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| Journalist Attacks Poor Promo Presentation Received In Mail |
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| posted by Jett Black on Monday September 01 2003 @ 03:34PM PDT |
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The following message (below) sent to a musician/music label (one in the same) regarding their music package which I recently received, and have declined to review in a publication I write for:
I received your package with CD and the indie rag/magazine featuring your recent music history.
I have also received your previous submissions during the last couple of years.
I must say though. I am not now seeing any improvement in the presentation.
I understand the concerns with shipping prices. keeping them down by not using jewel cases. That’s fine. But this CD cover art. or lack thereof is going to keep the number of actual reviews provided to you for each album delivered down to perhaps less than 50%.
Get some CD cover art and insert booklet or fold out, something together and include it with your mail outs of promos. You don't have to feel obligated to package it into a jewel case. We can do that ourselves and we understand the savings it affords you on postage.
Put that savings into High Quality presentation materials.
Otherwise, why should we take your music seriously?
You obviously aren't taking this promo marketing effort seriously at this point.
Most magazines that you should WANT to provide exposure for your music won't even consider your music (meaning they will not even bother to spin it at all) for the following reasons:
No CD insert/cover art that can be scanned for presentation in the magazine (some magazines will accept this format. Others which have a much better distribution will dispose of the CD or pass it off as a freebie. but they won't review it).
CD Label cover - not professional. Not even pretending to be professional.
No bar code, no retail-ready evidence or even appearance of having any adequate distribution. You can fake this and the magazine editors (in most cases) will accept it, even when they know better. The appearance of professionalism is often all that matters.
The thing is, magazine editors do not wish to waste time telling readers about music that is not readily available in stores at least nationwide, and/or does not carry the hallmarks of such music CDs, like CD cover artwork, tray card with bar code (or w/o a barcode is fine, too), contact info. and w/o any overt indications that the music is recorded on a CDR. An abundance of different online music distribution sites helps, or at least a reliable independent music one-stop such as CD Baby (http://www.cdbaby.com).
These are basic steps to appearing more professional in the presentation of your music to magazines which limit the number of reviews that will appear in the pages of every issue.
You are at this point. Not even competing with the majority of higher quality submissions because your music is immediately disqualified based solely upon the presentation.
It takes time to review music; time to assign to whom the review should be made available, time to ship it out again, time to receive, open, and orient one's self to the music.
If your presentation fails to meet the criteria, it will never be sent to a writer on staff (for review purposes) of any magazine that must maintain any level of integrity in regards to what it represents to international readers.
You need to focus on international appeal.
USA alone cannot support music bands to survive and thrive.
The phrase "big in Japan" exists for a reason. Europe, SE Asia, Africa, South America, the Mid-East, all of these areas have larger populations and more abundant and thriving music scenes populated with more avid music fans.
USA is not the answer.
Of course, if Success is not of any interest to you whatsoever. continue releasing music with such a lousy level of attention toward presentation.
The greatest challenge in gaining exposure is simply getting the music PLAYED by those who might be able to provide additional publicity and exposure for your new music releases. Anything that undermines that appeal undermines your chances of ever being heard and gaining that exposure in regards to physical submissions of music to print magazines and many online web zines.
Mp3 formats are an entirely different ball park.
You can make mileage with downloads, etc, but in regards to print media certain basic criteria must be met in order to find success in the targeting of most magazines. Raise the bar on your submissions and you will find greater receptivity to providing reviews and feature stories than you may currently be enjoying. The higher the quality of zine and the greater the distribution, the more expensive each issue is to produce and thus the greater the limitations upon music submissions to screen out more of the submissions automatically and focus only on the best of the best, because print space matters. Those zines often have limitations on word count, too. so CDs are also screened against the number of tracks they include or lack.
A minimum of ten tracks is a safe bet on the list of criteria used for considering new music submissions.
Some zines will accept 8 tracks as full-length, if the other criteria are also met.
CD Baby is a good place to sell such music. they deal with only independent music artists and will sometimes accept such questionable submissions. CD Baby, I believe, prefers to receive a CD insert/cover art for scanning to represent on the web. The musicians who operate CD Baby (http://www.cdbaby.com) are very reasonable.
I only say these things to you now because you've obviously been around for a few years or I wouldn't still be getting your subsequent submissions. I'd rather see your band succeed over the millions of other bands out there with the same clueless approach to marketing their music. that's my bias. If you were from another more mainstream-wanna-be music genre, then I wouldn't even take the time to send you this constructive feedback at all.
And most people won't care and certainly won't take this time to help you out with what remains a substandard submission.
Cheers!
-Jett Black
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Very informative we work with a lot of online and regular distributors your right we have an album (CD) that has been selling for years we just reach new people and re-package to fit the market
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| by Vu
on Tuesday September 16 2003 @ 10:56AM PDT [ reply | parent ] |
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Thank you so much! This is great and means a lot!
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I pray thou hast a good 'zine editor.
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| by SI
on Saturday November 01 2003 @ 11:18PM PST [ reply | parent ] |
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