Tag: Kickstarter

Fraudster:
2a:  a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :impostor;

It’s that time again. Two years have passed since I posted the first Crowdfunding Fraudsters dedicated to Jeremy Soule and The Northerners and the fact that we are coming back for round three should tell you everything you need to know about how much progress has gotten done in the last two years. December 2019 now marks over six years of delays since The Northerner was originally supposed to be launched, that being September 2013, and keeping on brand with Soule’s incompetence as a businessman, the latest launch date promise has come and gone without as much as a peep from the man himself. In fact, it’s gone without a peep from the Kickstarter community.

I can’t imagine there is anyone left with faith in Soule’s ability to deliver a product.

1. Jeremy Soule Is A Talented Fraudster

I said it before and I will say it again, Jeremy Soule isn’t some two-bit hack fraud who managed to dupe people into giving him money for an album he wasn’t capable of publishing. No siree, he’s a two-bit hack fraud of a businessman who managed to dupe people into giving him money for an album he was completely capable of publishing yet has not. Just ask about his DirectSong business. One that more than six years after the intended release date has still not been released! Remember back in the good old days when Jeremy Soule promised that the only risk that might delay the project was scheduling during the summer months?

“I will be working with the same team that has provided reliable and excellent support throughout my career. Recordings aren’t easy to make, but if planning is done within a reasonable time frame, the process can go smoothly. As we have delved into the initial planning stages of the recording session, scheduling for the summer months affords us enough planning time for a recording of this nature.” -Jeremy

Summer scheduling. Oh and we later learned that the instruments Jeremy Soule had planned to use in creating The Northerner Symphony hadn’t been invented yet and wouldn’t be for some years after, but why would you want to put that as a risk on the Kickstarter page? Telling people you are technologically incapable of delivering the thing you are asking for funding for might put them off of giving you a large sum of cash money with virtually no legal strings attached.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Soule had released a new single this month; Friðr. It’s from the album The Moon & The Night Sky. I’m not sure if the person who uploaded it to Youtube has permission to do so, but you should listen to it now just in case since Jeremy Soule thinks that music piracy is just as bad as the holocaust.

More on that later. Actually, more on that now.

2. This Article Profited Jeremy Soule By $10

Jeremy Soule made $10 from me writing this article, and much like backing The Northerner it was mostly a complete waste of money. I didn’t back The Northerner.

Last time I wrote about Jeremy Soule I noted that he had launched a Patreon, which December 2018 me was smart enough to know wouldn’t provide anything useful within the “weekly Q&A” sessions that Soule publishes once every whenever-he-feels-like-it. This time around I wasn’t that smart, and I ended up giving $10 to Soule’s Patreon so I could get access to all of his posts in the hopes of finding something relevant. I didn’t. Only a lot of curated Q&A’s asking Jeremy why his farts don’t stink.

Back in January, Jeremy posted his grand announcement that he would be releasing two new albums in 2019: On the Spring Equinox we would see The Northerner: The Moon and the Night Sky.” On the winter solstice we would finally get our hands on The Northerner. Pretty freaking grand, huh? Two albums in one year! Well I see your two albums in one year and raise you…no albums in one year.

Yea, The Moon & The Night Sky was more like The Pie In The Sky, and didn’t release. Who could have seen that coming, am I right? Jeremy Soule posted on his Facebook page:

“I’m currently putting the finishing touches on this album. It’s taken a bit longer than expected, but I want it to be right, and it’s close. While I had hoped to have had it to you sooner, I’m proud to say that this music is amongst my best work. This is the official album cover and I’m also excited to say that I have brought the Old Norse language to life in an operatic setting.”

And as we all know, when Jeremy Soule says he’s just about done with a project, he’s just about done with a project. Except for every time. To the best of my research (Soule’s Patreon, Kickstarter updates, social media), I was only able to find the single posted above as the only release related to Soule’s new side-album, in addition to Kickstarter posts from 4-5 months ago lamenting that this new album will also never be released. Screw the Spring Equinox, Friðr got released on December 5.

Enjoy the $10 Soule, I hope it goes to a good cause like a big paper calendar. Because you’re terrible at release dates.

3. The Max Steiner Agency Pulls Out

In preparation for writing this article, I sent an email to the Max Steiner Agency under the guise of someone thinking Soule would be releasing his album on the twenty first as announced, and inquiring about any planned press releases. The response I got was astounding: Max Steiner is not managing The Northerner and has no information about the status of the album. They are still working with Soule generally, just not on this album.

Crazy huh? Because I’ll be honest with my readers. I don’t have the greatest memory of stuff I wrote two years ago, but I distinctly remembered The Max Steiner Agency being a big part of the original Crowdfunding Fraudsters piece. So I looked back and found that yes indeed, they were a big part. Specifically Gloria Soto who made a completely unprofessional jerk of herself in an email to Kotaku.

“It still rings true. All the Backer did was re-post what Jeremy has said in the past. Which is still true. What part do you want to understand? Are you a Composer that has ever tried to write a symphony?”

The context of this piece should be noted for clarity. Soto here is attacking a Kotaku writer after her agency incompetently mistook a fan-written apology for an official statement by Jeremy Soule and posted it as an official update to the Kickstarter campaign. Like any professional adult, Soto attacks the question and condescends to the author’s intelligence, on the grounds that Kotaku writer never wrote a symphony, so shut your stupid fudging mouth on our PR snafu. Oh and in case you’re wondering, nobody has clarified the post’s authenticity to this date directly to backers. Soto at the time went on to separate the “true fans” from the “trolls” asking for refunds, noting that she was working with Kickstarter to get them removed as they had already been refunded.

Narrator: They were not removed, and many of them allege they were not refunded.

“What I do know – is that we are receiving a lot of support from the true fans. Currently- The ones making noise are backers that I have refunded – have become trolls – which I am currently working with Kickstarter to get them removed from posting on our page.”

The Northerner has so many true fans that as of this writing (noon on December 22), not a single person has bothered to comment on The Northerner not meeting its latest deadline. Or at all in the past two weeks. Boy for a company that isn’t managing The Northerner, the Max Steiner Agency put its name on the Kickstarter campaign, was handling refund requests for angry backers, and was actively attempting to work with Kickstarter to shut down dissent over the minor issue of the campaign being years late.

Now I’m not saying that Max Steiner is lying to me. After all two years have passed since these comments, it is completely reasonable (and likely) that the agency told Jeremy Soule it would no longer be managing his project. I can’t imagine having their name attached to The Northerner has been anything but negative, cue Gloria Soto making the company look even worse. It would also explain why the sparse updates to the Kickstarter campaign began being signed by “The Northerner Team” as of January this year, whereas before they were being signed by Jeremy Soule himself.

4. It’s Gone, It’s All Gone

The more astute MMO Fallout viewers might notice that this article is lacking in the citation department. That is 100% 2017 Connor’s fault, as he did not archive anything.

Here’s the problem: A lot of our statements from Jeremy Soule came from his Facebook page. Back in August, Jeremy Soule was accused of sexual misconduct. That’s not the focal point of this piece. Soule was not arrested, nor have charges been filed, but all of Jeremy’s social media accounts have been nuked from orbit in the interim. These quotes we got back in the first Fraudsters article are gone, you can go back and check the links to see that they are mostly all dead. This is my fault. We generally archive comments in case of exactly this type of scenario. It wasn’t done.

I’d fire myself, but I’m good friends with the boss and I’d just be back in the office tomorrow like nothing happened.

I decided to do some digging to check out the other missing links in this whole racket, and unsurprisingly nothing else is functioning. The Northerner Facebook Fan Page URL has been hijacked and currently redirects to a blog by someone named Carol Causey who hasn’t updated her Weebly page since 2016 and appears to be a spam page for another service that is equally no longer operational. The Jeremy Soule Facebook Fan page link redirects to a parked domain that was apparently once used to spam human growth hormone products. Fun times.

I looked up Jeremy Soule’s symphony website: http://northernersymphony.com/, since Soule’s Kickstarter has people sending emails to this domain to change their address in case they moved in the last six years. I sent an email myself to this address and have not received a response which judging by the Kickstarter comments is not out of the ordinary. The domain itself however is nonfunctional and a quick look at the Wayback Machine shows that it never was, displaying a “Server Engine Upgrade In Progress…” since May 2017.

And since we’re checking out URLs, it’s probably germaine to point out that Jeremy Soule’s DirectSong service no longer appears to be operational. You can read up on the original Crowdfunding Fraudsters about the DirectSong fraud racket.

5. In Conclusion…Again

One positive side of this piece is that with $10 I gained access to uncompressed copies of Jeremy Soule’s music, and through the magic of internet I now have those copies sitting on my computer forever. What isn’t forever is my Patreon membership which was promptly cancelled. Enjoy the $10, Jeremy. I hope it goes toward something productive like a sourdough bread starter since we all know it’s not going toward printing Kickstarter rewards.

Otherwise I get the idea that I’m the only one paying attention or even caring about The Northerner at this point, and I didn’t even back the thing. As a fan of Jeremy Soule’s work, I came into writing this Crowdfunding Fraudsters article with the slim hope that December 21 would come around and my skepticism would be proven to be totally unfounded, but I can’t say I’m surprised.

If there are any Northerner fans in the audience who are still holding out hope for a release, I’d like to hear from you. Mostly just to know you exist.