An update on our future plans

Hi there, folks! It's Michael here, and we've got a bit of an announcement to make. 

As you probably know, we do music, we write this blog, and we do our own graphic design. Banners, logos and all that, right?

Thing is, we do actually enjoy designing visual elements, but for the longest time, we've been doing it as a necessity, simply because if you have public channels, you need to decorate them somehow. Commissioning artists wasn't really ever in the budget, so we kinda went DIY with it, using a simple program called paint.net to bash together stuff that's "good enough".

But for a few months now, we (well, mainly Amalia) had this inkling that visual art is a skill we might want to hone. Learn to actually draw and paint, right? Not just to decorate our channels, but even just for the sake of creating nice art!

Now we could just forge ahead with that idea, start learning and share the process with you. And ultimately, that's the plan.

However, there's one complication.

In the world of painters, there's already another Captain Casual!

Now don't get me wrong. He's an established artist, he's had the name longer than we've been using it as an online handle, and let's be frank, he's a much better visual artist than we're likely to be (for now?😉), so by all means, if we started releasing visual art under this name, it'd be us stepping on his toes, not the other way around.

We knew he was around for a good while, but when we started out, we never figured we'd do anything other than music, so it never seemed like we'd end up overlapping.

Now, that puts us into a bit of a pickle. A pickle that has 3 possible solutions:

#1 - Do nothing, continue operating as Captain Casual, start putting out art and potentially end up in an awkward conflict at some point. (Which, to be honest, might happen even if we don't stick with drawing in the long term)

#2 - Keep going by Captain Casual for our music releases and release art under a different artist name. Problem with that is, with us working a full-time job, we have limited time to put into our hobbies/art, which makes maintaining two separate "identities" super-unattractive.

Or #3 - Do a full rebrand. This obviously creates a number of questions and headaches, but if we're gonna do it, it'd probably be best to do it sooner rather than later, while we're still quite small.

..... so yeah, we've decided on #3. And we've actually got a good opportunity to do this, because the title our next tune would make for a lovely, original and interesting artist name, which would mean we could time our rebrand with a self-titled single release. That'd be pretty cool.

(And no, we're not telling you the name, yet. We want that to be a surprise, because it's..... interesting.😜)

The thing is, rebranding like that is no small task. On some platforms, like this blog, it should be easy enough. Change our username, get a different domain name, and put a little disclaimer on all our older posts pointing out that they were written before the rebrand. New banners, logo etc. can be added in time as we make them. Simple enough.

The headaches start when we're talking about music distributors. Distrokid and SoundCloud in our case. Because they put our music on Spotify, Deezer & co, and getting all the artist names on all those places changed is not just a bit of a faff in and of itself, it also has potential legal implications regarding copyright law and whatnot.

So there'll be a fair lot of stuff to figure out, and things might be a little chaotic for a while.

The big question ultimately boils down to what we wanna do with our older music.

Do we start fresh, releasing all our future work under a new artist name, all while leaving our previous releases untouched? The problem with that is that we'd likely have to make new accounts (and thus, double up on subscriptions) to keep both our old and new music up.

Do we perhaps take all our older releases off the distribution platforms and just make them available on YouTube in an "Early works"-playlist? It might sound extreme, but with just how small time we actually are as of yet, it really shouldn't affect much of anything.

Simply put, we'll have to experiment and see what service allows us to change what, how and where. Again, there might be some chaos.

The nice thing is, in the grand scheme of things, we're doing this quite early (We've only been doing this for a couple of years, after all), and really, we should only have to do it once. The new name we're going for isn't used by any active creators at all from what we could find, and frankly, we just like it a lot more. It strikes a nice balance, in that it's kinda silly, but also might make you wonder what it's about.

Plus, while the rebrand will effectively be a fresh start, the new name actually grew as an accumulation of the stuff we've done over the last year or so, so it also feels a lot more relevant to who we are and what we do, while Captain Casual was really just a bit of a random handle we decided to adopt.

Hmm, i'm hyping it up, aren't i? Boy will we have egg on our face if you don't like the new name. Well, time will tell.

Frankly, while writing this, we started to reconsider whether we should try and just get the name-change out of the way first, and maybe even get a new logo sorted before releasing the new tune.

It'd probably create it's own problems (including just simply delaying the release even further), but it feels a bit like releasing a new tune when your entire online identity is gonna be in flux would just be confusing to new listeners, and this tune is our best work yet, so we don't wanna set it up for failure.

Probably smarter to release once the rebranding is mostly done and we have a somewhat coherent overall image to present to newcomers.🤔

But yeah, that's our announcement. In summary, there'll be a period of rebranding-chaos in the near future, where we'll need to figure out which channels we'll be able to keep using, which platforms we'll have to start over on and what to do with our previous work.

Out of all our channels, this blog should be the most stable one throughout this process, so stick around here if you wanna stay updated!