I haven’t asked you to review a site for a while, so I thought I’d get your take on this one. Put It On claims to be a home to the World’s Undiscovered Artists, which, depending on your point of view makes it either sound like a treasure trove, or a creative ghetto.
What do you think? Vibrant community? Showcase opportunity? Admission of defeat?
This is a follow-up post after yesterday’s piece about who you should send promos to. While we’re thinking along those lines, I thought I’d also get you thinking about your other possible points of influence.
It’s a great idea to send free promos to your friends and acquaintances and get a bit of buzz happening that way – but there are other things you can do to start that conversation going in ways that can spread your music and your brand to new audences.
If you’re in a band, and you play the kind of music that’s most likely to be enjoyed by university students, then I’m clearly not your target audience. I’m a 41 year-old guy with a wife and a teenage son. But, if you think about it long enough, you’ll realise that I do happen to come into contact with several hundred of your target audience members on a fairly regular basis…
As a result of the Humphreys and Keen thing over the past week, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about promos – free copies of albums sent to people in an attempt to find and build an audience – with the end goal of selling some records.
When I ran an independent jazz label back in the late 1990s, conventional wisdom was pretty simple: press 1000 CDs, and send out 100-200 of those copies as promos to influential people with radio shows, television programmes, newspaper columns and so on.
It was a bit of a lottery, and usually your record would either get a cursory mention in passing, or – most often – no mention at all.
You could reasonably argue that there have been better times to get into music retail. All the same, I’ve taken a very small step towards that this week on behalf of some New Zealand friends of mine who have recorded my favourite album of the past five years: The Overflow by Humphreys and Keen.
I was looking for a way to sell vinyl from my site. My friend (and fellow H&K fan) Owen had arranged a gorgeous limited edition vinyl pressing, cut at Abbey Rd studios in London, and I enthusiastically offered to do the online retail.
The sale of digital downloads was no problem whatsoever, because of Bandcamp. And yes, I’m an evangelist for Bandcamp – but with very good reason. It’s brilliant (and I’m on their board of advisors, if you need the disclaimer).
But having set up a physical online retail store in a completely different realm, I know that it’s not something to be taken lightly. It can be a mammoth task. But I have just one album to sell – and I wanted to do it from my personal website. I’m not building HMV or Tower Records here.
