51 f Marketing
With so much of the release process now easy and cheap, there had to be a hitch.
“It’s quite a battle to get press,” Steven Collins admits, “particularly if you’re working alone.”
Large mail-outs of promo copies and
biogs won’t guarantee you’ll get noticed, Jason Steel warns. “If you’re DIY, you’re competing for attention with people that have got full-time pluggers.” “Often,” Collins adds, “if a package arrives on their desk and hasn’t come from a PR company they know, it just goes to the bottom of the pile and you may not even get a single review.” [fRoots, we should point out, is an exception to this rule.]
So you could buy professional help. S
But: “We tried that once and it didn’t work for us,” Collins counters. “We hired a press guy for £1000 and got the same amount of press we were getting ourselves.” Nigel Spencer had a similar disappointment. “When I’ve paid for PR in the past it’s not made a blind bit of difference to sales. That’s not to write it off though.” Clearly there’s a Catch 22 in operation here…
arah McQuaid has a more posi- tive experience of pluggers. “Pat Tynan does my PR and does a wonderful job of it. I chose him because when I was a music jour- nalist in Ireland the products he sent me tended to be consistently good.” The fRoots CD-receiving desk puts indepen- dent PRs Sally Reeves, Harriet Simms, John Crosby and Will McCarthy (to mention a few) in the same category.
According to CD Baby, e-mailing your fan base direct is still the most effective way to make sales. All artists should be managing a mailing list, collecting address- es at gigs, online, on social media and from purchases. Free e-mail marketing services such as Mail Chimp, or the inexpensive YMLP recommended by fRoots, can help. And nothing beats pooling media contacts with fellow artists.
Social media
Meanwhile, the web is not what it was. MySpace – once mighty – is now quite unfashionable, but Jason Steel remem- bers how it gave him a break. “When we started, we were still on the back end of that MySpace boom. Everyone was con- tacting everyone. The lines of communi- cation were really open and direct, so it was easy to sell things direct. You’d put something up, put a bit of effort into the packaging and it sold.”
Similarly, Steven Collins uploaded a few tracks to MySpace with few expecta- tions. “Without doing any promotion you could find an audience really easily. People found it and started messaging me and were really into it, so clearly there was an audience there.” That surprise following prompted his first release.
But somewhere between then and
now, the web saturated itself with self- promotion and the internauts of the world uttered a collective ‘meh’. Phil Edwards, who put his 52 Folk Songs project on Band- camp, tells a story more in keeping with today’s online climate. “I thought the ease of access to the web and the lack of gate- keepers would spare me the humiliation of getting knocked back. What’s actually happened is that I’ve got access to a tiny niche that nobody knows about, and I’ve just been ignored.”
An Editor speaks
Want to maximise the chances of your CD being noticed, taken seriously, standing more chance of getting that elusive airplay and reviews? Here are our ten top tips!
1) Whatever form of CD packaging you use, make sure it has a spine with the details on. Without that, it vanishes into the racks of DJs, journalists etc, never to be seen again
2) Give it a label name and a cata-
logue number. It will make it look more legit: some people still react against ‘vanity publishing’.
3) Don’t make that catalogue num- ber 001.
4) Give it a bar code, even if you have no immediate plans to put it into retail distribution. It might need it later, and it looks more like a proper release.
5) Put a web site and/or email address on the outside of the cover.
6) Put the track times on the out- side of the cover: busy DJs will love you a little bit more.
7) If short run duplicating on CD- Rs, use the ones with a silver playing side, not blue. The quality is no differ- ent but they look like the ‘real thing’.
8) When sending out promotional copies, send the finished product in its proper packaging, not an incomplete advance in a plastic pocket. Your CD is the single best advertisement for itself, so it’s stupid to cut corners for the sake of the odd pound or two a copy.
9) The most you need to send with your CD is a short factual biog covering one side of A4. Avoid purple prose and any reference to the influence of Nick Drake or Joni Mitchell: maxi-cliché!
10) If you’re doing download-only albums via Bandcamp etc, always include booklet/ package PDF artwork for people who might want to burn their own CD versions.
Katie Rose is more positive, but emphasises the need to get proactive about being heard on the web. “Create good quality free content to share with your community. Write regular newsletters and blogs and use multimedia: it doesn’t have to be a top budget music video. It’s so easy now to create and edit photos and videos from phones and small cameras and post it on YouTube. Social media is fantas- tic – but like any tool it has pros and cons and needs to be used gracefully and pro- fessionally. Do Not Spam.”
Nigel Spencer is wary of giving social media too much time. “I think there is a tendency to use everything out there and try to maintain accounts at Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, ReverbNation, Sound- Cloud, Tumblr and god know what else. Social networking is fine and helps raise the profile but it doesn’t necessarily trans- late into records sold.”
Both Spencer and Rose agree on the importance of your own web site. These days, no skill is needed to create profes- sional-looking sites. Services such as Wee- bly and Wix provide all-in-one drag-and- drop editors and hosting plans, while
Wordpress.org is a highly modular system for the more adventurous.
However, self-promotion is clearly time-consuming and could turn into a full- time job if you let it. “Given everything I’ve said,” McQuaid reflects, “I’d still consider handing over to a mainstream label, if the deal looked like a good one. The marketing machines they have in place are capable of way more than I can achieve on my own.”
Most agree that little is better than real life contact. “Word of mouth is the best form of PR,” Rose says. “If you have aspira- tions beyond bedroom gigs with you and your banjo, meeting other people is required. Connections, sales, ideas, jams, collaborations and gigs are all about rela- tionships. You don’t have to become a fake socialite, just genuinely contribute, culti- vate and communicate with your communi- ty. Collaborate – team up with other artists to create events – it’s more fun and more effective when you are all promoting. Be generous and cross-promote where you can. Create links with like-minded artists or organisations that share your purpose.”
Royalties
Performing rights organisations (PROs) are charged with collecting and distributing royalties. Some find the process opaque, but it is a vital source of revenue.
“PRS [now PRS for Music] distributes royalties to those who write music or lyrics, and their publisher if they have one,” Andrew Cronshaw explains. “It also pays arrangers of traditional material. These royalties come from broadcast recorded music, or music played in any way in pub- lic, be it live or recorded. MCPS [now linked with PRS For Music] distributes roy- alties for the use of recorded music by a record company, film company or online. A DIY record company must pay MCPS a roy- alty for the use of the music on the record- ing it’s releasing. If you wrote or arranged it, you’re paying yourself, but if someone else wrote it the royalty will go to them, usually via their publisher.”
PPL, meanwhile, distributes royalties to the performers of music, so if you played on a track, the record company must tell PPL, so that PPL can pay you. “It also issues the ISRC numbers that identify tracks on legal download media such as iTunes, and legal streaming media such as Spotify,” Cronshaw advises.
Mr Folk Police: Nigel Spencer
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