This week I'll do this other way around. First of all, jpkallio.com will be taking part in the King kong club in the Village on Wexford street on Monday the 11th of April. To get an idea what’s going on, on the night, this is in the words of the organizers:
"Dublin's Biggest and best, Live Musical Gameshow!
The one band that gets the most claps at the end of the night goes on to the next level for the big prizes. Judged By our Fabulous Replica of The Empire State Building.... CLAP O METRE!
Prizes include festival slots at Vantatastival, KnockanStockan, Life Festival, N.P.L.D festival, Temple House Festival, Support The Hot Sprockets at there album Launch.
It is free entrance and free for bands to enter...
Beer 3 and 4 euro..
Each band is also video recorded and put onto our YouTube space; (check it out when you get the chance, to get a feel of the night...)
Each band is interviewed and recorded live for our Radio Show on RTE 2 XM."
So we need all you in there to support us :-)
Also big thank you to every one who came in last Thursday to Captain Americas - It was a great night :-) And we have some photos and Video up here again. I also started to document our 100 concert challenge on its own page. I am sure it will be almost impossible to get video and photos from all of the 100 concerts, but we will do our best :-)
That’s the updates for this week, and now to the meat and veg. As you know I have been talking a bit about the band promotion. I actually think radio is going through changes as much as the most of the music business. I personally was never a big fan of radio. I was always very picky about my music, and mainstream radio very rarely had any music that would get me exited. But I do understand the importance of it and lots of my friends regularly listen to radio (Tomek is a fan of Radio nova here in Dublin). To get to any radios play list is very tough for independent artists. And you can feel like throwing money down the drain by sending CDs to radio station and not even knowing if any one opens the envelope... And here is few points I would like to make. If you record, produce reliance and promote your own CD, then you basically are an independent record label. And small labels relay need to keep their spending to minimum. So I would not just send CD to a random Radio stations, let alone 100 of them. If you want to go after some radio play, research the radio shows that might play your music. Make sure your music would suit their play list, again no Reggae to Death metal stations, and vice verse. Then it is time to make contact. Drop an Email, polite one; no one likes a smart ass, or a big ego. I have dealt with lot of people in radio over the years and my personal experience is this: Most people in radio are music fans, they might not like your music, but some one will. And yeah, in big commercial station money talks, record companies and radio stations have relationship and for a reason. Radio makes its money from advertising, and they only can sell add slots if they have the listeners. And it is no brainer to figure out that what's on top of the charts got there for a reason, because people bought the tracks. So yeah, as annoying as it might seem, it all comes down to business. But I do believe that small indie or internet radio station that actually likes your music is worth a lot more, than your track played once in any of the main stations. So dig deep, look for specialised radio shows that suits your music.
The next thing to look at is all the different types of internet radio. They can go from online pod cast to sites like last.fm. I would recommend checking out Jango, It is a payed service but you get some free plays when you first join. Also there are lots of companies offering to distribute your music to stations for a fee. To me this comes down to control. If the company offer a “world wide” service, how do you really know what got played? I have opted for a service, that I will test drive for the next 3 months. Of course I am hoping to get radio play for us, but also to review the service. So as you know, there are lots of companies looking for your hard earned money, so let’s see if we can make sense of them as well. I'll let you know all the details of this service and how it works in the following weeks.
I have mentioned in the past about the importance of an email list. On our last concert we had a simple A4 signup form, and this proved to be very successful. Try it out :-)
And one more thing. After the success of our first video, we would like to make a new one. We are bit short on ideas at the moment, so we would like to hear from you what you think it should be like. Here is the song , so get scripting, or just even small ideas, we'd love to hear them all:-)
Everybody dies by jpkallio.com
Talk to you more next week.
J.P.
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