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.
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…
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.