An NPR producer once spent a few months living in the small college town where rock paper scissors is headquartered. I took him to a demolition derby and he took me up in a two-seat airplane; he was an amateur pilot. It was pretty wild being above the clouds in such a small plane held up by old-school propellers. Especially when he had me take the wheel.
But while we were in the air, he told me a great pilot saying: "You cannot use the runway behind you or the sky above you." Though you would think it would be safer to be closer to the ground, it's safer to be higher away from the ground so that when your engine dies, you have more time to find a good emergency landing location. The same goes for the runway on take-off: Never start in the middle of the runway. Start as far back as you can so that if something comes up, you have more time to strategize and figure out an alternative.
The same approach that works for daredevil pilots works for thinking about the lead time you need for a successful publicity or marketing push. You can start too soon; people wouldn't be ready to make the purchase. But in most cases, it’s easier to start farther back, with ample space and time to make changes in your strategy. The more time you have--the more sky beneath you and runway ahead of you--the better.
If a strategy is not working for your album release, tour publicity, or festival launch, wouldn’t it be nice to have enough time to change course? That doesn’t work so well after an album is released or, worse yet, after a concert is over. Once of the simplest ways to use the runway is to start further back; that is, schedule your release or event with more time.
What are you waiting for? Hurry up and schedule something with more lead time.
Dub MC is sponsored by rock paper scissors, the global music publicity firm.
Part II in a series, Getting the Bang for your Publicity Buck
In the days of yore—you know, ten years ago—there were lots of people writing album reviews. These reviews made it to print and to the eyes of readers. These reviews stood alone: The artist may have never even set foot in the city where the publication came out, and the reviewers’ taste (or lack thereof) governed what got covered and what didn’t.
Everything has changed. Traditional outlets have gone under, cut staff dramatically, rethought their strategies, and so on and so forth. You know the story. Sure, there are still critics and CD reviews aplenty, and there are high-impact, national, regional, and local outlets where reviews still run—and the competition to get their attention is fierce.
So what’s a musician to do to seriously liven up an album publicity campaign? Answer: Play live.
We’re not talking a massive national tour that starts on New Years and ends on Halloween, hitting every stadium from Bangor to Bellingham. A few shows, in major markets or regional hubs. A really good show at a venue with some clout and cache (and a couple other nearby dates, to fill things out). An unexpected festival appearance (Iroquois drummer at Bonnaroo!).
And lo! The press gets more interested.
Why does this work? A significant slice of the coverage in the national, regional, and local outlets open to rising musicians (as opposed to Jay Z or Keith Richards) is now almost completely yoked to local shows. Even in big markets like New York. The stand-alone reviews of yesteryear have been exchanged at many alternative weeklies and papers for the review-with-concert-mention, using live dates to power content.
There may also be a psychological element to all this. A live show is a deadline. Journalists today, overburdened and under-supported after staff cuts or as freelancers, need something to nail down potential coverage. Looking at a huge pile of CDs may be a thing of joy for the critics of old, but may feel like a stack of despair to someone trying to cover a major city’s music practically singlehandedly. And, mysteriously, even big national outlets sometimes respond more to a project that involves performances as well as a new album. Go figure.
This doesn't mean you can't get reviews for your album without a tour. But if you have the option, getting the stars to align with a live show+album release will maximize your publicity investment and boost your campaign's potential. So when you’re wrapping up those mixes, think booking, and you'll double your chance of landing press for the album.
Part I in a series, Getting the Bang for your Publicity Buck
Listen. We publicists are an accommodating lot. We’ll try, we really will, to get you press, no matter what.
But there are ways you can wildly increase the chance that our efforts (which are really your efforts) will translate into media response. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking about some of the most straightforward ways to maximize your publicity investment.
One of the main ways—and one of the aspects many artists, alas, flub—is timing. Seriously, you should never find yourself looking at a box of nice, new, shiny CDs (or a successful upload to an online retailer) and thinking, wow, wouldn’t it be nice to hire a publicist. Especially if you have a reasonable shot at making it into a national music magazine or onto a popular national radio show.
Here’s the best time to start reaching out to the media:
Long lead: Fashion and lifestyle magazines are a challenge for non-A listers to begin with. They often look for content way far in advance. We’re talking 6 months, on the short side. If you’ve missed that window, you may still have a chance at some online love from a major mag, but don’t get too fixated on print coverage.
Same thing goes for major TV shows; your chances plummet if you don’t plan very, very far in advance (and can make a show’s particular slot, not always an option for international touring artists). National TV can take as much as a year, sometimes.
Other outlets—music magazines, some freelancers with big-name outlets—should also be pitched very early in the process. Think 4-6 months for ideal results.
Short lead: This includes national papers (give them no less than 6 weeks), national radio (think 8 weeks), and tour-related press (alt weeklies, blogs, regional and local papers, etc). Ideally, you want to have your materials ready (and mailed, if you’re going to send out physical product) and raring to go 7-8 weeks before the first tour date or the album release.
In other words, if you want your album reviewed in a national music magazine, you need to be ready 6 months (at least) in advance. Even rough mixes and/or video can work, if you’re making appealing music or have a strong visual element. Then you need to bank on at least two months if you’re after some good coverage on tour or in national papers.
One month out? Your publicist may be biting her nails and praying for a miracle. Two weeks out? Good luck.
Dub MC is brought to you by rock paper scissors, inc., a global music publicity firm.
And yes, we will help you time things beautifully.
NPR recently explored exuberant rock critic Chuck Klosterman’s side-splitting, stream-of-consciousness faux press release for an instrumental rock band. The seemingly silly exercise in pseudo-pr has something to say to global musicians.
Not only is the release a great compendium of nearly every irritating cliché known to rock/pop journalism, but it shows why stories—even if wildly improbable and patently false—are so important to understanding music, and not just for journalists being pitched by publicists, but for listeners in general.
NPR reporter Frannie Kelly pointed to research by NYU’s Michael Beckerman, a music historian and Dvorak biographer who discovered significant differences in the way listeners thought and felt about music once they heard the compelling story behind it.
As an example, he played a simple boogie-woogie piano riff. Sure, it was nice, but whatever.
Then Beckerman asked, "What role would it play if I told you the title was called 'Dark Blue World'? And what if I further told you that it was written by a Czech jazz pianist around 1929? And what if I told you that the jazz pianist himself was nearly blind? Could see only shadows, and that 'Dark Blue World' became his kind of personal anthem?" he asks. "You might listen to it differently, knowing that this was again a fraught story of a dark blue world all put together in this world of Czech jazz.
A whole new world opens up to the imagination.
Beckerman’s point is convincing. However, other researchers working in music psychology have found that reading descriptions of pieces—especially “dramatic descriptions” that wax poetic—appears to hamper music enjoyment, at least in a classical music context. Describing a Beethoven string quartet as an emotional hymn or referencing its musical structure, even in very clear lay terms, seemed to get in the way.
So which is it? Do stories help or hinder?
It depends. Does the story create context, putting the music in a bigger picture about the past, say? That seems to help people respond. However, fancy adjectives, technical terms, or even general emotive language? Not so much.
This holds for press releases, even for Klosterman’s work of fantastic realism. Journalists were intrigued by the stories Klosterman told. Some guy named Steve plays 40 instruments. He got signed to a label after a quirky chat at a strip mall.
Though odd, if these stories were true, they’d be really fun to write about. The truly laugh-provoking part of the release is the descriptions of the music. It’s the adjectives, not the fabrications, that make the release ridiculous.
Here’s the crucial point for global musicians trying to raise their profiles and get media attention. True, intriguing stories work in your favor. They are more important than fancy verbiage. They make people more receptive to your music, which means they’ll want to cover you. And your stories are likely just as unexpected as the ones Klosterman made up, if not more so.
Getting them down and into the best possible form—with appropriate, evocative language and careful attention to cultural details—is more important now than ever before. Stories, thanks to online and social media, have serious legs. They can walk out of press releases and onto the web, across boundaries that once seemed impermeable between fan and pro writing, or between advertising and editorial content (“advertorials” have long existed, but were once prohibitively expensive, not to mention reviled as shady, in the U.S.).
Now professional music critics and feature writers share an increasingly blurry frontier with cheerleading bloggers, eloquent fans spreading the word virally, and, yes, professional promoters who also write. Some press releases get posted verbatim online. Some writers and editors at time- and cash-strapped traditional media outlets sometimes chose copy and paste over original journalism.
This is not the way things should be, but it’s the way things are. It puts the responsibility and opportunity for crafting your own amazing story in your hands. Do it right: tell the truth, and tell it well.
1. Be a human being…
People like hearing from friends but hate hearing from spammers. To sound more like a human and less like an email-spewing robot, identify yourself clearly.
Have an address that looks like a human uses it, and one that people will instantly (and positively) connect to you and your projects: fritz@globalmusician.com as opposed to info@globalmusician.com. Market research has shown that people react more strongly to the sender line than other elements in an email.
Give your personal name along with your band name in your signature. And try to write a personal note, not a hyped-up ad.
Some email marketing experts even recommend adding a photo of yourself (or your band, as the case may be) to emphasize the personal quality of what can feel like very impersonal communication. Use your cool, vibrant photos that show you in all your global artist glory. Or add a well-chosen video.
2. ...And be a nice one.
Respect people’s wishes to opt in or out of your email blasts. Don’t add people—especially not contacts in the media!—without their permission. You’ll annoy them and waste their hard-earned goodwill.
Be kind enough to make things short, sweet, and easy to open. That means choosing graphic elements carefully, avoiding attachments, and thinking hard about your subject line. It may be handy to come up with a standard approach, to make it easy for your fans to know what’s inside each message. For example, you could start each subject with your band name (i.e. “GlobalMusician: Hitting the North American Road in May”).
Consider having both a to-the-point presentation of events like tour dates and track releases (bullet points are great) and a short, warm, more narrative intro paragraph. Be witty if that’s your style, but don’t get too silly. Err on the side of simplicity.
And try to find the right balance between regularly contacting your fans with cool information and inundating them with repetitive emails. Think twice before hitting send (again). Two updates about an upcoming tour may be enough.
3. Give back.
When someone gives you their email (and thus gives you access to their eyeballs and brains if only for a second), give them something for their trouble.
Exclusive footage from a great live show, a nice mp3 every once in a while, a sneak peek at upcoming projects, a special discount or offer only for your email buddies…this kind of little treats and bonuses can make many fans feel it’s worth it to get your messages.
4. Watch your language.
The spammers. They’ve ruined so many great words and phrases for the rest of us. Spam filters love to flag messages with certain words (“hardcore,” “FREE!!!” and even, cryptically, “Oprah”) or certain subject lines (“Check this out!”). They even suspect you if you use a salutation, certain software to generate your message, or wonky code.
The last thing you want is your carefully crafted message to land in the junk mail because certain software thinks you’re peddling dubious wares.
5. Show your work.
Give links to your other sites, pages, and so on in full (or take a second and shorten them using a standard service like bitly if they are really long).
Spammers and crooks once again have spoiled it for everyone else, and people are wary of clicking through linked text in an email. If they see a reputable looking web address, they are more likely to follow your lead and click through to your site.
6. Manage your list well.
Your email list is a real asset. But the richer and larger it becomes, the more troublesome it can be. When you have a couple hundred emails, sending out a blast can be annoying but still doable. Once you get to a couple thousand, managing your list becomes a huge, if not impossible, chore, especially if you want to be able to sort by various parameters (city, state, favorite food, whatever). You’re managing a database.
Once you cross that line from irritating task to complete time suck, consider using an online service, of which there are many. Independent musician-oriented sites offer email management as part of their packages, and there are also good stand-alone services that focus on email outreach. These services make it easier to design a colorful but efficient message and help you do other things that would otherwise be extremely time consuming or downright impossible, like track who opened your message.
These features allow you to experiment, if you’re so inclined, and try different approaches to see what your fans respond best to. Do they love pictures? Or do they like things plain and simple? Do certain subject lines result in less response?
You’ve got a unique group of people you’re trying to communicate with, and all the generalized marketing research in the world won’t tell you who they are. But your analytics and your own tests may.
1. Know your audience: Guess what? If a journalist is covering you, most likely she or he likes what you do. Or at least thinks it’s interesting enough to bother writing about. That means you have a pretty sympathetic ear. Relax into that.
But do your homework: find out what you can about your interviewers, their interests, and their outlets, with a quick online search, if nothing else. That way you can feel more at ease, knowing who you’re dealing with and what intrigues them.
2. Perform: You wouldn’t give a concert while cooking a batch of rice, doing some laundry, and playing online chess. So don’t give an interview that way. It’s a performance of sorts; approach it like you would a concert. Give it your entire focus, to the best of your ability.
3. Take the time: Ask the journalist how long she or he plans to speak with you. Then budget for at least 50% more time. So if a writer says the interview will take 30 minutes, make sure your schedule is clear for at least 45.
Block off some of that time before the interview is due to start, just in case your day gets nuts. And expect things to start late and take more time than anticipated. (This is, of course, in an ideal world, one that many touring artists don’t get to inhabit. But knowing you need some transition time may help things go more smoothly.)
4. Get a clear connection: Again, ideally, you want to get to place that’s relatively quiet and distraction-free, where you can get decent (if not excellent) cell phone reception, or where internet speed and reliability actually allow online calls. This may be especially important if your verbal English has its rough moments, if your interview involves audio recording, or if you’re talking to a crucial media outlet.
If possible, test your connection by calling a friend beforehand. Have a back-up plan, including a way you can reach the journalist in a pinch and an alternate number or method he or she can reach you.
5. Sum it up: Can you say what you do in ten words? Okay, how about twenty? While no one wants to hear an artist rattle off a prepared statement, you can think about ways to express what you’re up to succinctly.
If you’re working with a publicist, you should already have some clear angles and catch phrases in mind. If not, you can look at past press, talk to your agent or label, or even bounce ideas off a supportive, well-spoken fan. You’re looking for context, for useful comparisons, for brief but compelling stories, for appropriate descriptions you can use to bring the journalist into your life and work. Just make sure they’re to the point and that you avoid hype.
6. Spell it out: Spell proper nouns, unfamiliar musical concepts, foreign language words, and other perplexing terms for your interviewer. Don’t assume the journalist knows exactly what you’re referring to. Though spelling things can break up the flow of conversation a bit, it saves everyone headaches in the long run.
7. Answer the question: Don’t know how to respond to something? Is the question cryptic? Do what politicians do, and turn it around so that you can talk about what you think is important.
A blithe “I’m glad you asked that question” may not work for the music media, but you can ask for your interviewer to rephrase things. Or you can ask your own (polite) question back. Or you can rephrase the question yourself, and go on to answer it.
Whatever you do, say no to any variation on “I don’t know.” Respond. Open the dialogue. See if you can engage and take the conversation to another level.
1. Keep your content personal, and your persona colorful.
You’re an artist—so post like one. Maybe you’re from a place lots of Westerners don’t know much about. Facebook and Twitter are simple ways to send out short, bright blasts about your life, your surroundings, your ideas.
You can imagine you’re a travel guide and reveal little-known sides of your country, region, or town. You can let people into your artistic process. You can show different facets of your personality and culture, things you may not get a chance to reveal on stage.
Your posts can do anything. Chronicle a beautiful meal or a moment from a traditional (or not so traditional) event with a striking photo. Talk about a funny interaction on the street or in the studio. Link to other music from your scene that has yet to be heard internationally. Write briefly about your favorite market vendor, your family’s livelihood, your drummer’s sense of humor, your most passionately felt social cause.
In other words, this is your world. Get it out there.
2. Work in English—but don’t sweat the small stuff.
English is the lingua franca of global music business, for better or for worse. You should post in it. But you don’t have to sound like an Oxford grad (or a native speaker who grew up on the slang-rich streets, for that matter). A few mistakes here and there that don’t interfere with your overall message won’t hurt. They may even add character.
So don’t be shy. Try writing your posts yourself.
If you’re worried about your English, see if you can find a committed friend who’s willing to glance at a particularly tricky passage or complicated sentence you’d like to post. Or focus on interesting images and video, keeping your text simple.
3. Offer value by making followers insiders.
Don’t waste the opportunity to reach people by simply posting gig details, release dates, or glorified advertisements. Let people in.
There’s nothing more disappointing than receiving something akin to musician spam from an intriguing artist, particularly when it reads like a press release written by (jaded) management. Talk about you, not how groundbreaking your new songs are, or simply that you’re playing on Friday.
If you get nominated for an award or have a big show coming up, tell folks how you feel about it; how you really feel. If you’re posting a funky remix as an mp3 on your website, let your friends and followers have access to it first.
When people sense something matters to you, you’ve made them insiders. You’ve given them something of value: your insights, time, attention (especially if you’re good about tweeting back or jumping into a Facebook exchange when someone posts on your wall or comments on a post). Insiders will care much more deeply about your art and are more likely to become hardcore fans—fans who will support you financially and refer you to others.
4. Balance quality and quantity.
Content is key, clearly. And it needs to have a certain personal, engaging quality. But if you only post once every three weeks, you won’t necessarily gain much of a following. Keep posts fairly regular, so that you stay on your followers’ radars, without flooding people with overwhelming updates on your every move.
But when it comes to finding followers, the opposite is true: Look for quality, and forget about numbers (they’ll grow gradually). Focus on finding people who will actually take an interest in you and your music. People worth cultivating as contacts, fans, and even as friends. People you’d love to see at your shows. People who are eager to talk about your art.
5. Avoid shortcuts.
Reposting press about you is fine. Retweeting nice things about your music is fine. But if that’s all you do, you’re missing the point. You need to be sparking a conversation and drawing people in.
And while it’s a good idea to cross-post between blogs, Twitter feeds, and social media sites like Facebook, make sure to think about ways you can use each platform fully, appropriately, and uniquely.
Lastly, don’t bother mechanically boosting your numbers. A gazillion robotically added friends or followers might make you feel important, but are unlikely to spread the word about your music.
6. Stick with it long-term.
Social media, as the latest big thing, may feel like a flash-in-the-pan medium, but to make it work, you need to commit to it for the long haul. Facebook and Twitter have an immediacy that’s deceptive; to get a return on your investment of time and energy—a significant investment—you have to be willing to pursue a social strategy for a while.
Be willing to let things build slowly and be committed to making the effort for more than a few weeks.
7. Use social media responsibly.
Just say no to games or strange quizzes that post results to your friends’ news streams, and the like… and learn how to keep truly private posts, photos, and other info private by managing who can see your posts and what is public on your profile.
World music: It’s too often portrayed—even by those who work to support and nurture it—as the step-child of music genres. And, sure, back in the bad old days (read: the consolidation-mad 1990s), when the evil stepmothers of the music industry reigned supreme, it was neglected and ignored.
But now, everything has changed, and world music has five strong ways to move into all sorts of new, barely charted, increasingly monetized territory. As the mainstream radio-and-major-label empires crumble, there are many reasons to leverage world music’s distinct advantages. Here are a mere five:
1. It’s flown under the radar. Okay, not in the most literal sense. Many people have a vague notion of “world music”—but with emphasis on the word “vague.” In fact, no one truly seems to know what the world music market actually looks like, not in the detailed, data-driven way pop or jazz consumption has been parsed.
On the surface, this seems like a terrible disadvantage. After all, how can you navigate something you don’t understand? Yet the market is excitingly undefined. Musicians and industry pros have a tantalizing chance to define it. There are no rules, and this allows both for an exciting range of potential income streams and approaches (see #3), and for a potentially great burst of growth. Whereas in more-defined genres you have to position yourself in reference to what has come before, in world music you can carve your own path.
2. It’s poised to grow. Again, we lack hard data—something the industry needs to address—but all indicators point to a gap between potential U.S. audiences and the world’s many amazing musicians.
As pop sounds more and more compressed and uniform, as everything from “alternative” rock to country sounds more and more like pop, world music sounds like, well, like just about anything you can imagine.
The cookie cutter approach of cramming similar sounding, marketing-driven songs down consumers throats via monopolies, relentless radio rotation, and million-dollar payola schemes is on its way out: The average time young people spend listening to radio, for example, has been seeing steady, double-digit declines for years. The marketplace has shifted from a mass broadcast/mass consumption model to individualized interactive media/personalized niche consumption.
World music is a breath of fresh air in this stifled environment. It is the ultimate in long tail music because it is made up of hundreds or thousands of genres. As the long tail fattens up and new ideas for monetizing digital media sprout, world music grows. (See #4 and #5)
And there’s another shift underway as well, one that also works in world music’s favor. The U.S. audience itself is changing as the demographic picture continues to shift toward a more multicultural, geographically multicentric picture.
Latino communities, for instance, are burgeoning in quiet corners of the stereotypically “white-bread” Midwest. The Latino population of Indiana, for example, has grown by double digits since 2000. In another compelling example, African immigrants—be they Somalis in New England or Minnesota, or Nigerians in Texas—are establishing communities outside of the historical immigrant hotspots and reached 1.4 million foreign-born residents (nearly half of which are college educated) in the U.S. in 2007.
While it is simplistic to assume that listeners’ ethnicity determines their music habits, this quick glance at the numbers shows that there are lots of audiences we can reach whose tastes likely extend beyond Lady Gaga—and that these future fans likely the resources to purchase music.
3. Maximum musician flexibility (which equals more money for artists). It’s really hard as an indie rock band to play a club one day and a performing arts center the next. It’s rare when, say, an up-and-coming pop country or rap artist can get regular, decent paying gigs at schools, local libraries, and colleges. Finally, it’s relatively hard to score a spot as a jazz artist on the pop or country charts.
World music artists, however, pull stunts like this every day, moving from hip bar scenes to refined stages to children’s programs, and between the commercially established genres (think of Os Mutantes or Shonen Knife or Bomba Estéreo: all rock/pop and world at the same time). This means newcomer and midlevel world musicians actually have more opportunities to earn income from performances than their commercially oriented colleagues. Thus, as a world music artist, it pays to hone your skills as a lecturer/demonstrator, as a master teacher, as well as learning to work the audience at a club.
4. It’s a fresh and diverse source of compelling content. The great flexibility comes from world music’s multifaceted nature: It’s not a genre; it’s a set of a thousand interlocking genres.
The various styles, traditions, sounds almost always have two qualities commercial genres lack. One, they carry cultural knowledge that falls outside of the American mainstream and is thus considered intriguing and/or edifying in and of themselves (which is why your local children’s librarian wants you to perform as part of their programming).
Two, they sound new and exciting, filled with timbres and beats that blast through the walls of highly-compressed pop and rock most often heard on screens and on the air. This hasn’t escaped savvy music directors and composers, DJs and corporate events planners. The opportunities to find new ears, or for professionals and music lovers to embrace new sounds, will only expand as the digital revolution continues.
5. It’s perfect for the Cloud-based music future. As music consumption shifts from album and product-based purchases to one-off files and now streams, the more adventurous side of the American listener can finally emerge.
It may be hard to imagine someone picking up an $18 CD on a lark, but it’s not hard at all to picture a curious music fan clicking on a streaming file of Thai psychedelic rock or Colombian salsa as part of a subscription service. Just to give you a taste of the possibilities: Spotify, one of the leading streaming services, boasts over 500,000 paid subscribers registered since September 2009.
The future is the Cloud, and the Cloud may be just the thing to help independent, far-flung artists get their music to once unreachable corners of the global market. World music doesn’t have a “big four” of foundering, confused, irate major labels to inhibit this process and criminalize customers with lawsuits, for example. It doesn’t have to panic as unwieldy brick-and-mortar outlets go under and physical products (including, by the way, stand-alone iPods) stop selling. The old industry only rarely worked in global artists’ favor, and now we have a chance to build something radically more democratic, freewheeling, and pro-artist.
In this curious and exciting new world, digital distribution, licensing, and most importantly marketing will play key roles. And world music artists have a marketing goldmine: They have stories, lives, whole other worlds to tap into and to set their art apart.
DubMC.com is sponsored by rock paper scissors, inc., a "world music publicity firm." Contact rock paper scissors, inc. about publicity campaigns for your album release, tour, festival, or other global music project.
1. Avoid abstractions, especially ones that are literal translations of expressions in your native tongue. You can't just translate a bio and make it work.
2. On the other hand, if every other word is italicized, your bio is not in English. Ex. This uligerchin sings khoomei to appease the gazariin ezid.
3. If every other sentence includes a list of festivals, collaborations, and "important" concerts or awards, you haven't written a bio. You've written a CV.
4. While you may be very proud of your Argentine Jazz Award, if no one else has ever heard of these awards, they don't help you make your case.
5. Please, please, please don't create a DOCUMENT IN ALL CAPS. Or in comic sans. Or with !!!lots of enthusiastic punctuation!!! It makes you look crazy.
DubMC.com is sponsored by rock paper scissors, inc., a "world music publicity firm." Contact rock paper scissors, inc. about publicity campaigns for your album release, tour, festival, or other global music project.
