Outsourcing has been a bit of a four-letter-word with how the US economy is doing, but it mostly relates to offshore outsourcing. What I’m talking about is delegating repetitive tasks to others, preferably others who will do it free or cheap. I’ve tried hiring interns in the past, but I didn’t have the volume of work to make it a regular gig for them. I’ve used the site Elance.com for finding web development projects, but I was tipped off after… (more…)
I’ve noticed that a lot of radio stations (college and commercial) are getting on Facebook recently. MySpace has always been a great venue for radio stations with its “band” style profile that allows for posting of shows and music. More recently, stations are popping up on Facebook with either profiles or Pages. When it comes to promoting a band, record release, or tour, “friending” these sites or commenting on walls and profiles is a GREAT avenue for making contact, passing… (more…)
I’m in a predicament right now where THE VITAL MIGHT’s tour got here faster than I had time to get everything done. While I should be sending out press releases and following up, I’m writing this blog post instead. I’ll make it fast since I need to tab over to my spreadsheet and get crackin’! If you’re got something date-dependent on the near horizon, like a tour, record release, TV appearance, or anything else that requires lead time for press… (more…)
Posters for essential for promoting a band. Most of the time, there isn’t a direct correlation between posters and people at shows. A lot of the time, they’re simply a large business card for a band. Until a band is really sought after, they might only have 1% effectiveness for getting heads in the door. So 100 people see your poster and 1 of them come to the show, or tell someone about the show. THE VITAL MIGHT is heading… (more…)
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… (more…)
For many years I’ve dug around for the best contact management software. I’ve used Outlook, Outlook with the Small Biz Contact Manager addition, Highrise, FreeCRM, Salesforce.com, Access, and I even built my own web front-end for my contact database. They all had too many features. Even Highrise, by the 37Signals guys who are famous for limiting features to create better functionality, didn’t fit what I needed. I wanted a very easy way for me to see who I need to… (more…)
Head over to Google Alerts and setup an alert monitor for ALL your artists, your label, your song names, or anything else you want to keep a close eye on. It’s great for finding press clippings, event postings, blog postings, rants by crazy fans, or even misinformation. It helps you to maintain a link list, some of which you may want to promote via email lists, MySpace/Facebook/Purevolume/Twitter, your blog, etc. And it’s always nice to know what people are saying… (more…)
Break up your tasks into 1-2 hour sub-tasks, or you’ll get overwhelmed and burnt out I often will list out several tasks that need to get done. For example: Contact college and non-commercial radio spinning the new record Followup with national blogs about new record Followup with NYC press about release party Those looks like tasks that can be easily tackled. The problem is that each one may have more layers than what you see on the surface. If you… (more…)
I’ve added a new category on the blog here called “Techniques”. I’m going to start posting here and describing how we get things done here. Right now, THE VITAL MIGHT is the only active band on our roster so most example will revolve around them. I’m going to start with a fairly straight forward and simple one: email. Email probably makes up 90% of the tools we use to book, publicize, and promote the band. In the past, it used… (more…)