A quick round of applause, please, for the Herculean live-blogging efforts of Mr Steve Lawson.
Steve came along as an invited guest to today’s Fresh on the Net seminar for London Songwriters Week and captured the whole thing – Tom Robinson and I presenting, the thoughts of the crowd and the mood of the day.
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.
Andrew Dubber's New Music Strategies attempts to unpick and explain what’s going on in the online music environment - and from that, develop strategies to help independent musicians and music businesses cope and thrive in a changing media environment.
Go back through the New Music Strategies archives completely at random and discover things you may have missed, or remind yourself about things you may have forgotten. Click here to explore.
In the sea of panic-stricken paranoia that characterises most of the modern music industry, Dubber is one of the few people I have met to keep a calm, sensible head in approaching the new media age.
