It's Patron Appreciation Month! A Story.... (Patreon)

This month marks the 2 year anniversary of the GaMetal Patreon campaign!.... Sorta, technically it was created on July 23rd, 2015, haha, but from now on we'll be dedicating the month of August as Patron Appreciation Month. I'll get to what all is in store for this month in a post coming tomorrow, but first I wanted to go off on a little spiel about how thankful I am for all of you (warning: huge wall of text bio incoming xD).

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I started GaMetal almost 8 years ago, back in 2009 (debuting on Youtube early 2010), as a just-for-fun deal to help learn my way around recording and mixing. It wasn't till about 2 years later in 2011 that I had my first somewhat large subscriber following. The first version of The Ocarina of Time Medley was the 1,000 subscriber special. Before that, I remember just being excited about Green Hill Zone being the first song to hit 1,000 views. 

Not much longer after the Ocarina of Time medley, I got a little spike in subscribers, and by early 2012 I had around 3,500 subscribers. This was when I started getting a bit serious about GaMetal. I was ready to really knock out 2012, but then we were hit by a huge setback: the fire nation attacked.

Just kidding (a little Avatar: TLA joke for ya there), I know a lot of you have been following me since those early days so you mostly know the story by now, but for those who are more recent: before I was Jonny Atma, my stage name was Jonny Death. It was a moniker I had used as my musician name since the early 2000's. Unfortunately, I wasn't the only Jonny to think of this cool and super edgy nickname. Another dude in California also used this name, and went as far as going out of his way to apply for a trademark for the name.

His trademark was approved, and I'm guessing he saw that someone else using 'his' name was starting to gain some popularity. I've refrained from saying anything too negative about this part, but I'll be a little more candid with you all here: this guy was rude, snarky, and had a very arrogant tone in the emails we exchanged. His first email basically told me I had to stop using his name or he would get my channel taken down.

Realizing there was nothing I could do, and being far too broke to be able to hire a lawyer to make a case or anything like that, I was forced to concede. I told him I'd change my name, but kindly asked if the least he could do was give me a couple of weeks to create a new channel to move all of my stuff over, to which he agreed (or at least, so it seemed).

So immediately, I released a video on Youtube telling everyone, in person, what all was happening. I never said anything negative about this guy. Just that he had trademarked the name and had to create a new channel because of it, and that I had planned to make the new channel even better than before.

Not even 2 or 3 days later, my channel was shutdown for trademark infringement. This guy did not give me the 2 weeks I had politely asked for. He lied.

I was furious... but I knew I was screwed over and defeated on this front. Still, I never went on the offense. I didn't send out my follower base to spam the guy mean emails or stuff like that (and I had friends willing to take it further than that). I know those sorts of things don't really accomplish anything in the long run... hate just breeds more hate.

I've always been a person that remains remarkably calm in even the worst of situations, and that applied to this case as well. I had pretty much lost 3 years worth of work in an instant. While I do have an incredible ability to remain cool under pressure, unfortunately I'm no super hero, so I wasn't really feeling up for starting all over again. I wouldn't say I fell into a spiraling depression or anything... just really uninspired. I knew I'd start back up eventually, but for a while, I just stopped working on music completely. I just wasn't really feeling it.

About a year went by. I sort of kept an eye on my comments on Newgrounds (back then, the Audio Portal was a decent way to get some recognition, and a large portion of my first fanbase actually came from there), sometimes people would ask what happened to me... some people started rumors that I had been arrested for copyright infringement (which wasn't the case, haha). I didn't really respond much if at all. Someone even made a Youtube channel called WaitingForJonny, and uploaded a bunch of my old songs. People would leave comments talking about how they missed me and stuff like that. It made me feel really bad.

Around early 2013, it had been pretty much a year since I'd said or uploaded anything, and I decided it was time to come back. I didn't want to become one of those lost internet people that completely vanish and never return. Even though my subscriber base was a measly 3.5k, this was an enormous number to me back then, so I felt like I owed it to those thousands of people. I wanted to come back far better than I was previously. I picked the guitar back up and started practicing harder than ever. I learned new things, like theory, chord tone soloing techniques, etc. I started drumming a lot more. I focused extremely hard on getting my mixes to sound better. I saved up and bought some better instruments for the sake of sound quality. I wanted to come back with a vengeance. I threw up the countdown clock on what is now JonnyAtma.com (formerly JonnyDeath.com), counting down to my return. I saw some people on the WaitingForJonny channel and Newgrounds comments freaking out about it. It made me feel a lot better.

June 5th hits, the countdown clock had ended, and I uploaded 2 songs: a new version of Don't Be Afraid, and Golden Sun Battle Theme, the song that I had promised would be next, a year earlier. I got a small subscriber spike as people saw I may be active again. I followed that up with Dark Star Core, which is still the #3 GaMetal song in views, currently. I paid tribute to everyone who had returned to the new channel, as well as the new followers, with Mega Man Mega Medley, where I asked everyone on Twitter what their favorite MM song is, and put the first 10 responses into the medley (back then, I had few enough people following me to do these sorts of things, haha).

After a few months, we re-reached the 3.5k subscribers I had before. I kept pushing through 2014 with new material. Songs like Punch-Out!, The Ultimate Show, and Dancing Mad saw great success and brought in even more people. 2015 comes around, Masked Dedede gets featured in a FNAF video that has millions of views, and as a result, Masked Dedede blows up and is STILL the #1 GaMetal song in views. And of course, I received a large subscriber spike from it. A few months later, we hit 10k subscribers, so I released Pokemon Champion Medley to celebrate. So in about 2 years, I almost tripled my old subscriber count.

I had tweaked my sound again at the start of May Madness 2015 (which was a little bit before Pokemon Champion Medley). This was the first sound mix I was comfortable with actually promoting (part of the reason the roman numeral albums started with GaMetal V). 2014 and 2013 were still a bit shoddy, but 2015 was acceptable to me. I knew at this point I really wanted to push GaMetal to the limit. The bad thing was, I was working an EXTREMELY tough job at the time (I used to be a Team Leader at the Fed-Ex hub in Memphis.. excruciatingly stressful job with so-so pay), so a majority of the time I would come home completely exhausted and not feel much like working on anything. It became my goal to make enough from Youtube to make music for a living, the ultimate pipe dream, so I wouldn't have to feel like this anymore.

This is the start of where you all come in. I really don't make that much from Youtube (ad revenue). It's still only about 20% of my income. Patreon was sort of the new kid on the block around this time. I had kept my eye on it, but I really wanted to get around 10k subs first, and then wait till a big song to start promoting it. In late July of 2015, I released GaMedley, the 100th GaMetal song, and at the same time started this Patreon campaign.

I honestly wasn't expecting much at first... after all, I only had a small subscriber base of a little over 10,000 subscribers. But in just around 2 months, we reached our 3rd milestone goal of $100 per song. This was already more than I was making from Youtube at the time. Just a few months later, only around 4 months into the Patreon campaign, we reached my part-time milestone of $250 per song. I was able to leave my awful, maximum stress job, because of the generosity I received from you all here.

My wife and I also decided to pack our bags and move from Memphis to Nashville... because Memphis sucks lol. 2016 begins and as dictated, I started working a part time job waiting tables and working on GaMetal part time (which ironically is what most musicians here in Nashville are doing :P). GaMetal continued to grow, and I was more inspired and hopeful than ever to reach the pipe dream of making enough income from music to be able to do it full time, and Patreon made this a very realistic possibility.

By mid-2016, we hit 30k subscribers on Youtube, triple what we had the year prior. Our lease was up for renewal where we were living around the later part of the year. I really wanted to move into a house (rent, not buy, not quite there yet! haha), we had been living in apartments the past couple of years and I hated it because it restricted when I could work on certain things (IE: drums) as not to create a disturbance. Here on Patreon, we were starting to close in on the full-time goal.... so, I decided to take the leap of faith. We weren't far from the goal (which was initially $675, moved down to $600), but it was enough to scrape by, and the Patreon kept growing so I fully expected to surpass it within the next few months. I started working on GaMetal full-time in November of 2016, thanks entirely to the support I receive from you all here. I've never been happier in my life. Since then, we've had over 40 new songs and we're only a little over half way through 2017, and we still have all sorts of great things to look forward to in the future.

I'm gonna keep it real with you: I don't come from money. My adolescence was a complete mess that ended up with me living on my own at the age of 18, making minimum wage from a gas station job (when minimum wage was $5.25 in Tennessee). I don't live in Cali like most successful Youtubers do: I've spent most of my life in and around Memphis, TN, which is almost always in the top 5 worst cities in the US.

I do (or well, don't do) a lot of things that I'm 'supposed to do' as a Youtuber. I don't pop up on the screen in person and say 'like, subscribe, and comment!' because I've always found that stuff to... not be me. I don't do a bunch of songs all from the latest game that came out just the other day because 'doing the latest stuff gets the most views'... it's true, but again.. it's just not me. 

I've kept advertising and plugging the Patreon to a minimum: I've kept it to the 'Help Support GaMetal!' cards at the beginning of videos, a link at the bottom of the video description, and the button on the end card. The only time I advertise it live is a brief segment on each of the Youtube Q&A/News Live-Streams, and occasionally I might mention it on Twitch. I never want to be in peoples face and down their throats with these sorts of things because... like I said, it's just not me. I know first hand what it's like to not be able to afford to financially contribute to things like this. I only want people to pledge if they genuinely want to, and I feel that's a big reason why we've had as much success on here as we currently have.

In regards to the Youtube things I mentioned a moment ago... does not doing these things hurt my Youtube channel growth? Maybe. But it doesn't matter to me: what does matter is that thanks to all of your generosity, I've been able to refrain from the obnoxious over-advertising and keep on staying true to what GaMetal is all about: an eclectic mix of classics as well as new songs and everything in between, from the popular songs like Undertale or Mario, to the less popular or unheard of like SaGa Frontier or Rabi-Ribi. This is what GaMetal is all about and will always be about, and it's, again, entirely because of the support I receive from you here.

One key thing I love seeing... is that despite not being one of the biggest Youtube channels in sub count, we've been outperforming a lot of larger Youtube channels with our Patreon campaign. Just more proof that the GaMetal fanbase is one of the best around.

There's a saying that success is the best revenge. I even said earlier in this story that in 2013, I was out for vengeance. But I don't even care about that now. I don't care what Jonny Death is up to, and I hope him all the best. Maybe, without him, I wouldn't have had the same to drive to succeed as I had then. But vengeance stopped being my drive when everyone came back in 2013. My main drive then became, and still is now to make as much of the GaMetal community as happy as possible. 

To make things even better, we still have a ton of room to grow. I still consider my channel to be on the smaller side. I believe in the next few years, we're going to reach all new astronomical heights. Who knows what all the future has in store for us... only time will tell. :)

Hopefully you find some time to read all of this xD, I know it's a bit much, but I feel like it can help to give you a sense of how thankful I am for all of you. I'll wrap it up by just saying again: I am so, so, so, thankful for all of you here, whether you're in the top tier pledging $25 per song with no monthly limit, or $1 for one song a month. Every little bit has made all of the success we've had so far possible. I love you all. <3

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Ok, I was going to detail what all is in store for this month, but I think I'll do that on a different post because I just literally spent about 3 hours on this, haha.

I'll have that post up for you all tomorrow, but in short: we're drawing 3 songs during the drawing stream this month, and also I'm moving that stream 1 day earlier to Friday, August 4th, at around 3:00 PM US Central Time. I'll go into more detail in tomorrow's update post.

Thank you all so much for everything you've done for myself and the GaMetal community!

TL;DR: It's a story of my personal climb to where we're at today thanks to you all. xD