I definitely understand things on their end — they are over-whelmed about 10 seconds into checking their inboxes. They have never heard of us before…just like 95% of the other submissions they’re getting.

Since I like to share numbers, we’ve included Bandcamp download codes for Dr. Quandary’s album, Beyond All Spheres of Force and Matter and out of 38 emails, so far 8 codes have actually been redeemed. This is a project that started Monday, though, so I think the weekend might see that ratio improve. I know I put off 50-80% of my email backlog for Sundays.

I hear you on building relationships first. The project was borne out of a need to move faster than my free time and limited attention bandwidth would allow, though, so I’m definitely making some compromises to my usual commitment to home-cooked excellence.

…and as for Twitter, well, you know how I use that. I’m talking music business all day, sharing helpful articles and info, and supporting other artist we like. I probably do 1 “shameless plug” tweet per day, and usually not even that much. We definitely prefer to bring interested people in, rather than push our promo out.

As always, man, thanks for the feedback. I appreciate your brain.

I don’t have it down to a science but I know I always get better response from bloggers that I have
a) Tweeted with (RT’s are great for this)
b) commented on their site
c) done something for first – as in promoted one of their posts, one of their artists, etc
d) looked into advertising with them – how do their banners convert, etc

In all cases I never come with the pitch first.

The next part is what’s in it for them. You may be saying, “I am giving you content and music your audience wants to hear.”

They dont really care about that. Are you giving them something exclusive? Did you make a drop, a video, a freestyle just for them, that references and will continue to promote them forevers on the Internets? Is there a way to make some backend money – aka an affiliate program that is atually worth something? Do you have testimonials/recommendations from any of the people in my crew?

That’s just a start. What’s funny is I have a whole course on this coming out in a month or 2. I am reworking the thing to mesh better with questions just like yours.

Thanks for making me think smart instead of regurgitating old shit over and over again.

I’ve talked to heads who do that, and the message has been uniformly the same: Yes, some people will get offended and block you, and yes, most people ignore it, but if you can reach just 10 new people a day that way, it’s worth it.

Personally I don’t buy that logic at all, but I sure do understand the frustration behind it. I just spent this week devoting all my free time to submitting World Around music/artists to a whiteboard full of 111 different blogs and the success ratio…well, so far it’s depressing as fuck. I’ve worked in Info-Marketing for years and I know that conversation rates on a great day hover at around 5% — so when I say depressing, I mean DEPRESSING.

Still, it’s going to take a decade of weeks like this before I’d change my mind about randomly blasting people. I really do think that’s only effective as negative publicity. I don’t want name recognition in the sense of “Oh, THAT fuckin dude…” — but for other folks, that’s perfectly acceptable.

I just submit this for general discussion because I feel both sides. I think there’s value in discretion, but on the other hand, the emails I don’t send are guaranteed a 0% conversion rate…

Is @ messaging 100+ people a day about your new track spam, or valid promo?

Take some ownership in your business because no one has to want it more than you do.

Real life example – I’m on Twitter. Found it through a radio Dj who uses it to enhance his radio shows – stayed on Twitter when one of my favorite bands suddenly showed up. At the beginning the band didn’t know much about Twitter (none of us did) but they did know how to connect with us – the guitarist took Twitter on as his own, and really grew the band’s fan base with personal interaction, tweets back, leg pulling, etc.. Getting a ‘good morning’ or ‘happy birthday’ tweet from this guitarist was the highlight of many people’s week/month. The band even did a Twitter Q+ A session around a restaurant table with 5 laptops – twitpic’d a pic of themselves when the very first tweet was ‘how do we know its really you and not mgmt’. Impressed the hell out of us + the fan base grew through word of mouth – “its really them!”

At one point though, it got to be too much. Their mgmt or advisors, advised them to ‘follow everyone’ and that ‘numbers’ were more important than people and they ended up going from 10,000 followers to now well over 60,000 – many of which (of course) are spam accounts as they were told to follow everyone, regardless.

The mgmt now tweets… about once a month on average, sometimes twice in one day if there is something that comes up they deem important (like a sale on merch). The fans have all but vanished – a few die hards still hang around – those of us who were on twitter for other reasons catch the odd tweet in our timeline and just ignore it mostly.

Botton line – if you broadcast in one direction instead of a two way engagement the fans (your potential customers) basically ignore it.

(i’d also be interested to know stats on how many cd’s are sold by indie bands at the venue because they stay and talk to fans and autograph the cd’s – compared to bigger bands who do a runner out the back door and only sell online or at stores. I’ll bet fans dont illegally download music (as much) from band’s they respect as people either)