It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, but I have finally gotten across the country with my family and my dog, we are settling in right up on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, in upstate New York, and things are just starting to get slowly back to normal. I’m sorry for the bulk message, but today was a bit of a tech nightmare, and I ran out of time to write separate email templates. Also, I figure it was time for an update that goes out to everyone.

First of all, congratulations to our song contest winners from January, those pieces will be written over this weekend, so please check back soon (linked here). Our February contest is now moving into the next round of voting, which starts pretty much right now - round two voting runs from Fridays through Sundays, every week, for an hour at noon PST (from the radio page). We set it up this way so that finalists and their fans can get a feel for the other songs in their cohort. The February group has quite a rock flavor that I am enjoying. It’s fun to see how the focus moves around from month to month.

Now that the move is finished, and once we get fully settled into our new place, I can move back into full-time blogging and making sure that CHILLFILTR® artist don’t wait too long for their coverage. As always, I’d rather keep someone waiting than write something that feels rushed, so I appreciate everyone’s patience in this time. I get a lot of questions about what the best way to submit is, and for the moment there are two channels : the song contest, which will always be free, and the Submit Hub channel, which charges a small fee per song. Lately I’ve only been accepting submissions through Submit Hub at most a few days out of the month, just because I can’t keep up with the volume. That may change in the future, but I am also looking at other and better ways to engage artists that are looking for coverage.

CHILLFILTR® has been running now for over three years, which always feels surprising to me. In some ways, I still feel very new to this game. As many of you probably know, we are still not even close to turning a profit, but making money was never really supposed to be the focus, so that’s cool with me. However, it would be nice to pull a paycheck out of this every once in a while, so I am still looking at different ways to monetize a bit more. If you are an indie musician, or a writer, please click here for if you’d like to share some information with me. We will be rolling out a lot more features over the next few months and the rest of the year, and part of that will be a streamlined submission process for both CHILLFILTR® song promo, and the CHILLFILTR® Literary Review. If you can take just a few minutes, I would appreciate it, it’s always better to move forward with more of an idea about what my audience is looking for.

Things have been a bit crazy lately, because of all the stress that is involved with moving from Oregon to New York State, but now that the move is over I am feeling much more relaxed, and ready to keep kicking some ass. Within a few weeks, I will finally have caught up with our backlog of coverage. From Morristown, NY, I want to personally say thanks for being a part of the CHILLFILTR® family.

We couldn't do it without you.