My perfect demo submission…
By Pursehouse – follow me on Twitter.
Hello one and all. Forgive me a second whilst I just do this…
*SOUND SUBJECTIVE BLOG KLAXON*
Right now that’s out of the way we can begin.
Arguably there is no ‘perfect’ way to send demos to industry people, but there are definitely wrong ways. So many wrong ways. More wrong ways than a faulty Sat Nav. And each person you send a demo to may very well have their own preference such is the beauty of us all being individuals by our inherent human nature. All this to one side though, the following is how I personally would utterly adore to receive all demos in the future. I’m aware this is a rose tinted ideology that, if were to come true, would no doubt lead to world peace and harmony amongst all colours and creeds, but I felt it needed committing to digital paper, if only to allow me to angrily mumble “didn’t they fecking read the blog?” the next time someone sends me a CD-R with just the artist name scrawled in childlike handwriting on the front.
I’m also going to take a punt and say although others may have a different preference when it comes to receiving demos, they’d probably favour the following to the amount of guff they currently receive. If my fellow bloggerati/industry chums disagree, I’m sure they’ll make their feelings heard.
- Don’t send me a CD. I don’t care for them
I could be all pious here and state my lack of passion for receiving humble demos CDs is due to the weight of the carbon footprint resting on my conscious. In reality though I have to *get up* out of my chair in order to put a CD on. Imagine that. Also, whilst pissing about with a CD I can’t use my computer to do other such important duties such as emailing, researching the latest internet memes and tweeting nonsense.
There are a number of us here in the Sentric office all receiving demos on a daily basis, we all have computers and headphones, but the office has only one CD player. An alarming number of these demos contain astonishingly bad music (the other day I was sent a link by a pub singer which had a live recording of him murdering ‘Many of Horror’ in such a way I actually thought said demo had been sent by a higher power to punish me) which we’d prefer not to share communally. If one of us is sent something which is ‘reet good’ then it’ll get it’s airing on the office stereo for all to judge in due course.
- Allow me to stream first & then download if I want to
A good electronic demo submission should have two links within it for the music; firstly a link where I can go and stream the tracks. My personal preference here is either SoundCloud or BandCamp as they’re brilliantly simple.
The second link should be where I go to download the music once I’ve streamed it and enjoyed it. The two preferences here are Dropbox or WeTransfer.
(I’ve done a post in the past entitled ‘How To Use SoundCloud and Dropbox To Send Music To Industry’ so have a gander there if you need a hand with that).
Both of these are pretty useful for me to have as I’d rather not download tracks onto my computer before I know if they’re any good or not for obvious reasons and if you’ve sent me something that I really like, but not allowed me to download it then further pissing about is needed between the both of us before I can grab a copy and start doing what I do best with it.
- Correct metadata is *essential*
Christ you lot must be bored of me harping on about metadata on this blog so I’m not going to go through it again. Just read ‘7 Steps To Metadata Utopia’ if you haven’t already.
- Tell me something interesting
Press releases are a minefield. They’re very hard to get right so they make you sound interesting, the vast majority I receive just end up making the artist sound like a self-congratulatory tit. I personally much prefer an artist just to tell me what they’re up to in an informal manner. Bullet points are always appreciated for example:
- Played XXX festival and XXX festival
- Received plays on [INSERT DECENT PROFILE RADIO DJ HITHER]
- Releasing new single on XXX via XXX Records
- Touring the UK throughout [MONTH]
- Featured on [BLOG + LINK]
Doing the above will take you a hell of a lot less time to come up with compared to a fatigued press release and within a matter of seconds it’ll give me a good overview of where you are as an artist.
- Send me to a well maintained website
If you’ve got a website which you actually update regularly then send me there. If you have one for the sake of having one, but don’t do anything with it and instead just keep your Facebook page updated then send me to your Facebook page instead. Recent activity is pretty much key here and I’d much rather see your social network page that has had some interaction on it within the past 48 hours over a website you haven’t updated in two months.
There you go. Alarmingly straight forward stuff, but following these simple rules will make my life a lot easier and therefore will increase your chances of getting your music heard.
I should probably note that when I say ‘make my life easier’ I’m not being lazy – you have to appreciate the sheer amount of music I receive on a daily basis from artists wanting to get their music heard and pushed for sync usage. If an artist puts up barriers or needless steps which I have to take in order to listen to their music, it’s simply not going to help their cause.
I’m a nice person. Honest.
What I’m listening to this week: Achilles, Emeli Sandé and Cerebral Ballzy
What I’m reading this week: This brilliant article over at DiS about Beethoven
Stay tuned.
~ by Sentric on September 9, 2011.
Posted in Demo Submission
Tags: Achilles, BandCamp, Cerebral Ballzy, Demo, Dropbox, Emeli Sande, Metadata, Soundcloud, WeTransfer
well if you like Achilles you should watch them on the COnversion Live broadcast recorded a couple of months ago – also on there is Flash Bang Band + Monsters Build Mean Robots. Check it looks lush and sounds lush and ooh – really is a fine piece of work to looook at: – > http://www.conversionstudios.co.uk/liveepisodemain.php?eid=6 – oh and the interview footage is hilarious!
Just read your blog post on the ‘perfect demo submission’ and I wholeheartedly agree. I’ve been harping on with the same advice for years and I feel like a broken record. There is so much advice and information out there for new emerging musicians that it’s hard to believe mistakes are still being made. One important point, you can follow all the rules for submitting your music, but remember, the first 30 seconds of the first track has to be grab the listener, so they want to invest their time on hearing more.
Just wanted to say thanks for sharing the great advice.
Hi, please check out my Soundcloud at http://soundcloud.com/bigb-1 You won’t have to mess about getting on it lol.
Soundcloud and Dropbox are excellent services, don’t forget they are free. Soundcloud allows you to see who has listened to you music and where and Dropbox can tell you if the person you shared with accepted your request. Bandcamp allows you to collect data from whoever downloads your music too.
Artists this is important info to help you gauge success and interact with your fanbase/media.
Get onboard!
Hi Simon
Very clear and good advice in the ‘My perfect demo submission’ blog.
You say
‘Don’t send me a CD. I don’t care for them’
In the FAQs section on Sentric website it says
‘I think my tracks would be brilliant in an advert – can I send you a demo?
Of course! Please send to this address:……..’
From your blog I understand the problems associated with receiving CD’s but I presume ‘a demo’ would be a physical copy and therefore a CD. Can you confirm if the FAQs section is still valid? Thank you.
Hey,
Yes it’s still valid, but the point of this blog was to show my preference really. If you send a CD it’ll get listened to eventually, whereas following this blog will pretty much mean you’re listened to a lot sooner.
Hope that helps!
Simon
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What Makes A Good Demo Submission? « officialrkz said this on April 24, 2012 at 3:34 pm |
Reblogged this on James Blogs and commented:
.. A great post! …
Well worth a read for aspiring syncronizers!!
Great words..
..
Want to say a massive thanks for Carly Dee’s syncs on Hollyoaks last year and we’re still keeping our fingers crossed for future ambience ..
We’re both having an ‘offspring related’ break from the live scene and we’re hoping to live on through Sentric!
Make sure you enjoy the good weather this week and take care!
.. Listenable here: http://j.mp/CarlyCloud
Hub station.. http://CarlyDee.co.uk
You are Lengendary.
Big love.
Jimbob
http://j.mp/ToMyBlog
I couldn’t agree with this post more. I work for an A&R scouting site in the UK and I when I started about 4 years ago receiving demos by CD was still very much the ‘done thing’ around the office, over these short years things have changed a a lot.
We tried:
Hard copy demos (CDs sent via post) – which took up all your time as they are never labelled correctly and when you would find one that you wanted to contact, they wouldn’t have put their details on the CD, but instead on a cover letter that was no long in the proximity of said CD so you had no way of telling who it was…
Thoughts: Time consuming and rarely produced results for us.
To using social networks – This worked for about 8 months until we became flooded with music and genres that weren’t of interest to us or our clients even when we would state what we were looking for. We also had problems with gauging the honest amount of fans bands and acts had as they all started spamming the online world for likes, shares or any other social network tool they are using now.
Thoughts: An overly used and flooded market full of fictitious results/data, OK to check up on acts you are already considering but you have to ignore their followers when making a decision.
Opening our emails to unsolicited submissions – This again started out fine, people followed our submission guidelines, we only received music we had asked for, it was just the quality that let us down to begin with, then like suddenly every musician on the planet had discovered we were accepting submissions and with out reading the guidelines and submitting dance tracks as we had asked for, we were getting metal, rock and cover bands submitting.
Thoughts: Once the musicians had discovered us we were again flooded with submissions of no relevance to our current clients.
Online storage (soundcloud) – We still use Soundcloud to send and receive
music with people we are currently working with, this service has become invaluable to us, but for initial contact and to receive unsolicited demos it was no better then just posting our email on our site.
Thoughts: Great service for working with musicians or clients you already have a working relationship with.
This left us rather stuck and trawling across many of the different social sites trying to hunt out the bands we wanted for a while until we were introduced to A&R submission sites or pitching platforms.
These are now the only way we do business with new clients, we are able to post a ‘searching for’ style listing and receive demos that are categorised in our inbox or even better only receive the specific genres we have asked for.
I’m not going to name names but you can easily find these platforms by searching for music pitching platforms, music submission sites etc
We have tried out many of these some with varied luck but all better then our previous methods of A&R searching, they come with different tools, some useful some not so but it all depends on how you work.
We have stopped using a few of these as issues were raised as to how legit some of the posters were as they were able to charge the musicians (under the excuse of reducing poor submissions, because as we all know only good music and musicians have loads of money???!!) and questions were being asked whether some people we just using it as a revenue stream without actually looking for new music or acts to sign and work with.
We now only use one service to receive our demos all of which are targeted to our specific needs at that time. Our work load has doubled and we haven’t had to turn away any of our record label, publisher clients in over a year.
In summary I do suggest you check out the platforms offering such a service, I think they all charge a small sign up fee/ monthly fee and watch out for the others that charge a submission fee as they add up quickly and I still feel there is too much doubt around the legitimacy of some of these.
J
Great comment James. Thank you for that!