News @ 14 December 2009, “No Comments”

eMusic is one of the biggest sellers of mp3s not associated with major labels, not to mention a great excuse to start a sentence without a capital letter. Anyway, they’ve added (oh, you know by now…):

http://www.emusic.com/album/The-Home-Guard-Forlorn-Hope-and-Glory-MP3-Download/11741544.html

So if you’re a member, Forlorn Hope and Glory can be yours for only ten credits. And even if you’ve already got it, a five-star rating or a brief review of the album would go an exceedingly long way indeed – nothing beats a genuine recommendation in our experience.

News @ 10 December 2009, “No Comments”

Twitter is one of those ships we haven’t yet climbed on board, but that doesn’t stop others from using it to promote our music:

http://twitter.com/LindaOfficial/status/6514234332

http://twitter.com/LindaOfficial/status/6513614634

Short and to the point, like all good publicity should be – and being described as the best anything since Queen is just about the highest praise anyone can give us from my personal point of view! (I’m a huge fan.)

Many thanks, Linda!

News @ 09 December 2009, “No Comments”

Forlorn Hope and Glory is now available to users of Lala:

http://www.lala.com/#album/2810527644410722290/The_Home_Guard/Forlorn_Hope_and_Glory

who we believe have just teamed up with Google to make music playable from search pages. Can anyone in the US confirm this? The deal doesn’t seem to stretch as far as the UK.

Meanwhile, our latest album has also been added to Rhapsody:

http://www.rhapsody.com/the-home-guard/forlorn-hope-and-glory

Quite why Year Zero has a greyed-out play button will be investigated.

This is all a major turnaround: barely a week after being told by CD Baby that their new system had “brought things to a standstill” and that many companies “ask that we wait until they are ready for us to send more albums to them”, they’re managing to do what should have been done three months ago. I think it’s clear that somebody behind the scenes flamingoed up (one for all you Red Dwarf devotees), but they didn’t want to admit it for some reason.

Oh well, we look forward to being added to more online distributors in the near future.

News @ 07 December 2009, “No Comments”

Gracious appreciation to our good friend Mike, who saw fit to embed our song Sweating Blood on his MySpace page:

http://www.myspace.com/493427991

On a related note, we musicians have different features available to us, but it appears that MySpace Music has just hit the UK’s personal profiles. With this in mind, Mike has set up a playlist of our songs, and we presume that these can be shared between friends. If anyone else wants to do the same, or perhaps include us in a compilation of your favourite unsigned artists, we’d be exceptionally grateful.

News @ 06 December 2009, “No Comments”

Just a very quick update to let you all know that we’ve overhauled our MySpace page and at last got round to uploading some of our new tracks:

http://www.myspace.com/thehomeguardinfo

At the same time, our admittedly underused iLike page has also finally been graced with Forlorn Hope and Glory’s presence:

http://www.ilike.com/artist/The+Home+Guard

Which in turn means that you can get dedicating new songs on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Home-Guard/33098994258?v=app_5368451543

Above all else, though, we’d like to stress that from now on the one page we’re really keen to publicise is the new Bandcamp one:

http://thehomeguard.bandcamp.com

From here all are welcome to download our music for whatever price they’re willing to pay. And if you don’t want to pay, you can have it anyway – just please download it, and encourage your friends to do the same!

News @ 04 December 2009, “No Comments”

How much would you be willing to pay to download our albums? Well, whatever your answer is, now you can:

http://thehomeguard.bandcamp.com/

We’re confident that in Bandcamp we have finally found the future of independent music distribution. A quick visit to the link above will reveal two main options:

1) Buy our CDs for £7.99 each (free postage to anywhere in the world) with immediate free downloads so you don’t have to wait to enjoy the music, or

2) Radiohead-style set-your-own-price downloads.

Yes, you read that correctly: anyone who wants to download our albums can decide precisely how much they think it’s worth and pay not a penny more, and for an experimental period, there’s no minimum charge! So even if you can’t spare the cash at the moment, go ahead and download the music anyway – we practically insist!

The only thing we ask in return is that you do a small independent band a monumental favour and make use of the “Share” feature on the site and help spread our music far and wide. In fact, if you’re reading this from http://www.thehomeguard.info/news.html (and not a Facebook or Last.fm imported feed), you should be able to do all the above from here: