A follow-up to my case study of independent New Zealand artists Haunted Love, whose Librarian song is rightly doing the rounds at the moment.
I received an email from Rainy from the band Haunted Love this week. With her permission — and because of the interest they generated — I’m republishing it here. Here’s the case study, in case you missed it. I recommend watching the video.
She writes:
Hi Andrew,
I just thought you might like a Haunted Love update as since Friday we have experienced a rather unusual and wonderful string of events, and can’t quite believe our luck.
On Friday night we were onstage at Scott’s bar, opening for The Brunettes and TeenWolf. This turned out to be the most wonderful gig ever, people were singing along and everything!
We also made some very valuable contacts, Hayden East (from the Brunettes) is the Marketing Brand Manager for bFM and has invited us to Auckland to do a bNet live-to-air.
The wonderful Ed Cake was doing sound for The Brunettes/TeenWolf tour and very kindly mixed our set as well. I’m not sure how fabulous his night was as he had a beer poured over him by some disgruntled lout, but he enjoyed our music and wants to record our EP when we come to Auckland!
All this unexpected attention has given us so much to think about and for a band with so little experience, it’s a little daunting. We want to make sure we make the most of all the opportunities that we are being given.
I’ve been thinking about your post on New Music Strategies a lot, we consider it a real gift and for having no prior knowledge of us, it’s amazing how well you have connected with the concept of Haunted Love.
Scott Muir has very rightly pointed out that the Librarian phenomenon is something that is quite unique and gives us an edge to work with, a special platform with opportunities for exposure.
It became obvious to us very quickly how well-connected librarians are and how sharing information comes naturally to them as with no other profession, and I think if we had anticipated this we could have set up a better system or interface to make sure the effects all this interest would not disappear when the interest wanes. ( i.e. netting and keeping all our new friends/fans)
We have a bit of trouble keeping up with all the correspondence we get from librarians and libraries, both on Myspace and emails to this address. Even with embarrassingly regular googling of ourselves it’s still kind of hard to keep up with all the blogs and things that mention us and the video. We try really hard to contact people personally and invite them to join our email newsletter (The Chronicles of Haunted Love) but mostly we have been somewhat haphazardly operating on the hope that anyone who’s interested in us because of Librarian will perk up their ears if they hear another mention of us down the line.
So we do think that our own website is a really sensible idea and we’re currently working towards this. Any suggestions on this very welcome!
A libraries tour is something that we had already given some thought to, we did a gig at Dunedin Public Library as part of their NZ Music Month celebrations, and felt right at home! After some really helpful advice from Lesley Paris this week, we expanded on that idea and talked about getting CNZ Creative Communities funding to go on a regional tour of libraries with the hope that this could lead to a nationwide opportunity. The idea of an international libraries tour is too exciting to contemplate at this stage.
We hope that our trip to Auckland (we’re planning it for late August early September) will be an opportunity gain some great experience to equip ourselves for touring in the future and maybe also to get some exposure from national media as well.
Librarian has been played on Alt TV once this year and Werewolf was played on National Radio’s Music 101 show last year, so we have some contacts there who are aware of our existence. I’ve personally always dreamed of being interviewed on (tee hee) breakfast television, and though I’m not sure if Geva shares that glorious dream, we support each other 100%. At the end of the day, we just want to enjoy a self-sustaining career making kooky pop music that makes us and other people happy and frightened.
We will appreciate any other advice you may have for us in the future and feel really privileged to count you as a friend and ally.
With kindest regards,
Rainy
It was a really lovely letter to get. Having adopted them here on the website, I’ll keep you posted with updates… but actually I think this is exactly the kind of communication they should be having with their audience:
‘Here’s something that happened to us, here’s what we’re excited about, here’s what we hope to do soon…’ etc.
Personally, I’d go for a podcast, so we can get the personality through their voices. Or maybe even a straight to camera video podcast. This is the kind of band you want to get to know.
But in the meantime… sign me up to the mailing list!