Top Ten Tips on How To Promote your Music Independently

Jeeni Blog

Helping the next generation of talent to build a global fanbase

Top Ten Tips on How To Promote your Music Independently

Let's set the scene. We believed there would be a load of "How to Videos..." giving expert advice to help musicians, artists and performers along their merry way. We thought just Google it and the rest would be simple. But the quality of what we have found raises the question, "how helpful are these videos really, and do musicians and performers use them"? Do these videos add real value?

To find out more, we're asking the new 400 Unsigned Artist Community members what they think. Maybe they have found a video or a blog which changed their fortunes, and they are willing share and let us know why it had such an impact. Let's see how far this forum opens new discussions and debate.

Having listened to Jasmine from Ditto in the video below, we started to think that our first job might be to start a discussion around "how to promote and market your work".

So you don't have to watch the whole 7 minute video, we have just listed the headlines to get a discussion going. (approx. 60 seconds read time)

1. Making great music, music always comes first.

2. Play as often as you can, make them remember you. Put on a killer live show and make an impact.

3. Start locally, go nationally and then head out on tour. Ed Sheeran says he played at least a thoiusand shows, before he became known in the music industry.

4. Create a website and build a mailing list - which links to your music, bio, promo images, tour dates, mailing list and sign-up form.

5. Get your social media sorted! Keep a consistent brand identity! Include competitions, polls, track snippets, press shots, backstage videos. Use targeted social adds, do not use mass advertising.

6. Check out what other successful performers are doing and learn from them, rather than starting from scratch.

7. Get your tracks PLAYLISTED.

8. Manage your own PR and contact journalists directly. Create an Electronic Press Kit, write a press release, upload your music, send to bloggers & journalists.

9. Surround yourself by the right people. Just because you are independent, that does not mean you have to do everything on your own.

10. Know your audience and focus on your niche!

So that's it folks, let's create our own list and add value to this vital conversation. If you would like to join the new Unsigned Artists Community check us out and send in a request to join today.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2529935880656436/?source_id=459365401133253

https://vimeo.com/396502327

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23
Feb

A Legendary NME Journo, his New Book and Other Tales

About to release his third book, a novel entitled 'The Unstable Boys', legendary NME journo Nick Kent, is interviewed by his stable-mate, Kevin EG Perry about his new book and other tales from his extraordinary career. The Unstable Boys - Nick Kent's new novel Nick Kent started writing for NME in 1972, which was a good year to be a rock’n’roll writer. And no writer in Britain was more rock’n’roll than Kent, who was soon as notorious for wearing a perpetually ripped pair of leather trousers and dating Chrissie Hynde as he was for writing novelistic profiles of enigmatic figures such as Syd Barrett and Lou Reed. Even now, almost half a century on, stories of Kent’s escapades and expenses-claims get passed down like lore at NME. There’s a good one about the time he flew to LA to profile Jethro Tull in 1975 and somehow wound up on a bender with Iggy Pop. Holed up in the Continental Hyatt House hotel on Sunset Boulevard, they hit upon the cunning wheeze of telling visiting drug dealers that they could help themselves to whatever they wanted from the luxury shops in the lobby and charge it to Kent’s room – leaving poor old Jethro Tull to pick up the tab. Truly, a grift for the ages. NIck Kent - Legendary NME Journalist Kent published the best of his collected rock writing in 1994 as The Dark Stuff and followed that essential tome in 2010 with his ‘70s memoir Apathy For The Devil. He’s just published his third book – his first novel – The Unstable Boys, which concerns the unhinged frontman of a mostly-forgotten ‘60s band appearing on the doorstop of his biggest fan after many years in obscurity. Over a video call from his home in Paris, Kent – 69 and just as louche as ever – discussed the book’s origins and held court about a life spent at the unforgiving coalface of rock’n’roll. On his no-fucks-given style Things weren’t looking good for NME when Kent first slouched through its doors in ‘72. Sales were so bad that the editors had been given just 12 issues to save the magazine. They hired Kent and other new writers such as Charles Shaar Murray and Ian MacDonald from the alternative press. The magazine then saw a huge jump in sales – but not for the reason Kent wanted to believe. “The assistant editor Nick Logan called me into his office at the end of the year and said, ‘Well, we’ve got great news – we’re outselling the Melody Maker’, which was a big deal at the time,’” remembers Kent. “He said: ‘In fact, we’re the biggest selling music weekly in the world!’ Pats on the back all round! I was standing there thinking he was gonna say: ‘It’s all you, Murray and MacDonald, you wonderful, beautiful people!’ “Not at all. He said: ‘We’ve done a survey of new readers to ask them why they buy the thing. They don’t buy it for the articles. They don’t read the articles, except for the quotes. They might look for a David Bowie quote, but they’re not interested in what the writers are writing. The only thing they actually read is the gossip column on the last page.’ What they really wanted to know was: What did Bowie’s latest haircut look like? And were Led Zeppelin playing a gig near where they lived? “After I picked my wounded ego up off the floor, I came to the very quick conclusion that I was writing for an audience with an extremely short attention span. I realised I had to go to extremes, because I would not be ignored! 300,000 people were buying the NME and the idiots weren’t reading it! That affected the way I wrote. You’ve got to grab them with the first sentence and say: ‘The action starts here’ you cannot not read this.’ I’m living proof that going to extremes gets results. The problem is that they may not be the exact results that you set out to attain.” Access all areas Kent went to extremes on the page and off it, where he found that the road of excess led not to the palace of wisdom but to a debilitating heroin addiction. His best work included an epic feature about the tortured genius of Brian Wilson, which ran to 10,000 words and was published across three issues of NME. He was also granted unprecedented access to a Rolling Stones tour and wrote memorably about the strange, distant atmosphere backstage and the darkness lurking in Jagger and Richards’ “numb, burned-out cool”. “There’s this whole idea that the writers of that time were the reason why the NME was so successful,” he says, “and that’s partly true, but the main reason was that we had more access back then to Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and the other big names of the ‘70s. There was a kind of give-and-take there, and I was lucky enough to get into that.” That time he was a Sex Pistol Kent first met punk impresario Malcolm McLaren in December 1973, when he went to France to interview the New York Dolls and found McLaren among their entourage. The pair became close and regularly dined together – along with their partners, Vivienne Westwood and Hynde – at what the writer describes “the only Indian restaurant in Clapham South”. When McLaren sacked guitarist Wally Nightingale from an early line-up of The Sex Pistols because he didn’t think he fit the band’s look, he asked Kent to replace him. Kent spent three months playing with guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook, but says he never quite matched the Sex Pistol temperament. “What I learned from playing with The Sex Pistols was that there’s a big difference between a middle-class guitar player and a working-class guitar player,” says Kent. “For a working-class guitar player, it’s all about repetition. It’s like that Johnny Ramone thing of playing the same chords over and over again. If you’re a guy like me, I’ll play a three chord riff like ‘Louie Louie’ for a minute but then I’ll get bored and throw something a bit jazzy in, and immediately that’s like going into Radiohead-land! My Sex Pistols experience taught me that I’m a middle-class guitar player.” On the rocker who reminds him Trump Kent’s new novel The Unstable Boys centres around the titular band’s grotesque, narcissistic frontman, known as ‘The Boy’. Given his abrasive personality traits, it’s no surprise that The Boy idolises Donald Trump – and Kent says he noticed plenty of parallels between the former President and some of the more self-absorbed rock stars he’s encountered over the years. “The rock star that really reminded me of Trump is Axl Rose,” says Kent. “I went out to America in 1991 at the height of Guns N’ Roses mania. They were the biggest group in America at that time. At almost every gig they played there would be a riot. Axl would usually be late, and then he’d come on stage and spend 10 minutes putting down whatever celebrity had said something in the press about him. I saw him once put down Warren Beatty because Warren Beatty had dated his girlfriend. “We got 10 minutes of: ‘What an arsehole!’ He was using the stage as a forum for his own narcissistic shit fits, just like Trump. At least Axl Rose could perform and could sing well, whereas Trump has neither talent. He doesn’t have any talent! He’s the ultimate huckster.” And the horror story behind The Unstable Boys In The Unstable Boys, things take a turn for the worse when ‘The Boy’ turns up at the home of a wealthy crime writer who also happens to be his band’s biggest fan. Kent says he was inspired by a real tale involving the British rock’n’roller Vince Taylor, who sang the 1959 hit ‘Brand New Cadillac’. “He was one of the best early British rock singers – one of the only ones, actually,” says Kent. “He’s probably best-known now because he became the inspiration for Ziggy Stardust. Bowie had met him in the ‘60s and became fascinated by him. By the ‘70s, Taylor had gone from bad to worse and he was basically penniless. He would just turn up on the doorsteps of people that he imagined were fans of his. He turned up on the doorstep of his fan club president in Switzerland and of course the guy invited him in – this was his hero! Things didn’t go well. Before long his wife left him, his dog disappeared and his pub burnt down." Kent adds that he’s been working on the novel in some form or another since his wife Laurence first told him Taylor’s story back in 1990, so he’s delighted to finally see the story in print three decades on. “When I’d finished it, for about two or three hours afterwards I felt really, really good,” says Kent. “High in a way that eclipsed all the drug highs I’ve ever had.” – Nick Kent’s The Unstable Boys is out now via Constable www.jeeni.com www.nme.com

10
Jun

Mel's bedtime story

Once upon a time, I created a platform called jeeni.com which is where independent artists perform their music in front of new fans, and get rewarded for their efforts. On a Saturday night we ran a live global music festival featuring 18 acts from both sides of the Atlantic. The oldest performer was over 70, the youngest was under 10. They were brilliant, each in their own way. We broadcast over social media and websites. There were no adverts, there were no fakes, there was no hype. It didn't cost us a penny to run. Everyone had a ball. We are part of a revolutionary process that is killing a corrupt and rotting music industry which has held both audience and performer to ransom since the 1890s. So if you will indulge me, I'd like to tell you how, and why ... I'm an old hoarder, I hoard old music recordings, and when I say old I mean really old. Upstairs, in what was once a studio but has turned into an Irish Setter leisure lounge, there are several hundred wax cylinders from the 1890s. Each cylinder is a unique recording from an age before duplication was possible. If Miss Florrie Forde wanted to sell a hundred copies of Hold Your Hand Out You Naughty Boy to her adoring public, then she had to keep lubricated and trill the bloody thing into a brass horn a hundred times and record it onto wax in real time. But to me the beauty of these cylinders is not that each one is a unique recording, but that each one is mercifully short, rotating at 120 revolutions a minute and lasting a meagre two minutes, because that's all a wax cylinder can hold. And so the two minute pop single was born. At the start of the twentieth century discs replaced cylinders, but not a lot changed. I have another room full of shellac discs that spin at 78 revolutions a minute. When it came to pop singles from artists bringing joy to the world throughout the first half of the twentieth century, they had just under three minutes to do it in. And if they were any good, just under three minutes was plenty. I feel personally to blame for what happened next, because in the hour of my birth in 1948, the microgroove vinyl disc hit the market, spinning at what my Irish chums call dirty tree and a turd revolutions per minute. I have an entire wall of vinyl albums, with their glorious covers and sleeve notes. And yes, they are arranged in alphabetical order by artist and date-order of release. Their storage capacity is approximately twenty-five minutes a side, which is usually twenty-two minutes too long. And on the opposite wall is where all my CDs sulk, each one capable of storing seventy-four minutes of audio, and not one of them played since the turn of this century. Why? Because a hacker called SoloH went and ripped the source code of something called the Fraunhofer MP3 encoder and spread it all over the internet for free. Thanks to SoloH, I can not only digitise my entire collection of recorded music without any restrictions on playing time, I can access the entire library of everything that has ever been recorded, for ever. My phone weighs exactly the same as my 78rpm copy of Little Richard's single Tutti Frutti, which runs for two minutes 28 seconds of total perfection. My phone holds 21,417 tracks in MP3 format, some of them complete symphonies, which are pretty good, some of them prog-rock drum solos, as used by Viet Cong torturers to break the spirit of the enemy. My desktop hard drive and cloud-accounts contain too many tracks to keep track of. I declare that my motivation for amassing this ludicrous collection of music was that one day it would bring me comfort in my old age, when my body and brain become enfeebled and I feel the need to keep hold of past pleasures while dying. As it turns out, I started playing my collection early, during lockdown, and wished I was dead by the end of day three. The singles were great, but the albums were mostly insufferable. Which is when I realised that the music album is stone dead, and the nightmare of a lifetime of audio padding is finally over. Then the real truth hit me. The recorded music industry is dead too. Thanks to COVID19 there has been an explosion of new creativity. Everyone is now a record producer, anyone can run a broadcast music channel, and that's exactly what everyone and anyone seems to be doing, including me. The spongers and leeches and shysters have been exposed as completely unnecessary, as have most of the agents, publicists and managers. They are no longer able to milk performers in our new world of social distancing, because they have lost their power. It's the remote audience that now has the power, and this audience wants instant gratification, not a load of overhyped, overwrought, overlong, flimflam. Jeeni.com is my final project in a very long career. I'm giving my artists three minutes per track to nail it, because that's what my old hoard tells me is right. And I hope you agree that in order to shine, three minutes is all that anyone should ever need.

02
Sep

Jeeni supports Escape to the Farm

Jeeni supports Arms Around the Child’s Escape to the Farm Looking for a family day out that supports children in third world countries? Presenting Arms Around The Child’s Escape to the Farm! Located at the idyllic Rushmere Farm in Hambledon, in Southern England's fabulous South Downs National Park, Escape to the Farm is a yoga retreat come summer camp where there is something for everyone. Explore food workshops and pizza making, poetry, eco talks and much more. There’s something for everyone to explore! Need some relaxing after a long six weeks holiday? Try one of the yoga, tai chi or meditation groups, guaranteed to help you take some breathing space and let go of all your worries. With live acoustic performances, storytelling and sound healing, there’s plenty of noise to block out the hustle and bustle of everyday life at Escape to the Farm. Are you a budding art enthusiast? Try your hand at life and nature drawing and learn a new skill. Come evening time you can gather around a roaring campfire before heading to bed in a beautiful yurt or tent of your own. Day Ticket £20 Day Ticket + Lunch & Dinner £35 Camping Per Night £10 Enquire for Accommodation Options Luxury Accommodation Yurts & Camping Escape to the Farm is a fundraiser for the Arms Around The Child charity who are raising money to build a school in Ghana for underprivileged children. Jeeni supports Arms Around The Child, who provide generously for children living in extreme adversity globally. To donate directly to Arms Around The Child you can go to their website www.armsaroundthechild.org/. Arms Around The Child seek to provide sanctuary, community, warmth protection, education, healthcare, safety, family, equality, love, hope and respect. Contact Jeeni Ambassador Ellie Milner for more details and get yourselves down to Escape to the Farm for a day of fun that will leave you fulfilled in all the best ways. Ellie: +447801292553 info@armsaroundthechild.org www.armsaroundthechild.org/

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