Are my ears buzzing?
If so, you stand a better chance of getting on my radar. And that doesn’t just go for me, it goes for every A&R person, every radio programmer, and every journalist that you want to recruit for your cause.
Even though I’m no longer actively representing musicians, I still get dozens of e-mails every week (and some phone calls) from folks that want me to help them “get discovered.” Let’s put aside the fact that someone writing me to get discovered probably hasn’t read any of my books or any of my posts here — since I advocate doing most of that hard work yourself.
Even if I was in the business of discovering new musicians, it’s hard to even start picking through everything that gets sent to me. (And when I worked in radio, we easily got about 300 CDs in the mail every week — and that was over five years ago. I can only imagine the submission nightmares that my former colleagues must be dealing with.)
Press releases have become just as ineffective, since everyone’s writing them. So many people write press releases so poorly these days, that even full-time journalists aren’t really looking at them.
So, if it’s really the right time to get a working professional on your team, what’s the very best way you can get their attention?
Blog about them.
My blog software keeps track of anytime, anywhere someone links to my site. The stream of folks linking to me or commenting at spinme.com is something I actually read each day, as opposed to the mail that comes into my “general” mailbox. (My friends would argue that I’m even behind on answering my private mail, too!)
If I’m BCC’d on the e-mail invite to your next gig or if you add me to your newsletter without asking me, or send our office a press release, you’ll probably end up getting flagged by our spam filter and you’ll never hear from us again. (More precisely, we’ll never hear from you again.) It’s a cruel, but true, reality — there’s simply not enough time to do any more than an automated response to unsolicited mail and still get the work done that pays our bills.
However, if you’re showing me that you take the time to read what I have to say, that you understand how I might help you, and that you “get it,” I might be way more inclined to check out your songs, blog about you, add you as a MySpace friend, etc. More and more of my colleagues in journalism and management fields are scouting for stories in the blogosphere instead of in their mailboxes. So get out there and show us that you’re already doing something worth telling others about.
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