Welcome to 2012

WASHING THE SLATE CLEAN

Welcome to 2012 friends, fans, and family. Hope the year has started with a (positive) bang for you all.

If I were to re-cap my year in 2011 it would certainly be a bittersweet one. I began the recording of my solo album in the middle of the year which has been a labour of love with fitting in a rather busy touring schedule, and relocating my life to Durban. I must say that taking my time with this album has given me a really great insight into where I wanted the musical direction to go, and it's also given me the freedom to put down a truly 'Ard Matthews' sound.

In the midst of getting the first single "Fire Within" out, and having had it adopted by the South African rugby team as their world cup song, the now infamous anthem bungle occurred. After a grueling mental process and a long period of reflection, I'm happy to say that it's all been put behind me now, and a large part of that is because of the incredible support I received from you, my fans. A big thank you for this and all the love you showed.

AIRBORNE MUSIC

Some incredible developments have been achieved in the music distribution industry in South Africa recently, which myself and my team, have very bluntly termed the best invention since the MP3 itself. This new platform is called Airborne Music...

A very basic explanation of what it's about is that for just $1 per month you can 'carry' me as an artist on Airborne, and in return get access to each and every new track that I record - delivered straight to your email inbox. Yip. Just like that. And the best part? You can share these tracks with your friends as a link and we actually encourage you to do so. As a 'carrier' the benefit is that you can choose what format you want the track in - from a low res MP3 to have on your phone, right up to the highest quality wave file possible (the kind that they use to make album CD's). The other benefit to a carrier is that all of this is available to you 24/7 from either your computer or smartphone - everything is mobile compatible.

Where you would have paid up to $15 to buy an artist's album in the past, and the artist themselves only receiving about 20% of the revenue at the most, with this service you can feel good about the dollar you spent knowing that 70% of it went to the actual artist who is making the music for you. No brainer right? As soon as this platform takes off I think that the old record label formula will be truly obsolete. I've always been of the opinion that the most important people in the music industry are the artist and the fan who is supporting that artist. That's it. And these Airborne guys feel this in spades.

Whatever you decide to do, please have a listen to the music and let me know what you think, and also make sure you share this with all the people you know - this is not just for my sake but also all the other hardworking musicians out there.

Below is a basic guide to getting set-up with Airborne written by my dog Jeff.

(Twitter - @JeffreyDingoDog - kid you not)

Howdy Humans.

Please support my Ard. Looking for some rad dog food upgrades in the next few months and I need your help for this.

First thing to do is sign-up for an Airborne Music user account. You can go to https://www.airbornemusic.com/signup/step1 to do this, it's super easy.

Once you have registered and put your plastic money card details in, you should get a confirmation email which you will need to click to complete the process.

You will then need to buy airborne credits to support my talented little human. This is important. To do this you need to sign in to your account at http://get.airbornemusic.com (top right hand corner of page - click 'log-in')

You will then see your account page - click on your icon on the top left - this should open up your account details.

Scroll down and click on 'Account Top-up' - the minimum is 6 credits. Once you have confirmed your details click 'top-up' at the bottom.

Once this is done - all that's left to do is to 'carry' the artist - go to www.airbornemusic.com/ardmatthews and scroll down on the right hand side of the page until you see the 'carry this artist' button. Click it and you are now in business.

If you are at all unsure about something please send an email to info@ardmatthews.com and I'll literally chase one of Ard's techies to help you.

Thank you, that is all.

Jeff.

Well there you have it folks. Straight from the doggy's mouth so to speak. Hope to see us connecting on Airborne in the future, but please also stay in touch on twitter - @ardmatthews - and on facebook - Ard Matthews Music.

Thanks again for your support.

Peace

Ard.