THE WENDY JAMES News Letter No.1 Welcome to News Letters from me! News Letter No.1 Regarding PLEDGE MUSIC and the completion of Many of you Pledged happily and successfully on my last album ‘The Price Of The Ticket’. When I was introduced to Pledge Music, and sat down with them, I must say, it was somewhat of a revelation to me that a model, a system, a delivery system was in place which allowed me to correspond and connect with an international audience, a storefront where anything I might create around the album could be made available to you, where expedition of the items you purchased were packaged and shipped with little stress to me: Pledge Music deducting their percentage to cover their set up and fulfillment operations. For the most part, I believe, you were all served well during the campaign for ‘The Price Of The Ticket’, so much so that the LP charted at No.15 in the UK album charts and I was carried along on the momentum of this and the ever evolving line-up of rather amazing musicians I now find myself working with, not least of all my increasing vigor and desire to write more songs and better each time, an upwards trajectory! So, I spoke with my point person at Pledge, one of the UK directors, and we mutually agreed to bring ‘The Price Of The Ticket’ Pledge Music campaign to a close and launch a new campaign to support and help pay for the recording, mixing and delivery of a new Double LP (!) named ‘Queen High Straight’. Whereas with ‘The Price Of The Ticket’ I had already earned, saved and borrowed the money to make the album and I joined Pledge Music simply as a pre-order campaign, the ‘Queen High Straight’ campaign was launched with the focus on being able to accrue the pre-order money, which in turn would help me pay for the record. Making a record is an expensive proposition! Certainly, nowadays, many musicians generate their beats and their tunes on a laptop with some (what we call) plug-ins: digitally generated versions of old analogue foot pedals, compressions, overdrives, reverbs, FX etc, amp sounds and so on and this is totally great and just as valid as ‘analogue’ recording, but when it comes to a line-up of such grand musicians as I have, musicians with lovely sounding instruments, wonderful old vintage amps and rare and exotic FX pedals there really is no good alternative, no cheap alternative to booking a recording studio, hiring an engineer (possibly also an assistant engineer) and recording through a mixing desk and absolutely when it comes to recording my vocals there is nothing better than singing into a lovely old valve microphone in a good isolation booth and on a set of very true headphones! Added to this: I have 20 songs to deal with! So that’s 8+ musicians and an engineer on 12 hour days multiplied out by 20 songs and you know it’s taken me 2.5 years to make the album to this point! and I’m only now organizing mixing the record! It’s 20 songs, you have to figure it’s going to take at least 20 days to mix the songs with that George Martin (The Beatles producer) skill! Arranging all the instruments across the audio spectrum so that there is clarity, originality and dynamic to each song and have each song sound the best it can be. Pledge Music i.e. your pledges, I had hoped, would largely help me fund this lengthy and expensive process of recording, then mixing, mastering (where it all get’s compressed into a stereo mix, the final result) and of course: generating artwork, radio campaigns, press campaigns and releasing the record and shipping it out to you all! It became obvious to me quite early on in the ‘Queen High Straight’ Pledge Music campaign that the rate at which I needed to pay for things in the recording studio could not be covered by pre-orders from Pledge only and it was necessary that I spend any money I’d made on the last album, after paying off the costs for it, and any money I earned playing gigs! The music business has changed! Digital downloads and streaming have changed the way records sell, (or don’t sell, when it’s pirated), the days of selling 100,000 copies as par for the course have all but gone, unless you’re in the very top tier of mega pop stars like Beyonce or Taylor Swift and the whole X-Factor aspect of music as commerce has devalued, to a whole swath of people, the virtue of a band or a singer who builds a body of work over time. I literally have to earn money to be able to continue. I am not signed to a record label, and, in all honesty, though there haven’t exactly been tons of labels knocking at my door (!) I suspect, had there been, I probably would have turned them down anyway because I just don’t enjoy the feeling of being owned by someone or some company. For better or worse, I prefer and am more comfortable being a free agent. So this brings me to the nub of this newsletter! During the beginning of the campaign for ‘Queen High Straight’ Pledge Music appeared to be operating as it always had done, it collected the pre-order money and when I needed to pay for some recording I could put in an invoice and draw down some money to help with that. Then, in about May/June of 2018, I started to not be paid when I asked to be and for the whole of that summer I played gigs and used that money to continue recording the album, all the while, Pledge Music directors were telling me all that had happened was a change over in the American accounting department of Pledge and so there were ‘teething issues’ with installing a new payments system which caused a time-lag in how quickly they were able to process payments. I figured this was plausible and true and though inconvenienced I was not suspicious or worried. By Autumn of last year I was getting concerned and I started to google Pledge Music for news items, at the same time continuing to question the people I knew at Pledge. Lo and behold, on the internet, there were articles starting to filter through from tech and music business publications alluding to Pledge Music being in ‘difficulty’ and then some weeks later the news broke out! Firstly a friend in USA emailed me a letter by a famous journalist who was going to Rolling Stone magazine and publishing about a friend of his who was manager of a band in USA who were owed 100k by Pledge and were unable to complete their record AND to whom no explanation had been offered by Pledge about where their money had gone… This news spread like wildfire and various bands in UK also started to voice the fact that they’d not been paid either and by the end of that week the trade paper ‘Music Week’ had definitively said Pledge Music was in trouble and the Musician’s Union advised caution to bands contemplating beginning a new campaign with Pledge. Meanwhile the director at Pledge, who was my point person, kept assuring me it was simply an accountancy back-log and it would all be resolved as soon as possible, so I measured my response by what he was saying versus what I was hearing from bands like Jesus Jones, Sleeper and of course the American bands affected. I simply could not believe and did not want to believe that a bad deed, a criminal act, had been perpetrated because the implications were/are so potentially catastrophic and huge. Finally on 01.02.19 Pledge Music made a public statement and froze the platform, asking for a 90 day moratorium while they sought out 3rd party investors to restore the finances of the company and restructure it and so on… legalese… when obviously behind the scenes they were scrambling. I was devastated: not only because they owed/owe me money, they owe you your items or your money back and how could I possibly finish a record and deliver the record without the money I had been relying upon? As soon as the Pledge Music platform was frozen I had my website director start building my own online store to continue to make available most of the items I had on the Pledge storefront, specific to my new album ‘Queen High Straight’ and still continuing to stock various formats of ‘The Price Of The Ticket’ and previous albums like ‘I Came Here To Blow Minds’. The store is up and running now and it is operating seamlessly and I am going to negotiate my own chart-eligible fulfillment deal so by the time ‘Queen High Straight’ is released I can ship it world-wide and get a chart position, (fingers crossed!). Currently I am able to sell all the previous album items and ship immediately from the UK to wherever you are and from here-on-in my web store www.thewendyjames.com/store will be the main hub for all my music releases and my website www.thewendyjames.com will be the first place for news and gig information, of course copied out across all my social media sites too. OK, back to Pledge: On 08/05/2019 a public statement was made by Pledge Music that they were now filing for bankruptcy. They stated that any and all attempts to woo investors had failed. I emailed one of the directors and asked “So what now?” and he told me the whole UK arm had been let go from their jobs some weeks back, including him! He hadn’t even told me the offices were now closed, shuttered, empty! He never told me the ugly truth that in fact everyone knew they were headed to bankruptcy and any money left had been spent to pay off partners in the corporate holdings of Pledge. In actual fact, the wholesale spending of all the money you pledged, which should have been the artists money, had occurred on a huge scale, resulting in Pledge Music not being able to pay artists or fulfill campaigns. I have no doubt that a massive class action law suit will be filed and probable criminal investigations in USA, I would think criminal investigations will happen in UK too. I also read that the employees of Pledge Music were specifically instructed to tell artists, when they phoned or wrote, looking for answers, in the final months of uncertainty, that re-finance of the company was looking good and to not worry, when all along they knew it was speeding more and more quickly toward financial collapse. One can hardly fathom it, except somehow continue on and to not only continue on but to improve upon the situation and make it a positive rather than a negative. The impact of Pledge’s collapse is one of devastation for many artists: financially ruining and ending their ability to finish records and fulfill them. The impact of Pledge’s collapse with the public trust is incalculable and will lead to yet more cynicism at a time in the world where one is left wondering just which institutions, companies or people one can actually trust or believe in. I can and I do promise you: I will always work my hardest to be the best musician, songwriter, singer and person I can be, I will always be respectful and considerate to you all, in the bond we share as artist and audience as one and I will deliver to you every single record or artwork or lyric sheet or t-shirt or poster or anything regarding my music you purchase via my store. In the case of Pledge: I am owed money, in as much that you bought my record and I did not necessarily receive that money. You are owed the item you bought or you are owed a refund. I have put together some information which might be of help if you want to refund at the bottom of the newsletter. FINISHING QUEEN HIGH STRAIGHT! To the MIX! I am currently getting time and price quotes in from various possible mix engineers to complete my record! We are ball-parking July/August for the scheduled time. This means I could well be on track to have the record in a ready position to release by Autumn/Winter, certainly by front 2020. As soon as the mix is finished I will book the pressing plant for vinyl and that usually has a two month, sometimes three month, lead time (** regarding this, I am of course, for all intents and purposes, pressing up twice the amount of vinyl as I normally would because this is a DOUBLE LP: you get two bits of vinyl per record! Go figure how expensive that is! and you will see how necessary your Pledge money was and now no longer there) CD’s are quicker, and of course all the artwork needs to be generated. At this point I am most cognizant that I must set this record up in the very best way I possibly can. It has taken so long to make, it is of such integral substance, the songs, the musicianship, the production choices, the singing, the lyrics: it is such a fine record! I will not just send it out into the world with no back-up! I will try to partner up with companies, PR companies, radio plugging companies, distribution companies, touring agents, all the myriad considerations one needs to take into account if a record is to stand a good competitive chance at grabbing a moment in the spotlight! And of course GIGS! I am so thrilled to be gigging with the Psychedelic Furs in October and I know that my own THE WENDY JAMES BAND shows are being talked about for early 2020 to come and play all the new songs to you. So… we’re nearly there, we’re getting there! My most sincere love, gratitude and respect to you all, Wendy James 19/06/19 *Listen to two Queen High Straight pre-mix reference mixes - click here. *Pre-order QUEEN HIGH STRAIGHT - click here. *Buy The Price Of The Ticket and I Came Here To Blow Minds - click here. BEST REFUND ADVICE REGARDING PLEDGE MUSIC. Advice on seeking chargebacks from your Credit Card and Bank: Some of you may have been declined a refund because your transaction is ‘out of time.’ However, for credit disputes this period is listed as ‘from the date the customer knew something was amiss’ for both Mastercard and Visa. (The same conditions appear to cover both debit and credit transactions.) So, your claim is not out of time. Your claim dates from the date you found out there could be a problem with your order. This date was: 08/05/2019 when Pledge Music officially went into bankruptcy. Up until that point Pledge Music’s official statement was that they were looking investment to set their financial difficulties straight and had asked only for a 90 day moratorium on sales. Up until that point there was no public statement to suggest the company would fold, indeed quite the contrary to both fan and artist alike, who were told there would more than likely be a positive outcome. For claims to have a greater chance of success do the following things: 1. Contact the merchant (Pledge) directly. You then need to allow 14 days for the merchant to resolve this for you. To prove you have done this, email Pledge asking for a full immediate refund. Screenshot this email (or print it if you’re submitting your claim via mail), you will need to send this with your claim. Make sure your screenshot has the date and the header information on. 2. Fill out the below letter and email or send it to your bank’s customer service department. If you have spent a lot of money and will be going to the Ombudsman if you are not refunded, consider the nominal charge to post this evidence to them recorded mail. YOUR ADDRESS, CONTACT DETAILS AND ACCOUNT NUMBER. DATE Dear Sir or Madam, I am writing to request that you look into raising a dispute for me regarding the transaction made on the *DATE OF YOUR PURCHASE for the amount of *HOW MUCH YOU SPENT IN TOTAL. I have contacted the merchant on *DATE YOU SENT EMAIL TO PLEDGE MUSIC CUSTOMER SERVICE and waited over 14 days for a response but have received no reply. I believe that this is an abnormal case for you, so please consider the following in raising a dispute in this case. The merchant, PledgeMusic, is one that operates on a delay, although you may purchase on an earlier date, the fulfillment date of the order is considerably later, often putting people outside of a usual dispute timeline. Although disputes are often handled from 120 days from the purchase date, it is actually 120 days from being made aware of the bankruptcy 08/05/19. I have attached evidence that Pledge Music will not honor the transaction noted above and I would like you to act on my behalf. They have also removed the refund button from their website and I have had to contact them via email. Further information about the company and the current state of affairs can be found here. As you can read in the above Pledge Music have been negligent to inform customers that there were financial problems that endangered their purchases. I would like a response to this letter/email (delete as appropriate) within 14 days as after this point I will be expressing my concerns to the Ombudsman. If you will not take this matter further to recall my funds it would demonstrate that the bank’s system in place is not suitable for these types of purchases and I should have been informed of this as your customer. Yours Faithfully, YOUR SIGNATURE
Further reading and information about The Ombudsman: https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/publications/technical_notes/disputed-transactions.htm |