Creating a press release can be one of the best ways for an indie artist, or band, to gain some instant media exposure for themselves. And you know, as well as I, that exposure is the name of the game these days. Even though the world-wide web has opened up many new possibilities for the independent artist, the competition can be fearsome. So, if you have any news item worthy of print (i.e. a new CD for sale, or a concert coming up, etc.) then a press release might be just the ticket to give you an edge. It will provide the publicity necessary for people to know who you are, so that your music will get heard.

In order to make the best first impression on your readers, your press release should be well written, informative, and to the point. Be careful not to lose your reader's attention by adding too many unnecessary details. Stick to the facts by explaining who you are and what you have to offer.

I generally prefer to write in a third person narrative when I have to create my own press release . By asking myself the questions a reporter might ask me, I am able to think more freely and objectively.

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Sample questions to ask and answer:

[Reporter] - Who are you- what is the name of your band?

[Band] - We have decided to call our band "Tangerine Sunshine".

[R] - What kind of music do you play?

[B] - It's somewhat eclectic and hard to define; kind of a mixture between alternative and rap.

 

{R] - I've heard that you have just finished recording a new CD. When will it be available to the public?

[B] - Yeah, it's called "Mixed Emotions" and we're really happy with the way it turned out. It will be available next week.

[R] - Where can a person get a copy of the CD?

[B] - It will be offered on our website (url) and through various other retail outlets (identify them).

When your press release is ready, after you've spell-checked it for typos and grammar, go ahead and post it on your website and/or in your blog. Then send it to as many free PR sites as you can find. Mi2n.com is a good one for musicians and indie artists to start with.

 

 eharmony UK

 

You should also send your press release, along with a cover letter, to all the local newspapers in your area. Put "Attention: Editor" above the address on the envelope and if possible include a photo.

Don't forget to send an email to all your friends, relatives, and neighbours as well. This is your time to shine, so reach for the stars!

Kathy Unruh is a singer/songwriter and webmaster of ABC Learn Guitar. She has been writing songs and providing guitar lessons to students of all ages for over 20 years. For free guitar lessons, plus tips and resources on buying a guitar, songwriting, recording and creating a music career, please visit: abclearnguitar .com                    

As an owner of an independent record label, I often get asked how to put together a greatpress kit. I have found that young musicians understand their music, but are often intimidated by the marketing end of the business. In this article I will help you figure out how to position yourself, whether you are a Latin female vocalist building her base, or an upstart garage band just looking for a break.

What is a Press Kit:

First of all, there is nothing magical about the term “press kit”. All we are talking about is a little background on you/your band, some basic facts, good quotes about your music, a couple of good pictures, and a sample of your music. You will use this to send to newspapers, lawyers, radio stations, A&R reps, promoters, and anyone else who is willing to spend five minutes reviewing your material. Additionally, on the internet you will hear about an electronic press kit, or EPS. An EPS is the exact same thing as a conventional press kit, except it is downloadable as an electronic file instead of a hardcopy form which must be mailed.

The main purpose of the press kit is to generate interest in the artist and their music.

What to include:

Include a limited amount of background information on yourself. It is fine to say where you are from, but no one really wants to hear about every singing performance you did during elementary school. Sometimes less is more.

Talk about your music. Who do you sound like, and who does your music remind people of. The reader needs to be able to have a good idea of what your music sounds like just from your description. Be thoughtful and feel free to be a little funny here (but stay professional). Saying something like your band sounds like a cross between “Maroon 5 and Green Day after 20 cups of coffee” helps the reader understand. Remember, if you don’t generate enough interest in the first minute, they will never listen to your demo.

 

Talk about what you are good at. What makes your band special and different from others? What skills and experiences do you bring to the table? Remember if you are looking for a record deal, you need to prove to your reader that you have all the right ingredients for them to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars marketing you. Launching a new artist is risky, so you need to help the record exec understand why you are a solid investment.

Include quotes and/or press clippings as you generate them. A good quote from a reputable source (not your brother-in-law) can add a lot of credibility to your press kit. It lets the reader know that you have already been reviewed and your material is worth listening to. Ninety percent of press kits unfortunately end up in the trash, some good quotes and positive reviews can create the momentum necessary to get heard, and who knows – maybe even become famous.

You can go with one page dedicated to a bio (biography), and a separate page focused on quotes about your music, or you can combine the two into what some people call a “one pager”. My personal preference is to boil everything down to a tight one pager. My desk gets cluttered and papers get separated. If you have you quotes separate from your bio, there is a possibility that I could misplace one or the other. With the advent of digital photography and high quality color printers, it is even possible to include a small picture on your one pager to make it even more complete.

Make sure the overall language and tone of the press kit is consistent with your image. If you have someone help you write your bio, make sure they have heard you music and know what you are all about before they hand you something that might sound great, but isn’t about the real you.

Include a couple of different 8x10 pictures that show off different features about you and your band. Include shots that would be appropriate in a news article, but also highlight your key assets from a visual perspective. Your press kit should look professional, but your pictures should reflect your style and music, so you pictures can be much more crazy and creative. Make sure you clearly label the picture with you name and contact information.

If you don’t have good pictures of your band, one of the best ways to get some is to go to a modeling agency and ask for a referral to a good local photographer. These photographers are often willing to do some great work for around $300 for the whole package. Make sure you get an agreement upfront that you own the copyrights after the shot and get the high resolution digital images on CD (with a copyright release you can print these photos at any major retailer). A photographer who does work with models is very different from a photographer who takes family pictures. They have a much better idea of what you want, they will encourage your creativity, and they are much more willing to give you the copyrights.

Place your AD here  contact:webmaster@mycd.ca

A current gig sheet can also be useful showing where you have recently played and where you are playing in the near future. This can demonstrate that the music is current and has a following in the community.

And of course, your music. Send a high quality CD demo, preferably mastered if you budget permits. Avoid burning your own CD on your home computer with a stick on label – it looks cheap. There are many new CD duplication services on the internet that will manufacture you CD with a printed color insert, and on disc printing even if you only want a few copies (CD replication is for batches over 1,000 but CD duplication is for batch sizes as small as 1). Expect to pay around $5 a retail ready disc for 1-5 CDs, with prices dropping off for larger batches. Make sure you clearly label the CD and the case with you name and contact information. The worst thing in the world that could happen is that they love your music, but they have already lost the rest of the press kit and don’t remember the name of the band.

What Not to Include:

Don’t oversell yourself. Saying that you are the greatest band that ever lived, might be true, but it probably isn’t. Be positive and promote yourself, but focus on statements that are credible. People in the music business hear hype all of the time, and for the most part are numb to it. Hype is good to use with the general public on things like posters (they often believe it), but your press kit reader is more sophisticated and will see it as cheap theatrics.

Including too much of your personal history can make you seem like an amateur with nothing meatier to talk about. Your reader wants to understand your music today, only your psychologist needs to know about every little detail of your childhood.

Don’t include anything that makes you look too desperate. You want to come across as a quality professional artist. Remember, you make great music. If your band is called the Chicken Heads, then it might be cute to include a rubber chicken in the box, but otherwise I would stick to the basics – bio, quotes, gig sheet, pictures, and music.

How to Package It:

Include a professional looking, personalized cover letter targeted at the person you are sending the press kit to. Your message needs to be different if you are sending it to an A&R rep at a label seeking a record deal, versus sending it to your local newspaper for a review in their music section. Be brief and to the point. Also, be clear and state exactly what you would like from them.

Put it all together in an organized package. Since you are most likely mailing your press kits, make sure that the CD does not bend the photos, and that your kit will arrive looking the way you intend. You may even want to test a press kit (send it across the country to a wrong address, and then it will come back to your return address) to evaluate your packaging.

Your Music Is Art, But Your Press Kit Is Business:

Remember, be professional. The person you are sending this press kit to probably gets hundreds of them, most of them are garbage (and that’s where they end up too). Your music can be crazy and wild, but your press kit needs to be more business like. You are asking someone to spend their valuable time reviewing your material. You may also be asking them to enter into a high risk expensive financial relationship with you. The person you are dealing with is in the music business, they need to make a living. The only way they can do that is to deal with real talent. By presenting a professional package you give them confidence that you are dedicated to making great music, and not just messing around.

A Word About Unsolicited Press Kits:

Avoid wasting your time and money sending a press kit to someone you have not talked with already. Always call and make contact first, ask who you should send it to and what their process is. If possible, have someone who knows the person act as an intermediate and make the initial introduction (this can work wonders). The music business is all about contacts, create and leverage your network. After sending your press kit, call in a couple of weeks and follow up to make sure they received it and got a chance to review it.

Example:

To see a good example of a press kit, go to Legend Vega’s website at legendvega.com.

Scott Richards is the president of an independent record label, 3JVL Productions, Inc.

Want to hear great music?
Visit Legend Vega's Official Website  legendvega.com                      

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7) How to Promote Your CD by Rashi Singh

Congratulations! Your debut CD is now recorded, replicated, packaged, and ready for market. It’s an amazing feeling to see the fruit of your labor in front of you, nicely packaged as a CD that’s ready to be sold alongside the big wigs in the industry. One small problem: you don't have the backing and capital that the big wigs do to promote your CD... and you just know your CD can be a huge success in the market.

Promoting a CD can seem like a daunting task at first, especially if you haven't done anything like this before. Here are a few tips and ideas on how you can get started promoting, and selling your music CD.

1. First, you should plan a launch party. Tell all your friends and fans when the CD is going to launch, and generate some buzz. Let local papers and shops know as well, and have them help you spread the word.

2. Network - tell everyone you know about your new CD. Ransack that mental rolodex of yours, and hit everyone you know, and tell them to do the same. Believe it or not, this is probably your best resource!

3. Have a website before your CD launches, and use it to promote your CD. Set up a page on myspace and other similar sites that allow navigators to sample your new tracks.

4. Look into setting up an email list for your fans. Before the CD launches, send out an email letting everyone know. It’s cheap, it’s easy and it’s a fast way to get the word out about this and other upcoming events.

5. Write a press release and put it on your website. You can find lots of examples and instructions of how to do this online.

6. Contact the music reporters at your local newspapers. Don't leave out the smaller papers - sometimes they are the heart and soul of the local music scene.

 Offer a free copy of your CD to local radio stations. Remember the school stations - they frequently tend to favor local artists. If they play it, it could pay off quite well   for you.

7. Approach internet radio stations, and offer them the rights to play your CD for free. Every time they play a track, you receive free advertising.

8. Call DJ's and DJ companies and offer a free copy. If they play your CD, that's more free advertising.

9. Get a barcode for your CD. This can help encourage retailers to sell your CD.

10. Get your CD sold at online distributers, such as cdbaby.com or amazon.com

11. Sell merchandise with your name or the band's name on it. This is not only a little extra revenue - it's great advertising.

12. Find out if there is a music show on your local TV stations, and see if you can be featured.

13. Cross-promotional deals - Talk to another similar band, and work out a cross-promotional deal. ie. They promote your CD at their shows, and you promote their CD at your show. Or even better...

14. Work out cross-promotional deal with several bands. Each band contributes a track or two to a sampler CD. Then each band gives away the sampler CD as a "bonus" with every CD they sell of their own.

15. Naturally, you should promote your CD at every show you play

There are lots of things you can do to realize your dream faster. These are some simple ideas on how you can begin to promote your CD, and get the word out to your future fans. Good luck!

Rashi Singh is with Duplium Corporation, a CD duplication  company based in Dallas and Toronto. Duplium provides top quality CD and DVD Replication, customized printing and packaging, and full-scale fulfillment solutions. Visit  duplium.com for more information or to receive a quote.           

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10)

Annotations are the small text boxes that appear on videos allowing the owner of the video to interact with the viewers. These have been proven to make viewers feel more involved with a video and also maintain their focus longer. So ensure your annotations are informative, witty and add a touch of humour to engage with your audience.

Cross Promotion

If you have a Facebook or Twitter account then be sure to post links on your Youtube profile page and ask your friends share your video online. Social networking continues to grow, so a lot of the hard work can be done by your friends that will produce big results. 

Secondly, post your video on a number of other video sharing websites. Youtube is not the only online video website which can generate fame and viral success. Try websites such as Vimeo, Daily Motion, Twitvids and Sevenload.

Conclusion

If you implement these tips, it won't guarantee that your video will "go viral", but will it definitely improve the chances. Just remember, it only takes a few people to like and share your video to kick start its road to viral fame.

 

About the Author

 

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11) How To Increase Your Sales Through Streaming Audio

Many studies have proven that radio is a good medium for product advertisements. People listen to the radio for entertainment, usually to listen to the latest music or to their favourite radio program. In between the program, advertisements on products and services are being played.

For many years, this has been the trend in advertising. But now that the radio medium is almost behind the audio-visual medium, the TV, and the Internet, other marketing strategies have to be employed to continue the benefits of advertising through audio.

It is then that the benefits of using music on websites were discovered. Before, music on the Internet was just available in downloadable forms as mp3. Even through hosting downloadable music on their servers, companies were able to get much traffic on their sites. And everyone engaged in Internet marketing knows that website traffic plays a big role in boosting product and service sales.

However, there had been a problem with illegal music download in which artists, musicians and record companies have lost millions of revenues.

Then, came the popularity of Internet music streaming. Unlike the former, radio streaming does not allow download of the music files. Thus, the copyrights of the artists and record label owners are protected.

So, how can this be done? There are several ways to stream audio from your site. First, is to stream a radio program from your site or blog. You can find free affiliate programs that allow you to stream their radio content from your site.

What will this mean to you? This means that your site will have new audio content every time it is visited. What's even great is that the content is being updated even without much effort from you.

In this case, what you needed to do is to signup with an Internet radio station and have the link embedded on your blog or website.

 

Another way is to stream mp3s. To do this, you just need to upload your mp3files on a server and add the files' links to the page. When the link is clicked, the browser opens a media player window and plays a file. However, since the file is in mp3 format, it may also be downloaded. Downloading music files without the authorization of the copyright owner is illegal. Therefore, if you will be using this type of streaming, make sure that you have the appropriate permit to do so.

A third way to add audio to you blog or website is to stream music through organizing playlists. Playlists are m3u files, which if downloaded, will not play music if offline. Using this process, however, can be complex. Here is a short instruction on how to do it.

1. Save your mp3 or wma file on the server. You may skip this step if you know that the file exists on another server and know the link to that file. Make sure that the link has a .mp3 or .wma extension.

2. Open your text editor and type the path to the file. Include the http:// and the file extension. Repeat this step until you have included all the links to the files that you would like to be included in the playlist.

3. Save the playlist with a .m3u extension.

4. Upload the m3u file on the directory where the music files are hosted or to your server.

5. Open your html editor and embed the link to the m3u file. Through this, you can also set if you want to have the playlist to autoplay if someone visits your site of if you want your visitor to control playing the music. You can also set the volume level.

After the code is embedded on the html file, and whenever your site is visited, the songs in the playlist will be buffered, streamed and played one after another. If your playlist has several songs, the user can skip forward or go back a song in the playlist using the media player controls.

Doing this setup works for many website owners. Through this you can customize the type of music being played on your site. You can even play recordings related to your product to boost product awareness.
 

It requires knowledge of html to be done. But if it will be the best way to increase traffic to your site, why not request assistance from programmers. After all, having audio on a website is a proven way to increase sales.

About the Author    millionairemarketing seminar.com
The 12 Month Millionaire Will Show You Everything you did and didn't want to know about making One Million Dollars by this time next year... revealed LIVE!          

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12) Internet Music Promotion For Dummies  by Don Newton

In the days before the internet, when the major record labels had the music market sewn up tight, it was all but impossible to break into the music business in the traditional sense without having a recording contract with one of them. This often led to artists becoming broke before their album ever actually hit the music store shelves.

The long established "standard recording contract" that was used by the industry, heavily favoured the company, at the expense of the star. Advances had to be recouped, recording and manufacturing and distribution costs repaid before the artist saw nickel number one.

Now all that has changed, and for the independent recording artist or band these days, it is definitely a blessing in disguise, although some may not see it that way. The "lure" of the big label contract is still a desirable thing for most young artists, just because they have never been exposed to the potential of the internet as a sales and marketing medium.

More seasoned artists have realized, in the past ten years or so, that the internet is definitely the way to go if you want to seriously pursue a career in music. Mainly because it is virtually open to anyone, regardless of budget constraints. Many bands and solo artists are, as I write this, creating small empires for themselves solely by means of the electronic information highway.

 

Online music promotion, while still in it's infancy, is becoming a force to be reckoned with by not only the major record companies, but other online artist. The competition, while not yet fierce, is significantly stiff enough to raise the caution flag for many. Add to that the seemingly incomprehensible way that advertising and marketing works on the web, and it's no wonder that many would-be internet superstars give up before the fight even starts.
 

But it doesn't have to end there. There are resources available for struggling artists to take advantage of when it comes to learning the in's and out's of internet music marketing and promotion. Online courses dealing with website creation and search engine marketing and optimization are too numerous to count.

If your eyes glazed over as you read that last sentence, don't feel alone. The vast possibilities that exist for creating a buzz, and establishing a fan base for your music are endless. There has actually never been a better time to get started in online music promotion than right now. And the fact that so many established artists are currently using this means as their primary marketing and distribution system only lends weight to the argument.

Ever hear of a guy called Jimmy Buffett? Well, after numerous successful years of feeding the record companies coffers, Jimmy decided that he'd had enough. Do you blame him? After all is said and done, a major label artist might end up actually being in the hole after everything is paid for on a major CD release. Don't believe me? The evidence is everywhere. Do a search on Google for the term "artists royalties", what you get back will look like some kind of horror story. But it's all true.

 

 Jimmy Buffett decided to form his own record company "Mailboat Records", and he's doing quite fine now, and actually has been able to steal a lot of talent from the likes of Island Records to come over to his new label.

When you consider that a major recording artist has to sell somewhere around 3 million CDs just to break even, and an independent label can sell about 10,000 and the artist makes just as much, well, the choice really isn't that much of a choice anymore now is it?

Add to all this the newest thing, digital downloads, and you have a brand new market ready to explode for the independent artist out there who has enough get up and go to take a crack at it.

The future is yours independent musician. Let's make the most of it.


About the Author
Don Newton is the President and Founder of the Independent Internet Musician's Association. A life long musician, producer, and self taught internet marketing expert, he now spends his time educating musicians and other music industry professionals about how best to promote their business on the web. Don can be reached at: Don@iimusica.com, the IIMA website is located at imusica.com