become viral – instead of pushing their own brand and thinking about how to really bring out the brand and do marketing or thinking about how to make a great product.

Everyone seems to expect miracles from Facebook

Hello everybody! Think about it! The world wide GNP won’t grow just because everyone is now using facebook! It is only facebook that is growing!
By the way I was warning everyone about the fact that you should focus on your website and not on facebook in one of my articles about the perfect band website. It is just to risky to relay on facebook. First it was great. now it is big and policies are changed over and over again!

Make a valuable resource (lists, special reports, history of, how to, etc.)

This obviously translates to: Put your music and videos on your website. And especially while first publishing this kind of stuff put it nowhere else. No MySpace and of course no Facebook. Fans / Webzines and so on will talk about you but it will be your website they are linking to. So you get the relevance points from the search engines and not Facebook or MySpace. Why would you make those websites better when you can improve your own? I just realize that this point is so crucial that I will craft a standalone article about where to put your music on the web. So long you can see my similar article about sharing music

Interview (e-mail/phone) prominent people and publish it.

well you are already famouse and prominent. But why do you need to be on MTV to be interviewed. Of course because you can reach a new audience. Guess what. Asking your fans to ask you questions making your own video interview on your homepage is fun, challenging and will drive back those fans and if their like it their friends on your page. Some other blogs / mags might talk about it. Give it a try!

Build a useful tool

All right you got me here. I don’t see any translation for the musician. Maybe you could build an app for the newer smartphones but still distribute it over your website.

Write an interesting article

As a musician you are kind of an oppinion leader. Why don’t you comment on other music you like. You are obviously an expert on your topic and it will be very interesting for your fans and the fans of other bands to read your reviews and comments on their music. Just Imagine Lady Gaga had her own blog where she reviewed other music. Damn this would attract many people.

Run a newsworthy ‘event’ such as a contest

That is a great one. You are going on tour or you are organizing the tour? Well local bands will be interested to open the concert for you. Have contests for this. Not a contest where they just have to make their fans click somewhere on your page. But making a bandcontest can be fun and other bands will try hard to get this slot on your shows!
Have your fans create youtube videos with one of your songs and give them the chance to win something really cool. You have a personal Gig on their birthday party!

Test something new that has not been done before

Well this might sound hard but as a musician you should be creative. When Radiohead first put their album on the web for free download they tested how it would work and a lot of people like me still talk about it. The crucial part is that it has not been done before. Now if I reference to this event / happening I always use the radiohead example even though many others also did it.

Be the first in doing something on the internet

This one is very similar to the one above. The internet is a huge playground just experiment around. There are many possibilities.

Write something controversial

It is sad but true. But In the entire timephase of promoting In Legends record most of them have been sold on april first when we did our somewhat funny somewhat controversial april’s fool telling the world that the band members have been replaced by some hot chicks because it’s a better visual effect for our live shows. not even the news that our album is out resulted in more comments. That’s kind of surprising.

Be the first to write the latest news in your niche

Easy score. Eerytime you have a press release you do this by putting it on your website and then you contact the mags with a short mail and state that you put the press release on your page. they will eather reference to your page or copy the release. You do not put the press release on Facebook or any other community. The only thing you can do there is to make an update saying you put something on your website.

Be the first to expose a scammer

well the scammer could be within the industry but remember you might loose a friend or close some other doors. But hey maybe there is this critic you always had an open bill with. Or this guy organizing a festival you don’t agree with. Since your connection is already bad why not making this public and getting a profit out of it.

Disagree with an authority

Again think about record labels / festival bookers. What would happen if Metallica posted an article on their page stating that this years Wacken festival had a bad or boaring line up? Well at least I would really enjoy the following and ongoing discussion.

Write some funny humor

Funny things happen to musicians. While recording the music while beeing on tour. In day life. Just think about stories that most people lough at and share them. Or remember the april’s fool we did.

Make an interesting picture

Well this could relate to promotional pictures. But there could also be pictures of fans or of you taking a sh** behind the tourbus. People are attracted by pictures and you certainly have a lot. On the internet quality does not have to be as high as in print mags. More important is the activity.

Be the first to research and document something

I guess this is one of the few points that holds best for bloggers.

Make a theme, plugin or piece of software

This things could relate to your music or artwork or what so ever.

Make a tool that others can put on their sites but that links to you

the best thing would be some kind of concertfeed or newsfeed. If you really aggregate all reviews on your music that apear on the web you could also use those as a content and still link to them and say tool powered by “your band page”

Make a joke about a known person

Well you have to know the person and everyone has to understand it. But I still remember Children of bodom playing umbrella at wacken open air. That was pretty funny. I guess you could transfer ideas like this to the web but in the case of musicians it would not be my first choice.

Make a resource that is just in time for a major event

you finnaly got your record release world wide or play the gig on this huge festival? well you better get an mobile app or some other cool stuff on your page to support it!

Write an outrageous theory and back it up with logics

Another point that fits best with bloggers. Anyone has an idea? Feel free to use the comments.

Write useful comments on something that is happening

it is what people do on facebook. Writing the tour diary or some other things about what is going on in the studio. Well do it on your page and attract the people to your page! not on facebook!

Give something valuable for free

Well I have a whole article about sharing music! I encourage you it is your very best marketing tool!

Coin a new acronym in your niche and get people to talk about it

Well this is what you do. You create new music or a new style. Van Canto have been the first to do a capella metal and now people talk about a capella metal and know right away they have to look into van canto.

Become an expert in your niche and write valuable information

as a serious musician you already are an expert and since you have fans your information will be valuable.
I guess you see the pattern that comes from Jim’s ideas and how they transfere to music. If you quote this list please also consider to link back to Jim since he really is the initial creator of this list. My article is just an interpretation of this list for musicians.

What do you need for an youtube video

• a song
• a camera team (and an idea for the video)
• someone to cut the video

Well these things where already mandetory in an offline world so I won’t discuss them any further.

What is important while uploading the video?

First of all it is important to understand how your video will spread through the Internet

1. On webzines if you contact them an tell them about your video
2. It will pass on from person to person once they find, watch and like it
3. It appears as a similar video besides other videos
4. Via search functions (be it google search or the video search of youtube)

The first two points are mainly your responsability. Once your video is great and you contact a lot of magzines and give them a press release the video might appear on a lot of websites. If your song and video are really great people might spread the word. But be warned everyone is talking about becoming viral. If all the music videos out there became viral everyone would be constantly watching music videos. So don’t forget that becoming viral hardly ever happens.
The 3rd and 4th point are your responsability. To some degree youself can decide where your video is supposed to appear. Search and recommendation engines are responsible to battle with these two points. But machines can undersand text documents like websites much better in comparison to rich media content like your video. That is why the algorithms on these machines probably pay a lot of attention to the tags you use while tagging the video, the title you put in and the description text. Of course they will probably also look at the websites on which the video is embedded and analyse what users this video watched an which other videos these users watched.
Anyway: your video should have the following title: “Bandname – Songname on Recordname” because this is what people are most likely to search for.

A short discussion on cover songs and guest musicians

Doing coversongs is by the way a great method to gain publicity. Look at the Van Canto videos. They have covered many bands and have those names in their title. If you search for “wishmaster” in youtube you easily find the van canto cover of wishmaster! Imagine how often people search for music by a famous musician in comparison to your music!
I did the work for you and just looked it up for Wishmaster and Van Canto:
On last.fm 317.207 people listen to the record wishmaster by Nightwish. On the other hand only 49.164 people listen to Van Canto! So you can do the math and decide what kind of songs you want to upload for promo reasons.
here you go with a title for a song with a guest musician: “your band’s name – songname feat. musician’s name from his band’s name”

illegal content on your videos

Most songs are on youtube in some form. Be happy about the fact that people like your music! A lot of artists wish they had so much attention. My article Why open source is the way to go holds perfectly as my contribution on copy rights in music anyway – also compare my article on sharing music. So what can you do to profit from the fact that most songs are on youtube anyway?
Upload them yourself. Use good tags, nice pictures, and provide the lyrics. Promote them! Put them on your search engine optimizied pages and ask people to connect with you and buy the album or donate for your music.
THINK ABOUT IT!
If you are Lady Gaga and your videos are being watched million times and some one else put them on youtube you don’t have as much benefit as they are watched on YOUR youtube channel. Where people could become subscribers or where you are able to embed AND change messages for your tour / album within the videos.!
So do you really want to be angry if someone else puts your videos on youtube. A very nice example is Blind Guardian. About one year ago they uploaded all their videos to their youtube channel. But the videos where already out there and other videos already made rank1 in search for videos. Again algorithms are just not that smart and the user doesn’t care as long as he sees the video!

new forms of marketing

This is the best part of the message. have a look at this great video (thogh it has nothing to do with music!) and realize that you have to act differently on the internet.

Understand?
Well here is a list of things you can do to be interesting and attract people on youtube if you are a musician:

1. Fans love interviews: make a video interviews. Have your fans ask you questions and answer them in a video
2. medleys (album introduction)
3. have a prelistening session of your album. You can tune into every song and discuss the song. What do you need print  media or similar for? You can reach your audiance in a much more interesting way
4. live videos: Ask your fans to tape your show. You will easily get a 20 + cam mix of a song. This will create much more feeling and will be much cheaper than any professional music video
5. Record short stories,
6. Interact with the world. Remember what old spice – even though not a band – did? If not have a look at my upcoming blog article on old spice.
7. Make competitions: Ask your fans to create funny videos using your songs. Don’t be afraid that the quallity might be bad. (if the quality is bad it won’t spread on the web)

Be creative be fun and especially forget about the old business models! On the internet you want to be open!

So here you go with my little open source experience:

About 2 weeks ago I was in the middle of redesigning metalcon. I already had a database schema ready and was discussing it with friends. Jonas gave me a call he suggested to look for a different database software since my schema was much more like a graph. From my PhD advisor I knew that there are some researchers working on a thing called graph data bases. I opened my first choice search engine and typed in graph data base. After a little bit of reading I got to know the open source Graph data base called neo4j. Apperently Neo4j seemed to be the most sophisticated Graph data base that exists so far. Since we want to use it as our core technology of metalcon being sophisticated is quite an important propertie.
Anyway I downloaded the database and did some first testings of neo4j’s speed. I was amazed. I was also amazed that in comparison to some other graph databases this strong and powerfull tool is available for free. I could not afford to spend money right now so I decided I want to return something to the open source community of neo4j and contribute to the project.But what could it be?

1. I had some trouble in setting it up together with google web toolkit and I didn’t find any resources on the web (due to the fact that neo4j isn’t to famous yet and the resources just did’t exist). Usually I wouldn’t care. After getting a piece of software working I would be happy and start using it. But neo4j as a startup is open source. The people who are driving the project have the right scope. So I realized that making a screencast on neo4j with gwt would be my way to contribute to the open source project.
2. After i did that the guys from neo4j contacted me and asked me for feedback on their documentation. So I read the documentation again and wrote down every question I had. not to ask them to answer the questions but to show them what is unclear to a reader. Again the guys from neo4j have been very happy.

A screencast and “proofreading” of course is nothing in comparison to programming a whole database management system but it helps others to quicker leran neo4j which mght result in more customers. Especially the guys from neo4j don’t need to do it and can focus on improving their software. So open source wins. They would not have earned a single dollar on me if it had a commercial licence. But they would have had less publicity and at least also one friend less.
Do you see what I mean? Do you see why open source wins in a world where everyone is connected and information can be distributed very quickly?

Quick review of the downfalls for online music marketing with Facebook.

Additionally you face the risk that Facebook might be as dead as myspace in the future or that Facebook will simply change its policies for commercial fanpages. They could ask you to pay a fee for fan interaction. Remember the introduction of Edgerank is already the first step. After its introduction only a small percentage of your fans will actually receive your status updates and even a smaller percentage of their friends will receive the interactions with your post. On Facebook everyone has the hope that due to wall updates / comments and likes that his message will spread very far. Be aware that this is an illusion! The awareness of facebook users is so high due to the fact that there is hardly any spam on Facebook. Edgerank is filtering it (and your news!). You don’t believe it? What about this experience? On March 11 In Legend a band with 1450 Fans posted a status update about the release date of the new album. This highly relevant status received 93 likes and 24 comments creating 117 interactions with fans. These interactions should theoreticly forward the status update to alle the friends of 117 people. If that was true In Legends Status update would have a theoretical reach of over 10’000 impressions. Indeed there have only been about 5’500 impressions of this update to facebook useres. Ten days ealier In Legend posted a status update with only one user interaction following which got displayed to 4000 users. To sum up: One fan interaction seems to bring 15 new Impression… So please don’t over estimate the power of Facebook. We have seen that music hardly becomes viral on the Internet. There is just to much out. In Legend for example have destroyed a f***ing piano and the youtube video – though quite successful – was far away from becoming viral.

Becoming viral might be easier since Facebook but still very hard! Keeping these problems / downsides in mind I now want to introduce a method that a musician can probably easily use on Facebook in order to create a viral marketing effect.

Concept for a viral Streaming Application

Instead of putting some promotional songs or snippets online you create a facebook app that will be able to stream those songs. The advantage is clear. Fans have to accept and install the application. This gives you the possibility to add your fans’ emailadress to your newsletter. Facebook is so kind sharing users private data with you, once the user installs your app. This gives you a lower risk in working together with this social network and makes you independent of it.
The application will stream your music but it will only stream one song until a certain amount of people have installed the app. Afterwards one more song will be available for public stream. Now you can always double the amount of people that have to install the App to get another promotional song for streaming. The good thing about this is that once your fans like your music they will not only show it to others but ask them to install the app that more songs will be available. You get your (sometimes) lazy fans finally to do the best promo you can ever receive: “Word of mouth” and wasn’t word of mouth the kind of promo you are aiming for? This will probably work even best if you use music and songs that have not been released yet!

Summeray

Creating a viral merketing effect is harder than you think. And in hardly any case it “just” happens. Consider if this is really cheap and if you can be smarter than the others that just use facebook or whatever platform. Be aware of the technology available and consider consulting by friends or experts. Don’t just follow everyone because this will most certainly not result in “Word of mouth”
Oh and if you now think that programming and maintaining such an app is a lot of trouble and might cost a lot of money I’ll tell you the good news. This app is almost ready programmed and I will share it as an open source project. So why don’t you sign up for my newsletter or follow me on twitter so you will definitely know about the final release as soon as possible?