A round of applause

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Steve lawson

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.

He tweeted, blogged, videoed and even AudioBoo‘d.

Like this:

Listen!

Go read / watch / listen to Steve’s whole account of what was an exceptionally good afternoon.

Put It On

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Put It On

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?

I’d wear your t-shirt

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Not actually Andrew Dubber

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…

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Who to send promos to

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Promo envelope

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.

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ANDREW DUBBER