Promotion • Buzzsonic.com

Archive for the "Promotion" Category

Apr21

How Vinyl Records Are Made

Posted at 5:23 PM • No Comments

This post first appeared on Buzzsonic back in 2009 but I thought seeing as its Record Store Day here in the UK and in the USA and elsewhere, it was worth a repost. Seems more topical now than it did back then actually what with all the renewed interest in vinyl and increase in sales and manufacturing, so…

In support of my recent post, ‘It’s Official, Vinyl Not Dead Shock’ and my older more detailed look at getting vinyl records pressed, ‘How To Press Up a Vinyl Single and Add Instant Kudos to Your Release’ , I dug around YouTube and found a bunch of instructional videos that should fill in the blanks for bands and artists looking for the inside look on vinyl pressings, cutting and mastering.

Having said that, Vimeo came up trumps with better quality instructionals but its also worth looking at this YouTube video of Detroit techno cutting engineer and producer legend, Ron Murphy who passed away almost a year ago now.

If you play Detroit techno and have played records with the letters NSC etched into it, you’ve played music that has been mastered by Ron. In fact most of the records that have come out of Detroit have been mastered by him.

Related Research

Vinyl Pressing Plants Listings (Lathe Trolls Wiki)
Long Live Vinyl (Mastered and Manufactured) In Detroit (LX7.ca)
Vinyl Pressings (YouTube.com)
Everything You Need To Know About Vinyl-PDF (Tunecore.com)

Dec4

Viinyl.com. MP3 Singles Promotion In ’3D’

Posted at 10:05 AM • 3 Comments

Viinyl is a cool new service from Canada that enables anyone to create an interactive single song-site within minutes that comes with lyrics, artwork, videos, notes, various download options, promotional tools and analytics.

I was able to upload a track, add a YouTube video, about page and sort out my one page site in just a few minutes here. It’s a great tool for bands and artists who want a way of dishing out a free download in exchange for that all important email, or as a mini EPK or simply as a quick introduction for a promoter, potential manager or A&R.

The service is in Beta invite only mode right now as they test and add new features. What is looking promising is the possible use of Viinyl as use as a satellite micro-site for acts to promote singles once Viinyl add buy links (iTunes and AmazonMP3 purchase links are on the way.)

Right now Viinyl offers the option of adding YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace social network links and integration with services like Soundcloud is promised within the next few weeks. One neat touch is the ability to add your Google Analytics code for extra tracking.

The site reads , “The Viinyl platform turns your song into an interactive website – a digital version of the 45rpm single with artwork and videos. Viinyl sites are optimized to travel the web, engage fans, grow market demand for your band and increase customer loyalty using marketing techniques for the web.”

My only ‘difficulty’ with Viinyl was preparing the background image for the page, and getting it positioned correctly, which proved time consuming without any template guidelines. Not a problem you’d encounter if you were using a single large image (guidelines are 1280 x 800px), but if you were trying to position logos and the like it takes a few attempts to position things correctly. CEO Armine Saidi promises a template system to counter these potential problems asap.

All in all, its a fantastic looking service, very easy to use and will prove to be even more invaluable when the promised new mods and additions come into play in a few weeks.

Some great examples of Viinyl users here.

Related Reading

Music Singles Enjoy Record Breaking Year (The Guardian)
Official UK Chart Rules (OfficialCharts.com) PDF
Billboard Digital Songs (Billboard.com)
Best Year EVER For UK Digital Music Singles (Slyck.com)

Sep14

99th Floor Elevators vs. The Beatles

Posted at 5:43 AM • No Comments

Moving on from my first national pop hit, ‘Hooked’ (as the 99th Floor Elevators) we struggled to come up with a follow up that PWL were happy with, then we finally finished ‘I’ll Be There’ which actually crawled onto the BBC Radio 1 playlist.

Anyway, recently I was browsing through some news archives and stumbled across a piece from the mid 90s in the Independent about how the Beatles had been ‘banned’ from the BBC Radio 1 playlist.

Radio 1 refuses to play `boring’ Beatles

Their John Lennon penned single, ‘Real Love’ , only the second Fab Four single since their split in 1970, despite entering the mid week charts in the top ten, had been left off the playlist to make way for “less established chart names” such as Goldie, Gat Decor and the 99th Floor Elevators.

Paul McCartney went on to say “The Beatles don’t need our new single to be a hit. Its not as if our careers depended on it” Too true of course but still a grin of self satisfaction that something you wrote had a hand in ‘banishing’ the Beatles from the national radio playlist!

The story even made it into the Keith Badman book ‘The Beatles Off The Record Volume 2: The Dream Is Over (Beatles Off the Record)’

Download 99th Floor Elevators Torrent Sampler here

More info: Torrent Distribution Experiment

Apr22

101 Distribution Correction

Posted at 7:09 PM • One Comment

I mentioned 101 Distribution in my digital distribution round-up here:

101 Distribution – (Phoenix, Arizona, USA) – Not sure what warrants the high costs here. But there’s a massive $599 sign up fee, then $49.95 a month. 100% payout of all sales. You’re gonna need it with those kind of upfronts! You can Twitter questions why, here: @101Distribution

from my post earlier in the week.

Anyway, I did get a few Tweets from the guys at 101 explaining that their Pro setup is only $599, there is no monthly charge on top. The $49.95 monthly charge is actually a ‘payment plan’ for artists who can’t stump up the 600 big ones up front.

I did promise 101 I’d clear that up for them, so here you go!

Mar12

Radio and Airplay Resources For Independent Artists

Posted at 10:38 PM • One Comment

This was supposed to be one of those short snappy posts that was concise and to the point. Instead, and this happens all the time, I continued to research as I was writing and the post grew into another lengthy monster. Hey, I’m the editor so I guess its OK.

Anyway I was looking around for radio resources and stations that play independent music and associated resources and as usual the post kept expanding.

I write using Live Writer (which plugs into my WordPress install), pulling notes in from Google Notebook at the same time as having a bunch of web pages open with my RSS reader running in the system tray. Input crazy.

I’ve concentrated mainly on terrestrial radio but I’ve also included a bunch of streaming resources. I came to the conclusion that anyone with a little time on their hands could put together a respectable mailing list for a radio ‘campaign’ with a little creativity.

I’ve also focused on the USA (where I live now) and the UK (where I’m from). I’ll probably extend things to Asia, Europe and the ROTW in a later post.

Where To Start?

Some tips from UK recording artist and radio DJ Tom Robinson first who has one of the best articles I’ve seen for a while on getting radio play. How To Send CDs To Radio. Its written from a UK perspective but the basics apply anywhere.