Sunday 2 June 2013

Promoting new artists...

Reading the pre-release material carefully, it's clear the onus is on the promotion of new artists, NOT established artists.

Music magazines and their websites tend to feature largely established artists. Why?  Think about it. he magazines are carefully targeted towards an audience. Their business is to sell copies to encourage advertisers to continue to pay large sums of money to place ads in the magazine, which, in turn, will lead to profit for the magazine, so what better way than to feature artists they know the audience wants to see? It is reckoned that when Mojo, Record Collector, Uncut or Q feature Bob Dylan or the Beatles (as solo artists or the group), they sell thousands more copies - and every year, this is precisely what they do. More than this, established artists have a lot of money behind them - they can afford to fund big promotional campaigns to get their artists into the magazines they know will reach the audience they need to.

It's true that some new artists have been 'broken' by magazines - Mojo claims a role in discovering and promoting British soul artists Michael Kiwanuka, for example - but how can young artuists of today compete against the promotional machine of an established artist, be that Beyonce, Bowie or the Libertines - especially when they don't go on talent contest freak shows like Britain's Got Talent?

You're going to be expected to use your webpage to help promote new artists - and tied up with this is the notion of connectivity/interactivity between the artist, the magazine and the audience.

Ideas we looked at:

Following the example of the editor of Kerrang!, invite people to submit tapes or soundfiles; the editorial team could choose the best and create a playlist that could be voted on by readers. There could be links to new artists on Youtube - a video playlist, if you like. After all, that's how Justin Bieber was discovered in 2008 by American talent manager Scooter Braun, who came across his videos on YouTube and later became his manager. There could be links to social networking pages of various artists; the artists will be able to promote their local gigs on a linked page; fan reviews and pictures of gigs can be posted; the site should have a message board - albeit a moderated one - where the audience, artists and the magazine can interact. You should also have links to iTunes so the audience can download songs legally.

What other ideas can you come up with?

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