PLEASE READ! Someone is messing with our band.

:mad:

Recently our band has learned that someone is going around the internet to various guestbooks and chat rooms making asshole comments and signing it using our singer's name or initials and a reference to our band website. Somehow, a work email has also been supplied in some of these messages. NOT cool!

If anybody sees any activity of hateful or damaging comments with a reference to our band or any of its members, please be so kind as to forward the link to revdup@drivingforward.net.

Also, please understand we have nothing to do with this and are extremely upset upon learning of this childish and cowardly bull{censored}. We are actively working to get to the root of this matter and would appreciate your understanding and support until this fiasco is over.

Thank you for reading. If by chance, the culprit is reading this, I encourage you to grow up and stop the bull{censored} immediately - karma's a bitch.

:mad:

welcome to the music scene, its always gonna happen, if i had to take a guess, its probably a rival band. This happens daily with me, or band i was in. Get used to it, ill tell ya what, music scene is a dirty place, fight back. Weve gotten into a lot of fights over {censored} like this. All i can say is this is always gonna happen, theres always some dickhead that is doing nothing with his life, and wishes he was you guys. Saddle up partner, fame is a bitch.

Do you have any obvious enemies to the band? Piss off anybody lately? This sounds like a personal form of revenge, especially since this guy is posting your (or another band members) E-mail address for work. Normally trolls don't go through all that trouble, you most likely know who this guy is.

Unfortunately, you're right, the scene can be ugly. But I'd rather not "fight back" - what comes around, goes around. As far as fame...hahahaha! We ain't even close yet.

We don't know of anyone or any band recently who would have any reason to do this, but our singer/guitarist has been in the scene for many years. Considering the culprit is using his info, it's likely someone he crossed paths with at some point. Just the fact that someone referenced a work email which he's never used for band-related stuff makes it real sketchy.

I know it exists, I just don't understand this mentality.

Agreed, definitly someone we know, or at least knows our singer. As far as I know, we don't have any "band enemies." We've always been cool with the bands we play with and have a couple other bands we've befriended and play shows with rather frequently.

Anyway, I'm just trying to get the word out on this so people understand it's not coming from us. We've worked hard to build connections and relationships and think this is absolute BS.

The only advice I can give you is to not acknowledge the losers who are doing this to you. Granted, they're out there posting stuff under your names, but IMHO the last thing you want to do is get bogged down in this crap.

Bands will be jealous of your success and sometimes this leads to them saying or doing things to piss you off. In my experience it's best to try to stay above all that petty crap rather than get embroiled in it.

Case in point: my guitar player has been very involved with a bunch of other local bands in his agegroup (40+). For whatever reason, we've been more successful at getting good gigs than these other bands, draw bigger crowds, etc. Once in a while, a few people from these other bands will say something negative about us ("so-and-so sucks", "they're sellouts", etc.)...usually directed at this guitarist, but sometimes about the whole band. I could care less about this crap because as long as I'm getting to play and people keep coming out to listen, it's all good IMHO. My guitarist, on the other hand, takes this crap waaaay too personally, and immediatley has to respond by flaming guys on their websites and other crap. Of course this increases the animosity and then they retaliate, and it ends up going back and forth. If he could just ignore them, he'd have more free time on his hands, and we'd STILL be getting more gigs and doing better than these other jealous idiots.

Anyway, do what you can to back away from the negative stuff going on and keep moving forward. That's pretty much the key...you're either moving forward with your band's musical career or you've stopped to fight a battle. The more time you spend sitting still and fighting these battles, the less time you're actually moving the band in the direction it wants to go. Leave the losers in your dust and keep plowing ahead.

fighting back will only encourage more activity by the guilty party.

you may want to put a disclaimer on your band's website to openly address the issue, but I woudn't go any further than that.

try to igore it as much as possible and eventually it will go away.

i've been though this before, and i feel your pain.

best of luck.

Keep in mind that your music or popularity may have nothing to do with it. This same exact thing happened with a band that I used to play in. At first the insults were directed towards our music and our "lack of balls", but before long it was my character that became the target of the verbal abuse. We thought it was a rival local band at first, but I eventually found out it was my ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. Pretty stupid, I know...

Fight back all you want, but if it gets to a point where it seems like a lost cause, sometimes the only thing you can do is try to find ways to block the person out. If that doesn't help, then just learn to live with the consequences of having secret admirers.

Thanks fellas. Yah, we don't intend to "fight back," we just want to get the word out that we have nothing to do with the comments and want try to find out who's behind it.

I have an interesting story:

This guy was impersonating me on one of the message boards, basically doing the same thing. I suspected that it was this guy whom I hate and I happened to know the moderator of the board that the bogus posts were being posted on. The suspect regularly posts on the board under his own name. So I called up the moderator up and asked him to compare the IP addresses of the two logins, and lo and behold, they were identical. I had determined who it was. I then started a rumour "through the grapevine" that I would break into his house while he was sleeping (since I know where he lives) cut his throat and rip out his teeth one by one with pliers. Needless to say, the bogus posting ceased within a matter of days.

contact the Admin and have him track down the IP of the poster and let him know you are onto him.