Promotions Archives - Page 3 of 3

August 21, 2012August 22, 2012

Behind The Board – NEXT Charity Concert Series And Captain Lawrence Brewery

In a couple days, we will be working at a new venue (as previously mentioned) with the NEXT Music Charity Concert Series. We’re really excited by this one. We will be working at the Captain Lawrence Brewery in Elmsford, NY on August 23rd, inside the brewery enjoying craft beers and one of America’s greatest bands, Black Taxi. Originally this was scheduled to be outside, but there are a few factors preventing an outside show there at the moment. We are working towards returning to that plan, but in the mean time we have a huge warehouse full of beer to play with!

This will however, present us with some new challenges as we will be in quite the harsh environment for a sound production company. Nothing we can’t handle! Most specifically, we need to dial in a venue that is designed for brewing beer and storing boxes. Concrete floors and metal ceilings. Brewing vats and countless bottles and kegs everywhere. Reflections will have to be dealt with from numerous areas. Environments like these have a tendency to reflect severely high notes. One factor that will help is cardboard. The stage area is actually going to have stacks of cardboard boxes on both sides. Equalization will be vital here. There will be sections in the sounds you hear that will be drastically reigned in, while others are severely boosted. We’ll follow up after the first show on this blog.

Black Taxi, in case you are severely musically challenged enough to not have heard of them, are the modern answer to the Rolling Stones. Dance-able, creative song writing with high entertainment value. These guys are a lot of fun to watch. Honestly, if you don’t know who Black Taxi is, then you’re definitely not listening to NEXT Music on the radio or on ITunes. So head on over to www.allthingsnext.com and click on “podcast”. Pick your preferred method of listening (Stitcher, ITunes, Stream it right from NEXT) and catch up already! You’ve got till Thursday!

Here’s a little help:

Food will be provided by Bridgeview Tavern and The Cookery pizza truck. So, you got great freaking beer, an awesome band, great eats, and Chris Bro to talk music with. Why anyone would stay home this Thursday I do not know! It’s kind of like the keg parties of our youth. Only! We’ll be partying at the kegs house. And with better food than most parties.

*Captain Lawrence Brewery is so easy to find you have to be careful not to drive past it. (Come on. Admit it. You’ve done that before!) 444 Saw Mill River Road, Elmsford‎ NY. Exit 2 on I-287 West (Route 9A).

*Black Taxi is managed by the super capable Nicole at MezzoForte Productions . Please visit their website if you book bands. She works with some great talent.

August 20, 2012August 22, 2012

Sound Advice – An Open Letter to Bands Pt II

Today the music scene is awful for young original musicians. The music industry has failed to survive the internet thus far. The record label behemoths have fallen. Popular commercial radio is consolidating to very few stations and formats in the big cities. Clubs would rather hire DJ’s and some cover bands than the original bands. Potential fans attentions have moved away from the new musicians coming up, and the DJ is the new “Rock Star”. Bands today must work harder, for far less money for a long time building up a following that will raise their value to potential venues. Fortunately there is the tools of social networking out to help you do this. If used properly and consistently, a band can still build up a huge following.

A proper social marketing program for any band should include Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Google+. They’re all free. They all have millions of users, meaning if used right, millions of potential viewers. Bands also should have a Sonic Bids, Reverb Nation, MySpace and last but not least their own web page. Your own web page will be your hub. All these social media pages will center around this webpage. It should also contain your “Press Kit”. Direct them to your page by putting out content that is on your page, but linked out to the social media world. For example, host a video of one of your songs on your web page. Post a link on your Facebook page with a preview and statement saying check out our latest performance (or similar). Viewers of your page will then see this on their news feeds, click on the link, and be taken to your page to listen to the music.

You must post at regular intervals. Not every 5 minutes, but hourly would help. The more you post, the more you show up in news feeds. The trick is to find the interval between presence and annoyance that makes sure people see you out there without hating you! Using insights on your Facebook page will help you decide the right interval by seeing when people are most likely to see your posts.

Content is vital! What all these sites do is help you get content out to people. What is content? Content is pictures, audio clips, video clips, and little fun blurbs about the band. All of this must be of the best quality you can afford to get, so spend some money and invest in yourselves! If you’re going to put out lousy videos with awful audio, you’re going to give people a bad impression. BNK Productions is one of many companies that are able to help you with this. Load your pages with 3 or 4 pieces of music/videos to be rotated in a regular rotation. Post on your Facebook and Twitter pages links to the new content. Companies like ourselves come out and record a multi-track audio recording of your show, a bunch of photos, and some videos that can be mixed with the audio recordings. Now you have new content for your pages. as you write new songs, or refresh old ones you can get more done.

Again, the quality of the content is vital. Fuzzy audio, pixelated video, and blurry pictures are absolutely annoying. You will lead people away with that kind of content. If you want to be taken seriously you need to appear serious! I’m sure most people who read this have gone on to Youtube to see a video only to find it was from someone’s phone and you can’t see or hear anything! It’s annoying. Do it enough and people will avoid your band and that will defeat all this effort!

For a great example of using the social net to market yourself, find yourself on Daria Musk’s Facebook , Google + and webpage . She is a perfect study of how to market yourself in the Social Music biz…and could be considered the music queen of the Google Hangouts.

For information on bringing us out to build your portfolio of content email us using the contact link above. We offer all kinds of marketing/promotional help for bands.

August 20, 2012August 20, 2012

Sound Advice – An Open Letter To Bands Pt I

Our friend over at the Historical Inebriant posted a little advice on The Historical Inebriant Blog . As a marketing pro, professional alcoholic, and music fan he gives a bit of important advice. We repeat it here for your review. We will also follow up with this post with more advice on how bands should be marketing themselves.

An open letter to New Bands

I heard a great band yesterday, granted they were only 2 out of a 4 person band, but they sounded great, had some wonderful original music and did some inventive covers of some well played songs…however, they haven’t really marketed themselves so chances are, you’ve never head of them. I am not a musician and will never be (and I’m pretty cool with that). I do, however, love music. I really, really love live music, and if you have a band I want to hear you and maybe tell some of my friends about you, and maybe bring them to see you, and maybe we will buy one of your CDs but know that unless your band is really, really big – you have to do most of your own publicity and marketing. Thursday through Saturday I tweet about bands playing in my local area (Stamford, CT). There are about 6 venues that will have live music on those nights and I try to cover them all. However, so many times I will get the name of the band from the bar but that’s it. I will try an internet search and often won’t come up with anything on the band. Hence this post.

*********Disclaimer*********

I know nothing about the music industry – and never will. These thoughts are from a non-qualified, non-professional, never been in a band, can’t play a note, can’t sing karaoke, can’t read music, can’t keep time – guy off the street… that being said…

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I came across a band on twitter the other day (if you’ve never heard of twitter stop reading this right now (I mean it – stop reading and google twitter!) composed of three brothers ages 12, 10 and 9 who do pop/punk pretty well (for 12,10 and 9). You can read a bio of them on Facebook, you can hear their music on SoundCloud and you can follow their gigs on twitter. Their music will get better and better with time, but the most important thing is that you can find them & hear them NOW. Isn’t that what this is all about? Being heard, being known, having people who like your music come to your gigs and buy your music and share their love of your band with their friends? Granted, the band I mentioned had help, (follow me on twitter @thi_stamford if you want to know who they are) but again the important thing is to realize the marketing(gasp) is an integral part to the music and if the music is important to you, then the marketing has to be also.

I have a friend who does sound for bands (professionally) (BNK Productions), I have another friend (Focus In Digital) who takes photos of bands (professionally). I like to write and see bands live (amateur). We have talked for months about putting down some of the absolute basic things that every band needs to have to make this whole music thing work, but even we are torn between other commitments and have not have a chance to sit down together. After yesterday’s events, I am starting the list today with what I believe is a no-brainer Number One thing to have and my friends and I will add to it over the coming days.Number One:Get a facebook account in the name of your band. Ok, yes I think facebook sucks, (I think most people do) and I think if I see the word timeline one more time I’m going to dig out my eyes with a dull soup spoon and scream till my ears bleed. But, I tell you what my friend – there are 500 Million facebook users who probably feel the same way . Open an account (its free Btw –FREE) under the band name and make the other band members administrators to the account so you all can post to it from your personal facebook accounts. Buy smartphones so you can post about your travels and gigs on the fly. Use the camera on that phone so you can take take cool pics (more to come on that) of your gigs (or yourselves) and post those. Take some video and post it. Even not so great quality is better than nothing to your fans (do not use bad quality though). Put some music up there, (we will have much more on that later) even if its just you working through a new song. “Like” other bands on facebook so you can message each other about how sucky facebook is. Mention you are on facebook at your gigs so people can “Like“ you (second gasp) and then push out notices of your next gig to them using events so they will know and remember to show up to hear your great music. List all your events – who knows I might just be in East Bungalow on the 28th and I would catch your show there. Give away some some downloads of some of your live stuff in exchange for a “like” and/or build up an email list with offers and giveaways. And then – when you reach about 35,000 likes and its a mad house wherever you play, just send me an email and say “you were right about that whole sucky facebook thing”.

August 7, 2012August 7, 2012

Behind The Board – Photo Gallery of The Matt O’Ree Band at Alive @ 5 & The Rack

And finally our pics from the show, taken by our partner @ Focus In Digital (give the slideshow a chance to load)

One thing to notice in this gallery is the crowd at the stage. In all the other galleries out in the media, these photos are shown as the crowd for the next act when in fact they were there already watching The Matt O’Ree Band play.

BNK Productions again thanks The Historical Inebriant & Focus In Digital for their promotional help.

$Crowd-Matt\'s Phone$

Video from someone in the audience: