Cutting through the noise - promo/record labels/indie...

[VREEEEVROOOOOW]

I get that entirely Paul_C. Right now I'm biting the bullet and giving the "LOOK AT ME!" route a chance. And so far it has lead to some few dislikes on YouTube, and a few likes on Instagram. Is it working? We'll see when the album drops, but I'd be surprised. It's an interesting experience though. I even sent the album to a bunch of Norwegian papers and blogs, and will be sending it to international noise/experimental music blogs when it drops. If a single person buys it, I'd be surprised, but admittedly pleasantly so.

[Benn Roe]

I feel like I have a bit of a different take on all this, but I came up in a bit of a different scene, I guess. I've played in bands that have made reasonable names for ourselves, and none of us ever did any real promotion at all. I have never personally had a social media account of any kind, and I don't think any of my bands have either, other than Bandcamp (which came after break-up for most of my bands). Most of my bands played a lot of shows, toured as much as we could (which honestly wasn't that much; I don't think I've ever been out for more than about three weeks at a time, and never even made it to the west coast of this country, let alone to another country), and just made friends. Booking tours has never been a walk in the park, but otherwise we just made sure to have fun and meet people, and the rest always kind of did itself.

When you play shows, you not only expose potential fans to your music, but you meet other bands you connect with--either musically or as people, or ideally both--and you meet people who run labels, either hitting it off with them as people or because they really liked your band. Being friends with other bands leads to touring together, doing splits with each other, referring each other to labels, word of mouth exposure, etc., and being friends with labels has obvious benefits. We occasionally got reviews in Heartattack, or wherever, but we never really actively sought reviews. We just relied on being part of a community that was excited about building a network.

Looking back, it probably also helped that I was so involved with booking shows for many years too. I met a ton of bands just by booking them, and I made friends with many of those bands, which opened a lot of the aforementioned doors. It's been almost a decade since I was involved with a really active band, so it's entirely possible that things have all changed, but all my experience "promoting" was really just meeting people, building friendships, and embracing mutual excitement.

[coldbrightsunlight]

I think that the tenor of the discussion that's gone on in this thread is very shaped by the fact that it's 2020 and there are no shows

But yeah I totally agree, if shows were happening my goal for promotion would just be to play them, and hopefully be good, and meet people. Booking shows/doing posters/generally being involved in your local scene is going to help meeting like-minded people, way more than any internet stuff.

....Except for the international internet band which is kinda hard to do that with.

[VREEEEVROOOOOW]

Even pre-corona my band wasn't successful with that strategy. But that's definitely the route we're going. We don't do any promo, we just book and play shows. The probably biggest problem we've had is that hardly anyone will let us play shows because we're an unknown band that plays odd music. So we play at the local anarchist café, the youth centre, and places like that, but it's a small town, so we can't play the same venue more than once a year—they get sick of us. We've also "booked" our own shows in our rehearsal spaces (which is what the black metal bands used to do way back when), but only our closest friends show up (only two people for one of the gigs), and there isn't really room for more people anyway. Once we rented a locale and played a show there with three other bands we brought along, but only ten people came, so we couldn't even cut even even though all the bands played for free, and we simply can't afford to put on shows like that without at the very least cutting even. We've played with a bunch of bands but only one of them has ever invited us to a show. (Note: I'm not bitter or resentful or whatever about that, I don't expect any other bands to invite us. But I'm very grateful to the band that *has* invited us!) We can't play out of town, because nobody will let us play before we have a record out—although I'm not sure they will let us play afterwards either, because the venues in town that have asked to hear us, we've sent them a fairly well-recorded live set, and then they've just stopped replying…

Our strategy for next year is thus to cut a record (and some splits), rehearse, and be prepared for gigs, and play with all we've got. There's no chance of doing any social media or whatever with that band—not even ironically, hah. We'll be on streaming and other music platforms, that's it for an "Internet presence".

This isn't a whine-post or anything. I'm just relating how it's been, and our plan for the first half of next year. Any comments would be appreciated, from Benn or others.

The band is the thing for me. This solo stuff is the thing I do during downtime. And I approach it entirely differently. Including the promotional side of it. Experimental music, experimental promotion. Call it post-modern.

[Benn Roe]

I think that the tenor of the discussion that's gone on in this thread is very shaped by the fact that it's 2020 and there are no shows

But yeah I totally agree, if shows were happening my goal for promotion would just be to play them, and hopefully be good, and meet people. Booking shows/doing posters/generally being involved in your local scene is going to help meeting like-minded people, way more than any internet stuff.

....Except for the international internet band which is kinda hard to do that with.

I get that shows aren't happening now. My band hasn't practiced since March either, and I guess I assumed the same was true of most peoples' non-professional bands. It seemed like this was more aimed at a post-COVID gameplan. Apologies if I was off-base. I also realize, almost regardless of how things play out, playing shows is going to be much harder in 2021 and 2022 than it has been in years past. There will always be basements, but a huge number of more professional venues are just gone forever, so the opportunities are fewer for the foreseeable future. I don't have anything to contribute to that discussion, though, I'm afraid.

This isn't a whine-post or anything. I'm just relating how it's been, and our plan for the first half of next year. Any comments would be appreciated, from Benn or others.

Small towns are tough. There usually just isn't the audience for weird indie music in towns like that unless you put in the work to build that audience and (and this is a big "and") the stars align. I don't think there's a silver bullet, and I think your plan for next year lines up with everything I'd recommend. Having something recorded, being able to fall back on you or your bandmates' previous bands' popularity, or having friends who can help are really the only ways I know to start getting shows, but you're going to want to start trying to play shows in nearby cities or college towns. After you record stuff, make some of it available to stream on bandcamp, and get in touch with promoters in nearby areas who have booked bands who sound anything like you. Some of them will want you to send them something physical, some will stream your music, and some just won't give you the time of day, but eventually you'll get some shows, which will probably lead to more, etc. You'll probably start by opening shows, you may often play to virtually nobody, and you shouldn't expect to make money or even break even. Getting started isn't easy, but your effort usually snowballs, and I'm sure it's easier than trying to build up a following through internet promotion. Unless you hire someone, which I'm sure can be a worthwhile route to go, but I can't speak to that approach. None of your old CMHWAK friends can help you nearby? Even if they don't live nearby, they may have played shows in your general area and might be able to recommend a good promoter and put in a good word for you. Screamies were all over Europe ten years ago. I'm sure they know someone.

[VREEEEVROOOOOW]

There aren't any nearby cities. There hardly are cities here. There's basically the capital, that's where everyone wants to play. Myself, I'd like to be able to "tour the country", which here generally amounts to doing five shows in two weeks twice a year or so. But at this stage I'd like to just be able to play where I'm at, and small nearby towns. There's plenty of venues here, but they won't give us the time of day. Then there's the capital. Then there's being able to tour. But it's hard to do any of the bigger risk stuff when you're poor. Even if some band invited us to play in the capital, it's not certain that we could afford to go play there if we did not nearly cut even from our travel expenses.

I'm well aware of the snowball effect you mention—most of our shows so far have been due to that. Either a band inviting us, or someone saw us play and wanted us to play at their place, or whatever. But our snowball, just like almost everyone else's, has been put on hold for now. Hence the idea to cut a record in our downtime.

I must have sent a hundred emails or more to bands and venues in this country, and to bigger international bands' booking/management about playing shows. Most don't reply at all. The rest ask what we sound like, and then stop replying when they've heard what we sound like.

But we played more shows this year than yesteryear, even with corona, and I'd be surprised if we don't play more shows next year than this year. So it's plodding along. Though I admit it is sometimes difficult to not get frustrated. We'll see how 2021 pans out for us.

[coldbrightsunlight]

I think that the tenor of the discussion that's gone on in this thread is very shaped by the fact that it's 2020 and there are no shows

But yeah I totally agree, if shows were happening my goal for promotion would just be to play them, and hopefully be good, and meet people. Booking shows/doing posters/generally being involved in your local scene is going to help meeting like-minded people, way more than any internet stuff.

....Except for the international internet band which is kinda hard to do that with.

I get that shows aren't happening now. My band hasn't practiced since March either, and I guess I assumed the same was true of most peoples' non-professional bands. It seemed like this was more aimed at a post-COVID gameplan. Apologies if I was off-base. I also realize, almost regardless of how things play out, playing shows is going to be much harder in 2021 and 2022 than it has been in years past. There will always be basements, but a huge number of more professional venues are just gone forever, so the opportunities are fewer for the foreseeable future. I don't have anything to contribute to that discussion, though, I'm afraid.

Oh yeah for sure. No hard feelings meant haha, I totally agree with what you're saying just making a little joke before

[Blackened Soul]

I just want to throw in a few rocks.

1. Every thing has changed, we are entering a brave new world. My motto anymore is try lots of stuff, see what sticks, the world is broken and will be so for a very long time.

2. the old advises are bs. playing a cover will not instantly gain you some sort of acceptance, every tv show and social media site is FILLED to the brim with people doing amateur and campy covers and it is not going to stop and now with tiktok being such a heavyweight it will just become background noise. my sister [the dj] is always at me about this "you need to appeal to the mainstream " "no one likes that weird crap" well guess what sis the world is not [at least I hope not] Aberdeen washinton... not everyone likes a mixture of country pop, rap and 80's nostalgia..

3. Despite what people like to post about and talk about and ignore, live music has been dying in a lot of places, people stopped going to shows in decent numbers a LONG time ago. Places I've played that were iconic venues are now trendy bistros and car parks. Almost ALL the cover bands in the south sound stopped giving 4 years ago to where bands that do covers that would normally be boo-ed off were getting gigs until the venues realized that the draw was dwindling too much even for the elderly. And the bad indie rock bands that pretend that playing tim's tavern is the tacoma dome dwindled off the rest.. in 2018 almost every show my band played some one thanked us for having real songs and not sucking

4. I think the REAL problem is there is no REAL new music scenes. Experiment/noise is cool and I like it personally but lets face it unless you are a nerd it all sounds the same, it all has sounded the same since the late 60s. Those of us that place the weird shit no one likes need to actually be experimental and move forward to making in interesting and enjoyable and intriguing, the extremes have been found, there is nowhere else to go. And indie-rock needs to just go away, it's tapped out and postpostpostnewgenreforeveryband is a fucking meme, it's time to say fuck off this is [incert most basic style name here [rock, metal, country, etc]] it's time to look inward and take a chance and kill your gods/heros.