Its it The Real You?

As a music promoter and blogger there are many times were you will come across music that is submitted either by agents or artists looking for your help in promoting their latest single or album. Submissions are the holy grail of music blogging because they come from someone that engaged with your publication at some point and thought enough of your work to want you to be involved in their musical journey.

That’s is the definition of what it means to make music. It is a journey with two different sides to the road. On one side are the artists that create the sounds that the other side, the audience, gets to enjoy. Walking down the middle of this road are those of us that take up the call to champion the artists that speak most to us. We are the bloggers, photographers, videographers, and promoters that organize shows. For most of those walking this middle path, it is a journey taken because of our love of the music. It is our salute to the people that decided to make the often thankless trek up the hill of independent music. We are the army that works its fingers to the bone to create a space were others can experience the wonder and enjoyment that those artist on the other side of the road have shared with us.

With that being said there is one thing that I personally feel is unacceptable in the journey of independent music. In all of your promotional efforts no matter if you are a promoter, artist or producer it is your responsibly to be genuine. We look down on athletes that use performance enhancing drugs, that is no different then creating multiple Twitter accounts to spam promote your music. Now people reposing their own content over and over again through their own channels is their own choice, but creating multiple accounts is wrong and against the terms of use laid out by the service.

A while back I was hit up on Twitter by a very sketchy twitter profile with a link to download the “Joy & Pain EP from I Am Anthem. Now I am feeling this project but I question the method of delivery. Was this a bad call my the marketing team for ANTHM or indicative of a culture of marketing that promotes spamming? Most people would argue that to make it your required to do whatever it takes to make sure you are heard. As much as I agree with that sentiment. This are a few key detractors that come with using this approach. First off after listening to this mixtape I wanted to know more. The only problem with this was that there was no information in the erroneous Twitter account to point back to the artist. Second the link posted was a direct download link, so it also could provide any information. To find the artist I had to look in the meta-tags on the Mp3, then run the name in Google.

If the goal of sending out these links was to build an audience then the promotional team failed on that regard because the average person will not go through all of that effort. So the object of this lengthy rant is that if you really want to boost your reach make sure your authentic with it.