The official thread about promoting music?

the end.

i second this. engage the audience, dont check email from onstage.

I've been talking to a guy in an indie-pop group who are a big deal in their domestic market (they won an MTV Europe Award and the local equivalent of the Brit awards for best band / album) but don't really have a presence in the UK. They'd like to try to make more of an impression but don't really know how to go about it.

Is it feasible to get press, support slots, etc if your promo team is based in another country and doesn't necessarily have great personal contacts in the UK or is representation here pretty much obligatory?

They're quite keen not to just get stuck playing shows to ex-pats but are realistic about the prospects of much else happening quickly.

Is there any useful advice anyone can give them?

Should probably mentioned that they sing in (flawless) English and make music that would, to me at least, be a pretty natural fit on XFM or Radio 1.

what are you all doing these days to try and get people to listen to your music?

Haha, mostly marveling that anyone listens at all given the amount of music and media saturation these days.

Have you tried being friends with TikTok influencers? Or possibly turning your kids into TikTok influencers?

But for real, I think it's different for every musician/release/genre, but personally I've had the most luck with either 1) getting a label with more social media muscle than I have to put something out, or 2) sending a message to the followers I've built up on Bandcamp over the years.

Everything else is pretty much a crapshoot, although it least with DJ culture there are the mechanisms of someone putting your track in a mix, and I can send them to DJs who I like, etc. So there are more chances of some random cool thing happening, and idk how that works with non-dance music these days.

It's definitely a very difficult thing if you're not plugged into an irl scene of some kind, I try to get my music to people who are when possible.

i've put out plenty of digital-only releases with no live support over the past several years so i don't have big expectations, but we're putting out new music sometime in the next few months probably and i was just trying to come up with a plan to see if i can get anyone outside of our usual audience of friends and family to listen to it.
the one thing that was good the last couple of times was getting the releases to our local community radio station - they have a local music quota so anything that's local and in their heavy/light rotation of new music gets played regularly, and their audience (sad old hipsters) overlaps with ours.
i would do tiktoks, just for fun, but i don't have the creative energy for that kind of content.

but it does feel like an impossible prospect in 2022

It seems worth at least trying to send it to some indie labels who you like and seeing if anyone bites, before you put it out yourself?

a lot of sites are using submithub now, which is annoying bc a) it feels scammy even though you don't have to pay for anything and b) it doesn't seem like you can submit albums, only individual tracks

there's also a site called musosoup that you do have to pay for to submit music to sites. some sites only accept submithub/musosoup etc for music submissions, which is pretty gross!

well i would say taking two months between finishing this album and actually releasing it in order to systematically try and get promotion for it had mixed results. my goal wasn't really so much to sell a bunch of albums so much as it was to try and get some people outside of our immediate circle of friends and family to listen to it:

GOOD - the places i was most hoping would cover the album (bandcamp, rosy overdrive, chicago reader) did cover it in a positive way. the little bandcamp feature led to a few sales to people whose email addresses i didn't recognize (ie not friends or family). the local community radio station has been playing our music a lot. tiktoks are fun to make and some of them got decent engagement though i don't think they really pushed people to listen to the music.

CONS - the world of websites that write about small independent (like truly independent, not being pushed by a big promotional company) rock releases is very depressing - there are almost none left that write about music in a thoughtful way, and a lot of them brazenly charge for coverage, which truly bums me out. i was hoping some of the local college stations would be interested but as far as i can tell none of them are playing it - but it also seems like college stations don't have heavy/light rotation any more and djs just play what they want so you probably have to promote to individual djs instead of the station.

I have absolutely no idea but this is a fascinating thread for me as a person having attempted to do it, how does anyone "stick out" amongst the glut of new music from everyone everywhere, live performance seems to have diminishing returns over the last couple decades, anecdotally, no one I can recall has broken out of the Portland scene in at least a couple decades...

I suspect the answer is networking/social media but also location, though I have friends that garnered some attention through licencing deals for tv shows and the like, who knows how that works but seems like a good thing to do

My best idea presently is to contact individual YouTube/TikTok content creators and offer to make music for them for free, for the "exposure" lol but that is what we're after anyway so why not

That's great that some stuff happened! These days I'm pleased if *anything* comes from trying to promote music independently.

I recently had an adventure trying to find a label for an upcoming LP, and my big takeaways were that 1) it's extremely difficult to get anyone to actually listen to unreleased music, and 2) even the labels that responded positively have releases planned for over a year out and aren't taking anything new on, or at least that's their polite way of saying no. I think we did eventually get a 'yes' that will be great as long as it doesn't fall through, and it only takes one.

Are many musicians using Substack to function as a simple mailing list? I'm considering it, as using twitter and ig is increasingly depressing. I've got a bit of a trad mailing list but not much of a mechanism for anyone new to sign up, aside from asking on those other platforms. Are there any better alternatives?

i haven't heard of that but it seems like it would work if you just want an old-school direct mailing list. i don't know how it would do a better job of acquiring new subscribers than a traditional mailing list but maybe i'm not educated enough about substack works. neither (or instagram) seems like they would do as good a job of getting you in front of people who don't already know your music than twitter, unfortunately.

Yeah. I'd just be happy if some of the people who already follow on those other platforms signed up for a simple newsletter, so I wouldn't have to worry about the vicissitudes of those algorithms.

NA and Jordan, I would appreciate you both linking your music here so I can check it out.

https://shreddedsun.bandcamp.com/album/each-dot-and-each-line

i feel like it's still new enough that i should still be pushing it but i ran out of steam. i'm trying to make a video for one of the songs but that's more for fun than a serious attempt at promotion

NA - I bought the Shredded Sun bandcamp download last week and am very much enjoying it! You and Sarah and Ben did a stellar job!

thanks dude!

Ha sure thing, I already feel like I post my music too much here, but here are some links:
https://linktr.ee/chantswi
https://chants.bandcamp.com/
https://limitedresourceslabel.bandcamp.com/
https://impossiblecityrecords.bandcamp.com/album/dance-the-crevice