Magma Music

If you don’t have the time and resources, hire someone else

December 18th, 2008

For this past release of Red Planet from THE VITAL MIGHT, we put together a release plan that included PR, print advertising, online ads, college & specialty radio promotion, social networking, tour support, and a bunch of other pieces.  Being the small label that we are, we can’t handle all of these tasks ourselves.   We also have other jobs that take up a significant amount of time and if we wanted to get any sleep or have any sanity, we had to outsource parts of the release plan.

For Red Planet, we handled as many tasks as we could, but a college & specialty radio campaign would’ve pushed us over the edge.  We didn’t have a database of contacts and we hadn’t done a campaign like this before, so we decided to go with The Planetary Group again, who did an admirable job on the band’s debut release back in 2006.

Before deciding to outsource, we laid out a plan for doing it ourselves.  We filled up the calendar with deadlines for compiling and checking our contacts database, deadlines for mailing packs, dates for following up, and some other details.  When piled on top of the other tasks already in the queue, it looked like too much.  So we spent the money to have a third-party company handle it.  We were very happy with the results, especially given we would simply receive an email update and a report every week from the guys and gals at Planetary.  Instead of dozens of hours compiling, mailing, calling, and emailing, we got one email per week summing it all up for us.

We are ALL for being DIY and indie in everything we do, but sometimes you just run out of hands and hours.

Entry Filed under: Techniques