Hello August!

Aug 8

July Recap:

We've definitely got some momentum going and did a lot of fun stuff last month ☺️ We released a cover single and performance video for "Lazy Countryside," which went live to the public on all streaming services on July 26.

Even more exciting, I publicly released a new, fully-produced recording of an original song, “Not Now,” on July 12.

We had another true Vault Debut Night on July 16 where I gave a little presentation to update you with my current/upcoming content plans and releases coming this month: a new production of an original song Please Take Care, and another cover video + single for the 1936 tune, One Two Button Your Shoe. If you missed the live event, the replay is available here in the archive at the bottom.

Changes Ahead… IMPORTANT! 😬

Extensive details below, but for the TLDR people, here are the bullet points:

I can no longer afford to keep up the cost of managing The Vault, so I’ve made the very difficult decision to shut it down.
You don’t have to do anything. On August 22nd, I’ll be canceling everyone’s subscriptions manually.
I will continue to deliver you the same content via email until everyone’s annual subscriptions have completed through in the Spring. If you are someone whose annual subscription would have renewed after this September and you are not happy with this arrangement, just let me know.
You can review your membership and renewal date before I disconnect the plug-in that integrates your billing with my website, but you’ll have to do it before I cancel your subscription on August 22. After that, you’ll have to contact me directly so I can look at it in the backend of the payment processor.
There is now a Holly-Frost-only membership available at Patreon for $5/month. Of course, there won’t be any stuff there for the other projects, there won’t be any archival things there, at least for now. Otherwise, the content moving forward will more or less be the same, but limited to the Holly Frost project. (I would of course like to reinstate an all-project membership/version of The Vault someday, but there are no plans for that right now.)

The Details

I went into this quite a bit in the Vault Event on July 16, but the short version is: maintaining The Vault in its current state is becoming untenable for me financially.

When I moved over to The Vault, there were a lot of features Patreon was missing that I wanted to be able to provide for you in a space like this. Yes, I’d have to pay a little extra over here to have those features, but at the time it wasn’t much, and the better experience I’d be able to give you was worth the extra cost to me.

Also, The Vault was established as an HQ that would deliver exclusive content from ALL the projects: One Big Dark Room, Moorhaunter, and (the-then-named) Lex Land, which has evolved into the Holly Frost project. This is great for those of you who have stuck it out with me over the years and have a good understanding of what I make and what we’re doing here, but it’s… a lot to take in for, and explain to, someone just entering my world after being introduced to it through one of these projects. This has resulted a reticence on my part to try to bring in “new” people, while experiencing the totally normal, and actually pretty tame, attrition churn that’s to be expected when dealing with a subscription model.

Since the move 3 years ago, the software costs of keeping this up have more than tripled monthly, I’ve lost some people (again: expected, normal, and, thankfully, not many) while the membership hasn’t been growing as I expected it would have over time. The “Big Burn Out” followed by my existential and identity crisis from 2022-2023 definitely didn’t help, and now that I’m essentially starting my primary project over from scratch, I’ve been at a loss as to what to do about this weird little world we’ve developed over here. I’ve obviously invested years and plenty of other resources building it out and keeping it going - and I didn’t want to give it up, and I didn’t want to let you down.

The original conception for THE VAULT was that, eventually, there would be smaller subscription levels that would discretely support, and in turn, receive discrete content for, each project individually- and that those people might “ascend” to the higher tier that would be “The Vault” (as it has existed) where they would participate in all the projects at the “label” level.

This is still where I would like to see this go someday, but under the current circumstances, I’m forced to make some concessions to reduce my tech-stack overhead.

For at least the last year, if not a little longer, the cost of operating The Vault vs what it has brought in has left me pretty much breaking even, just with incoming vs outgoing - not accounting for things like taxes or my time administrating The Vault. (I need to be creating the content anyway, so recordings and the like are not included in my Vault-related time-investment assessment.) Just in administrating the Vault only, the posts, emails, website infrastructure upkeep, calendar management, any promo, and the monthly live event is easily upwards of 20 hours of essentially unpaid work each month that I could possibly be directing to more revenue-generating tasks. I saw this as a totally worthwhile investment that I was willing to put in in order to keep this community hub strong over this past year, but this has put me in a precarious financial predicament that I can no longer wait out.

I’ve debated and meditated and thought about this over and over for months, and there’s no scenario I’ve been able to come up with that would reduce the cost of operating this for me that I can currently commit to, and which would also be completely fair and convenient for you. So I’ve come to the conclusion that shutting it down is my only reasonable option. 😔

This is happening now so that I can somewhat-smoothly pull the brake on it before monthly subscriptions renew at the end of August, and before almost all the annual subscriptions would have renewed in September.

What does this mean for you as a Keyholder?

“Vault-stuff” will continue as normal through the end of August. I’ll still continue to update The Vault blog and send you emails with all the same new stuff like I have been, at the same cadence. We will have one final Vault Night on August 27.

You don’t have to do anything, this is all me! On August 22nd, I’ll be canceling everyone’s subscriptions manually.

After the end of August, all currently active Vault members will be included in a special email list, where I will continue to deliver you basically the same type of exclusive content via email until Spring 2025 (or until you all unsubscribe 😜 if it’s sooner than that). I figured this way we could still stay in touch, it would be a way for me to thank those of you who are still here by providing you a few extra months of bonus content, and uphold my commitment to anyone who pledged annually (but whose subscription would have renewed after September).

(If you are one of the few whose annual subscription would have renewed after this September, and you are not happy with this solution, just let me know and I will make it right.)

If you are interested in Holly Frost stuff only, you’re in luck: there is now a HF-only membership over on Patreon. 😑 Originally I wanted to have separate areas for each individual project with corresponding tiers inside the Vault at $5 monthly, with a $10 monthly “label”-level tier. This would require more building-out, development, money, and a migration of website stuff on my end to a new service which I haven’t been able to make the leap to yet, so Patreon is now my only responsible option for doing something like this if I want it to happen anytime soon.

I’m totally willing to admit that while I had the best of intentions, things didn’t turn out how I’d hoped.

There’s so much that’s happened over the last 3 years that I couldn’t have foreseen when I made this initial decision to do the migration. Really, it would have been weird to try to keep it on the original Patreon hub anyway with the rebrand/redirection of the Lex Land project, so it’s all for the best. Maybe it’s silly to beat myself up for not being able to consistently deliver the exact same stuff in the exact same format that I initially set up almost a decade ago when life looked a lot different. I tried my best and thought I was doing the right thing with the information and vision I had at the time. I am severely disappointed about its inconvenience to you, though, and wish I didn’t have to make this change.

As a final clarification, I’m not going anywhere! While the delivery of Vault content will be a little different, it will otherwise continue as it has been through the Spring. All the deliverables will more or less stay the same, I’ll just be sending them to you through email via a more affordable solution for me. Regardless of whether you pledged monthly or annually, you should not see any more Vault renewals from here on out. If you don’t wish to continue receiving the bonus content for free, you can just opt-out by unsubscribing from any of my sends.

If you’d like to hang onto any of the archival content (song demos), the easiest way would probably be to use the direct-download link from the Soundcloud-hosted playlists which you can find here. I’m not sure how I can host these for you to access after I do the shutdown, so just to be safe, you might want to do it before the end of the month.

Now that I’m done breaking the bad news, let’s get to the fun stuff!

August Event + Broadcast Schedule:

I will not be updating the full LoveLetterMusic calendar anymore, because I'm not sure anyone looks at it and it is REALLY time-intensive to update and keep current… LoveLetterMusic.com might also not exist for much longer since it’s one of the things I’m having a hard time paying for.

For Holly Frost dates, you'll be able to find the most important ones at http://hollyfrost.com/live, and there will be visual calendars kicking around in emails and social profiles for reference. As always, I'll be sending out notifications and reminders for events through our community forum in Discord

❄️ Thursday 8/8 - "One Two..." Release Eve!
Whenever possible, on the night before any new releases I'll be celebrating with y'all through live events and giveaways related to the releases. For the One Two Button Your Shoe "Release Eve," we'll be celebrating the new cover song single and video. I'll jump onto Instagram Live at 8:30PM ET for a live playthrough of the song, some chit chat, a first-public-listen of the track, and then a giveaway for a One Two... merit badge.

Immediately after, we'll hop over to YouTube for the public video premiere of the One Two... performance video at 9PM ET, where I'll give away one more merit badge to a live attendee.

❄️ Friday 8/9 - "One Two Button Your Shoe" Release Day!
The new single ("One Two Button Your Shoe") will be live to the public on Friday, 8/9. You can listen to it on your favorite streaming service by visiting this link, and I'll be sending you a reminder here at Patreon that morning.

During the Crooner Coffee Hour events that day, I'll be giving away a couple more free One Two... merit badges and promoting the new release. Party time! 🎉

❄️ Crooner Coffee Hour - Fridays 11AM ET/12:30PM ET
CCH will still hold in the format we've been doing lately: FB Live the old-school way on mobile, vertical format, and using only my phone from 11am ET to noon-ish on FB Live only for a stripped-down, acoustic segment, followed by a Twitch block on my regular electric rig starting around 12:30pm ET. There will be no CCH on 8/16 due to an out-of-town gig that weekend I need to fly to.

❄️ Sun 8/11 - SPEAKEERIE RAID TRAIN - 9PM ET
Our clan has been invited to participate again in what's called a "Raid Train" on Twitch… basically how it works is: live viewers from a preceding stream get "deposited" into another channel's broadcast, and this happens over and over to predestined channels for a predetermined period of time. We participated in this "all vintage music" one last month and it was a blast, so we're doing it again! Free to attend, of course. The info and schedule for the whole event can be found here at the host's website. My slot will take place around 9pm ET for approximately one hour. To keep things interesting and on-theme, requests will be limited to songs from the 1940s. You can join us here.

❄️ MOUSEKETEER MONDAYS - 9PM ET
Disney Night continues! Vintage Disney songs by your request- only on Twitch. (note: because of my fly-out date, there'll be no Disney night on 8/19)

🗝 Tuesday 8/27 - 9PM ET
During the LoveLetter Vault members-only DEBUT NIGHT, I'll be premiering all the new stuff for September, plus early exclusive prizes given away for September-related releases for live attendees. 🎁 I've been consistently holding these every third Tuesday of the month for at least the last year or more, but the fly-out performance date will conflict with that plan for this month, so I'll host this one on the following Tuesday, August 27, instead.✈️ This will be our last one, and I hope you can make it to toast the end of this special era with me. That would also be a great time to check in and let me know if you have any questions or need any technical support. 📓 We will still do a special broadcast to live-premiere all the new songs for the 7 Songs in 7 Days campaign in September, though (which, yes! I do still intend to do, they’ll just be all Holly Frost songs this year) ❤️
That event will take place via this private YouTube Live link:
https://youtu.be/SES1C7EeGSU

❄️ Thursday 8/29 - "Please Take Care" Release Eve!
For the Please Take Care "Release Eve," we'll be celebrating the new original song single. I'll jump onto Instagram Live at 8:30PM ET for a live playthrough of the song, some chit chat, a first-public-listen of the track, and then a giveaway for a Please Take Care merit badge.

❄️ Friday 8/30 - "Please Take Care" Release Day!
The new single "Please Take Care" will be live to the public on Friday, 8/30. During the Crooner Coffee Hour events that day, I'll be giving away a couple more free Please Take Care merit badges and promoting the new release.

Our August
VAULT EVENT
will take place:
August 27, 2024
at 9PM ET

you can enter through the
events/concert tab