Putmeonit LDN
Last night i went down to AmeLia of Put Me On It’s event at CAMP and managed to capture this portrait of Szjerdene after her sublime gig.. Prompts to all that performed.
10 Reasons You Should Sack Your PR
Around 80% of the promotional emails I receive for putmeonit.com come from PR companies who either don’t care or don’t know what they’re doing - same thing really. I delete most of them unread unless they’re one of the many PRs who go straight in to the spam folder. 15% of emails come from artists directly who do their best. The remaining 5% come from a couple of labels with good internal PR (indies tend to be better than majors), and two or three PRs who do a great job.
Here are 10 reasons you should sack your PR and get a better one. You’re worth it.
- They don’t discuss a strategy with you (because they probably don’t have one).
- They send out one email blast to hundreds of blogs with no personal approaches or follow ups, when as we all know, one size definitely does not fit all.
- They don’t try to secure you exclusives, features or interviews. Half an hour on the front page of Nah Right in exchange for your blood, sweat & tears. Result.
- They send your music out at ridiculous times (10pm on a Friday night?! You may as well just put it in the bin).
- They send multiple emails to the same press list on the same day (*select all, delete*)
- They don’t report back to you. Hey, you’re only paying them, they’re not your slave.
- They’re on a retainer but don’t try to build you long term press relationships, because as we all know hundreds of short term relationships lead to a life of true fulfillment.
- They send out music by anyone who pays them. You, Rebecca Black, Ja Rule - it’s all music after all.
- They’re spammers “HEY @kanyewest @pitchfork @sarahpalin COMMENT, LIKE, SHARE, RT THE NEW SONG BY @wackface!! http://bit.ly/oDJdYtt”
- They don’t BCC - thus incurring the enduring wrath and hatred of all bloggers for ever and ever amen.
Tip: ask bloggers for recommendations - there are only one or two people I ever recommend for online “urban” PR (@jkim645 being number 1). Ask for a proposal and to see previous campaign strategies and successes. You can also find someone’s IP address and check it on a database for blacklisting, which at the very least should let you know it’s not worth paying for your work to end up in a spam filter.
Bandcamp vs Topsin
*Independent artist or label? Set aside an hour to watch this
I admit I was on the fence. Bandcamp was an amazingly simple tool which (at first) let anyone sell or give away their music for free in return for fairly valuable data (email addresses and post/ zip codes). Topspin was a paid service that only approved artists could use and they focused more on their marketing advice as a benefit. In the last couple of months, Topspin has become available to anyone, and (I’m so sorry Bandcamp, you tried!) it just wins hands down.
Having had to train artists up on how to actually make use of the data they were collecting from Bandcamp, set them up with mailing list provider services to send emails, and generally try to turn artist friends in to digital marketers the above Topspin demo is like an answered prayer. They have literally thought of everything at the click of a button, and because its an all in one solution it works out cheaper. If you’re an artist or a record label and you haven’t checked it out yet, make a cup of tea, set aside an hour and watch the video above - it is a game changer.
The Easy Way To Write Your Bio
“I started making music in 2002…”
“I grew up in South London…”
“I’m best known for working with so and so…”
It’s really hard to write your artist bio, and sometimes it’s even harder to find someone who can write it for you. Sitting there staring at a blank screen can even make you question whether you’ve actually done anything worth writing about, which doesn’t exactly inspire you to start.
Last week I came across a really simple way of attacking the bio problem when helping a friend write his, and that was to stop thinking about it as a biography.
At the top of the page, start with “Once Upon A Time”, and begin with how your parents met. Imagine you’re writing the story of your family, with you as the lead character. It should be easy to read for almost anyone over the age of 12, and it should make sense without boring them. Try to write quickly and in a continuous flow (I turn off the internet and write in all caps, then change to the correct case at the end). Read it back to yourself aloud, though you may want to pick another voice - I made up a cheesy African American 70s award show host called Bill.
Once you have finished your story, go back and edit. Get rid of “Once Upon A Time” of course, and then delete anything that is irrelevant or boring - you should be able to get the whole thing down to three or four paragraphs. A good bio should make people feel they almost know you and want to ask you questions - if you give away every single detail what is there to ask? The hardest thing is knowing what to leave out, so keep imagining someone reading it who has never heard of you and comes from another country (that should also help you remove overly presumptuous statements - “in 2004 she worked with all of Kiddlington’s greats - The Badlights, Emma Hope & co…” Huh?)
Try to avoid the usual pitfalls; don’t start every paragraph with your name, keep lists of people you’ve worked with or places you’ve been as short as possible, don’t fixate on boring technical details, and don’t write in the first person “then I did this, then I did that”. Most importantly, don’t tell yourself you can’t do it before you start.
Stop Rehearsing In A Vacuum.
When talking to a friend the other day he was embarrassed that his clothes smelled of the rehearsal room he’d been in all afternoon because it was a “closed space”, and it struck me how solitary and insular music rehearsals can be. Of course this makes sense sonically, but none of the other performing arts are rehearsed in this way and it got me thinking.
Before you reach a certain level, some things are almost inevitable. The soundsystem at the venue itself might (will) be crap. The sound guy probably won’t care about your carefully constructed set. You might not even get a soundcheck and have to beg just for a line check. Your set may be cut short. You won’t be the only act on the bill and the rest might be terrible. Most people in the crowd won’t know your songs or be able to hear your lyrics. The crowd might talk (yell) all the way through your heartfelt acappella. It sounds quite bleak, but in reality, sometimes it can be - I unofficially manage a number of artists who are paying dues, and sometimes they get off stage and feel like crying.
The problem is, to the audience not much of that stuff really matters. Most people cannot tell if the mix or sound system is terrible. They’re not expecting to be able to hear all of your lyrics - the only thing they may fully understand is what you say between songs. They just want to be entertained. Something I often feel at gigs is that musicians forget the obvious difference between being in the studio and being on stage - we can see you. It sounds glib, almost patronizing, but I say it because I come from the opposite end of the performance spectrum as a former dancer, where rehearsal is always either carried out in front of a mirror or an audience, we crave constant feedback and the soundsystem is probably the last thing on our minds. The idea of stepping on stage without that public preparation would terrify me.
Don’t wait until after your gig to ask people for feedback, no one wants you to feel bad about something that has already happened and can’t be changed. Ask some trusted and honest friends to come to your rehearsals, (not the day before your show, weeks before and regularly) so that they can give you some honest feedback about how your performance makes them feel. If possible, get their children to come along, that way you’ll really know if you can hold people’s attention! Ask yourself honestly if your show (not set, show) will make people leave raving about you to their friends no matter how crap the venue and circumstances, because that’s what makes it worthwhile, not the rubbish fee. Think about what you will do in worst case (but probably not that uncommon) scenarios. Once you step on that stage your every moment is a performance and we want you to commit to it and deliver it to us with very ounce of emotion you had when you wrote it and more, (but this time also on a visual level that has to scale), no matter what happens.
I still talk about how they cut the power on Angie Stone at a festival ten years ago after just one song, but we all stayed in the tent in the dark with lighters, singing with her and clapping our way through her set. Or when Slum Village backflipped off the speakers. Or how Lissie’s drummer can sing and play guitar all at the same time. When Matthew Herbert and Eska made the whole Barbican sob. James Brown holding his dancer over his head and being able to do the splits in his 60s. I could go on and on. I imagine you all have amazing gig stories too, but I doubt many of them started “the sound in this venue was amazing…”
Get Rid Of Your Myspace Page. Now.
If you haven’t already of course. I have spent a large portion of my afternoon trying to remember my old password in order to get rid of my Myspace page because the email address I registered with is no longer active, as I suspect is the case for lots of people. This is probably the reason I didn’t realise that Myspace changed to a (rubbish of course) new layout where all of the customizations made long ago no longer work and look like a car crash, and there was a giant ad for some rubbish band I don’t like on the front.
“Why not just leave it there? I can’t be bothered to work out how to change or delete it and no one ever checks it anymore surely?”. For most regular folks that is true, but for musicians Myspace was the industry standard for a very long time. That means it usually still comes up top in the search engine rankings for your name even if it looks awful, people are clicking on it - get your shiny up to date website up there instead.
“What about my 10,000 friends??” If you’re not logging in what’s the point of them? Concentrate on growing your e-mail list and actually emailing it - Twitter does a better job of letting your fans speak to you directly and hear your news than Myspace ever did anyway.
Another reason you should get rid is that the long, humiliating, protracted death of Myspace courtesy of Rupert Murdoch means that your profile is being used to advertise things you have no control over unless you buy a premium account, similar to a bot which harvests and parks adverts on the urls of people’s names who may one day become famous (and want to buy them back for an extortionate sum).
What next?? Once you’ve hit ‘cancel account’ 20 times and gone through the rigmarole which just confirms how rubbish and desperate Myspace is, what next? (Either do that or spend hours updating your page, but don’t leave it). There are lots of ways to build a decent web presence, but by far the best option I’ve seen for artists recently is Flavors. Flavors is a website builder which makes simple but beautiful design really easy, and collects everything else you’ve got scattered about the web (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Last FM gigs, Soundcloud, Bandcamp etc - all of which are great but don’t give the full picture) in to one nice looking place. I’ve been recommending it to my friends so a good recent example of it in action is ericlaumusic.com.
A Few Tips (for non-web nerds)
1.//Whatever the top search engine result for you is, make sure it’s up to date. If you don’t want to delete your Myspace page, update it then push it down the search engine rankings with a good website, Bandcamp, Soundcloud and your social network profiles.
2.//Whether you are about to build a website or not, register your domain name (url) before the afore mentioned bot harvests it. I use GoDaddy.com
for putmeonit.com because they send reminders if your credit card is expiring (instead of just auctioning off your URL as a third party once did to me!).
3.// If you’re signing up for Flavors, the pro version at $20 a year is pretty cheap and it’s on 2 for 1 at the moment so if you arrange to sign up with a friend you can split the cost and get it for $10 each. Bargain.
4.// Whatever your website looks like, add a newsletter sign up form and USE IT. I’ve downloaded countless free Bandcamp projects in exchange for my email address and I rarely hear from the people who’ve put them out. Your mailing list are the people who are going to buy your projects when they’re for sale, come to your gigs, blog about you etc - stay in touch. I use Your Mailing List Provider because it’s the cheapest I’ve found, and pretty easy to use. Apparently if you use the code: 02NA2J you get a discount. If you’re emailing more than a couple of hundred people at a time use a mailing list provider or your email account might get suspended for spam!
5.// There are lots of website builders aimed at artists out there at the moment but for the most part the services they provide seem to be a bit of a rip off - all you really need is a blog (Tumblr is a winning combination of easy to use and very attractive without customization), a bio page, and links to your music, videos, gigs, press shots and social networks.
Whatever you do, don’t leave your Myspace looking like a car crash from 1996.
Raise it up. J Dilla Changed My Life @ Scala, London 6th Feb 2011.
5 years has gone by quickly, RIP.
How To Apply For Red Bull Music Academy - A Little Extra Advice
It’s that time again, and a large chunk of the emerging musical community is currently in a mild state of panic trying to fill in the epic 53 question Red Bull Music Academy application in hopes of making it to Tokyo this October. The video RBMA put together is fantastic, but I thought I’d ask a few of the past participants if they could add any extra words of advice.
A couple of my thoughts - The first page looks relatively easy but Question 7 “This is where I am in relation to the musical universe« Please draw us a map!” might be a bit daunting - start with the chunky questions you feel confident about answering first and once your form filling juices are going get on to the tougher questions, you don’t have to go through it in order. You might just be Googled - what comes up (something to bear in mind anyway!)? Is the first result a Myspace page you haven’t updated in 5 years? Sort it out. *How to post coming soon. It’s an amazing opportunity, but if you don’t get in are you proactively trying to line up other exciting opportunities off your own back so that you’ll be ok either way? Personally, that’s the kind of participant I would want to pick.
Oddisee - The RBMA application is one of the few tests in life you’ll actually enjoy taking. Give your self lots of time to fill the application out. It’s designed to reveal who you are & what your music is about to the academy, you wouldn’t want to cram that into an evening. Don’t try to make yourself out to be something you’re not, your best chance of getting in is being yourself. Show that you work well in a group environment, show that you’re open to different cultures, mediums & genres. Just remember, these are questions designed to find out who you are, how difficult could that be?
Andreya Triana - Main and only piece of advice is to really put your heart and soul into your application, send them music you love and don’t feel you need to have a finished polished cd of music!! (I sent some scrappy home made recordings and a few collabs). It’s not your bulk standard application and can be as fun as you want to make it. I personally really enjoyed it, it gave me the chance to get the coloring pencils out and all my old mixtapes (which in turn bought back alot of great memories). They won’t give you any feedback due to the amount of applications they get but they are great people and if they think you’re right for the academy they’ll be able to spot it a mile off. So just show them the best you can what you do and hope for the best!
Kidkanevil - It’s an epic form so the main thing is to give yourself a good amount of time to do it. Try get a free day just to get really into it. Think about your answers properly but enjoy it, the questions are pretty fun, its not like doing your tax return or whatever! It’s not a performance so don’t act like your the shit, just be honest and genuine. They’re super clued up, so you’re not pitching yourself like you’re applying for funding or some shit, it’s more like chatting to fellow music geeks. Yeah, cool. Good luck yoOoOoOo!!!
PUT ME ON IT beach party at Soundwave Festival, Croatia (Sat 24th July 2010).
The second video from the PMOI x Homebase CMJ showcase in New York. DTMD are such an exciting young group and I was astounded by their confidence and stage presence - I don’t think it will be long before we see them touring Europe.
“Instant Pop” To Beat Piracy (AKA Finally Starting To Meet Demand)
An article written in The Guardian this Sunday left a strange taste in my mouth, and after doing some digging pretty much every other publication I’ve seen has “reported” the story/ regurgitated the press release in the same way (please will someone remind me of the difference between blogging and journalism again?).
The general premise is that “Wait is not a word in the vocabulary of the current generation”, that “Piracy remains a crippling problem for the British music business”, and that “Britain’s two biggest record labels will finally try to play their part in stopping it”.
I personally would like to say to that, bullshit. Below is Exhibit A, a cassette tape (yep, that’s what that plastic thing is kids!) I recorded of Trevor Nelson’s Rhythm Nation show on Radio 1 in 1999. My average weekend involved waiting for Trev to come on, recording his show (you couldn’t leave because you had to turn the tape over), then painstakingly writing down the tracklist and six weeks later trying desperately to order in a few singles or albums from HMV in Brighton “LL Cool Who?”. Is ripping a song that’s not out for another six weeks off of Youtube any different?
The iPod and iTunes store launched in 2001, and yet we’re in 2011 and the process for selling music hasn’t changed - 6 weeks of radio play to “build anticipation”, then a single or two, follow up with the album. Just writing that makes me laugh. I wonder at times how many people at the top of major labels are actually music fans. If you are a music fan you search for a song because you can’t get it out of your head and you really want to listen to it - not because you’re a terrible and impatient person. Some people won’t pay for music regardless, but it has been proven that the majority of free downloaders are also the biggest paying customers - because they are the biggest consumers of music.
The question is not so much one of stealing, but one of supply and demand. If I search for “Jessie J Do It Like A Dude”, currently at Number 2 in the charts and all over the press release as an example of the new “on air, on sale” policy, what comes up on the front page is lots of videos and press - not an iTunes or Amazon link. I then click on her Youtube video where there is a link to buy the single, but that’s an extra step in the chain and I’ve already sated my appetite. 79p is often the price consumers will pay for convenience and to save time searching online (not just because we are morally compelled to support an artist), in the same way we might pay 79p more for a Starbucks inside a train station than at the lovely local coffee shop 5 minutes down the road (even though we all know what sadly happens to many of them). Unless music retailers can better compete with Youtube as a music search engine they will still fail to truly compete even with this new release strategy (though its worth mentioning they do receive some revenue from online streaming).
The most worrying thing is the amount of pressure this “on air, on sale” strategy could put on radio playlists, which virtually dictate the singles chart. Great news if you can afford a radio plugger and a big campaign, good luck if you can’t. Interestingly, the idea has been floated to create a broader range of charts to incorporate streaming or something like the new Billboard Social 50. It would be interesting to see the difference between a playlist created by committee (Radio 1) and one created by listeners (e.g. Last FM). This week the Last FM top 10 includes Florence and The Machine, Daft Punk, The xx and Arcade Fire, none of whom are in the R1 singles chart or A-Playlist.
The generally underexposed other side of the story is that more units of music are being bought, more music and music of a wider range is being listened to, and more musicians have professional careers than ever before - the music industry (or perhaps major labels) are not so much being “ravaged” as generally doing a very bad job of adjusting to the market whilst blaming some of their biggest customers for not remaining in the past with them.
Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition
You’ve got until Monday 17th January if you want to enter the Glastonbury Emerging Talent competition which gives emerging unsigned artists the chance to perform on the main stage at one of the biggest music festivals in the world. It is open to artists from any genre, you don’t have to be a guitar wielding mud lover, and rumours abound that Prince and Beyonce are playing this year so it’s worth it just to get in.
I’m on the judging panel this year, and I will be objective, but it would be in your best interests if you’re entering to only send your very best tracks (on their surprisingly easy application form), because I’m told there will be hundreds we have to sift through and I don’t imagine we’ll get to track 27 for every act. Good luck!
Apply for the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Festival here
The first PMOI video from our showcase in NYC this October, with Olivier Daysoul. Shot & edited by Joel Craigs, interview by myself.
A couple of pictures from PMOI crew’s exploits in Brooklyn for our CMJ showcase (Nov 19th)
It definitely wasn’t all smooth sailing but I learned a lot, and am still slightly amazed it happened.
