Let's start in January 2021, you are now me.

A hobby musician sitting in his basement writing music. Every now and then you put out a track or an album. Hardly anyone is interested in your music, but you think that's totally fine! You're basically just doing it for yourself.
You like the feeling of writing music, recording an album, producing it until you're satisfied, then releasing it into the world. It feels a lot like the first shower after a 5-day festival. Damn good.

So you've been working on a project that's about World War 1 for quite a while. You've been researching, writing, recording and mixing the music since September 2020. After more than 4 months of work, you are finally satisfied with the result and your feeling tells you that the disc is "finished".
You plan the day of the release: February 20, 2021. You realize that you still have a buttload of work to do. You still have a load of CDs to get pressed. But not too many. Otherwise you'll be stuck with them for the next 10 years. So you order 300 of them and hope that they will sell in the foreseeable future. You have to set up a Bandcamp page and ask the nice guy from the Black Metal Promotion YouTube Channel to upload your music.
Already you have the next idea in your head. You need your own label. This would give you a solid platform to sell your CDs. Thought, done, with the best help you can imagine, so you don't have to do all the stuff alone.

Important notice:
The label will be called Noisebringer Records. That should explain why my artist name is "Noise". The label is called Noisebringer, "so it brings Noise". Well, and Noise, that's me. Sounds blunt, it is.

February 20, the day of the release

You sit nervously in front of your laptop with your loved ones, watching the live broadcast of Menschenmühle. There are many comments and also the clicks can be seen. The feedback is positive throughout!
Every now and then a mail from Bandcamp comes in, telling you that you just sold a CD. There are more and more mails.

5 hours after the premiere.

In the meantime your cell phone is going crazy. In the Bandcamp Metal charts you are on position 1 and in the Bandcamp overall charts on position 2.
More and more people write you mails, congratulate you and ask for vinyls.

10 hours after the premiere.

In the meantime you are only on your cell phone. You get mails from all over the world.
The first underground label contacts you and wants to produce vinyls with you. That's a good thing, because people don't stop asking for it.

1 day after the premiere.

You just broke the 24-hour stream record on the Black Metal Promotion Channel. Needless to say, you didn't sleep a single hour that night.
Your phone is starting to merge with your body. And yes, you get it. Everyone wants vinyls.

2 days after the premiere.

The first well-known label gets in touch. You get a rush of adrenaline, comparable to the feeling of the first 0.5 l can you've been pissing away at a festival, which you've been looking forward to for months. What an incredible feeling.
More than half of your 300 CDs are already sold and the things haven't even reached you yet. You're about to order another 300. Hopefully they will arrive soon. But you still can't conjure up any vinyls out of your pocket.
Damn vinyls!

1 week after the premiere.

You've slept a total of 10 hours in the last 7 days. Everyone at work is asking you if you're sick because you look like a pile of shit.
You've turned off your phone's notification feature by now because you've already developed nervous twitches from the constant beeping and instant check urges.
The CDs arrived, thank God, and you spent hours packing, stamping and shipping packages with your label boss.
And by the way, fuck vinyls! I don't want to hear that word one more time.

20 days after the premiere.

You just cracked 100,000 streams on YouTube, breaking the next record on black metal promotion!
You own a Spotify account and have Facebook and Instagram set up for Cannon Fever. It's on! You try to answer every comment.
You're in such a mode that you can't wait to produce more music.
You've even started writing the next album on top of your 40-hour job.
Who the hell needs sleep and caffeine addiction is nothing to worry about.

22 Days After Premiere.

You've finally found a pressing plant for records. They tell you it'll take five months, though.
You think it would be a good idea to start a pre-order for the vinyls. After 2 days you realize that it was a crap idea.
The ordered contingent is sold out. Fuck.

30 days after the premiere.

You have had contact with countless people. You get asked if you want to play live at a festival. Also, a booking agent gets in touch, wants to go on tour with you.
Your spontaneous answer: BUT SUCH! Kanonenfieber goes live!
 
Important notice:
During this time, big music labels also became aware of Kanonenfieber.
I got offers, but something felt weird. I was supposed to give away the ownership rights to my own music. But I don't go along with that. You don't give away your own child.
And if that means it takes 5 months to get the vinyl, then so be it.
We have grown into it in the meantime. Noisebringer is now making shirts, patches and whatnot! It's going pretty well and Noisebringer will grow with each new project, improving steadily.

50 days after release.

Live band - Check.
Production of vinyls - Check.
New website - Check.
EU tour - Check.
Hater - Check.
 

Important note about Hater:
"THE STREAMS ARE BOUGHT!"
"YOU BUY YOUR LIKES!"
"YOU'RE A ROBOT!"
"YOU'RE A MILLIONAIRE BUYING YOUR WAY INTO BLACK METAL!"
Besides all the positive feedback and great reviews on metal.de, Metalhammer, Legacy, Rockhard, etc., there are always people from the black metal haze who obviously hate me.
They post fake statistics and start rumors about Kanonenfieber and me. All freely invented. On my social media channels it was really going around.
It's fine if people don't like my music, but trying to kill me over it? That's a bit too much commitment, I think.
So, how do you react to a shitstorm like that?
First of all, I answered every shitpost. I wanted to communicate openly. But the more I reached out to people, the more gasoline I dumped on the fire. No matter what I wrote, it was wrong.
After that, I tried an open statement. This was again commented with threats and deleted from Facebook.
Even a lawyer could not help. The reaction was similar to the posts.
What to do?
Exactly.
Do nothing.
Ignore and hope that they lose interest at some point.
I then also started to see "shitstorm" in a positive light. Because it was actually also a great advertisement!
That's why I say thank you for it in the same breath.
I wasn't aware that you could get the blackmetal underground so riled up with an obvious deathmetal album.

To conclude, I'm not a millionaire. I haven't bought a single stream or like and I'm not a robot. And yes, the earth is not a disc.

So that's the end of the topic of haters and back to you, because you're still me.

Day 60 after the premiere.

Your next project is here! Sisyphus is out. Even you can't pronounce the working title of this project correctly, but it fits perfectly!
Leiþa is the name of the whole thing. You had a difficult time when you were writing the record. You tried to reflect your inner demons with the album. The disc is also quite well received. Not nearly as well as Kanonenfieber, but who cares? You wrote the album for yourself and your peace of mind.

120 days after the premiere.

Finally. Finally, finally the vinyls are in the house. The next 4 days will be spent signing, packing and shipping.
Now begins the time to write your new album.

284 days after the premiere.

Here you are today. You are sitting in your studio writing these lyrics. Your next project is ready and waiting in the wings. It took longer than expected. You've been busy, and haven't found the time to give your music the attention it needs.
All the stuff around releasing your projects takes a lot of time. Writing emails, actively playing on social media, planning for the release and merch, writing newsletters (haha) takes a tremendous amount of your free time. Time you would need for writing, recording and mixing new songs. You hope that one day you'll be able to hang up your job and dedicate yourself fully to your music. But it is what it is:
The music business, and metal in particular, isn't going to make you rich.