Tools for Promoting Electronic Music

Promoting an electronic project through external resources and working with a label is an important task for a musician. In our article you’ll learn about how to communicate with label managers, playlist supervisors, radio station editors, DJs and other industry professionals, and what to do to make sure your music doesn’t go unnoticed.

Why send your release to someone

First and foremost, an artist is driven by the desire to be heard. We send music when we want to get some feedback from professionals and understand our level, make conclusions not only about the quality of our own ideas and music production, but also to make useful contacts and build new relationships. In the music business, as in any other, connections decide a lot: often, not the strongest music with properly built up contacts takes higher positions than the result of the work of talented, but invisible in the industry authors.

In addition, working with other channels to promote their release allows the artist to reach the maximum number of listeners from their target audience through all available tools – promos from labels, playlist curators, various communities and others.

How to prepare to send a release

Make sure you’re ready to communicate and won’t abruptly interrupt the communication

The artist should have no illusions: as you prepare to send your release to a label or playlist curator, make a sober assessment of your desire to communicate. Don’t think that you have to overcome yourself and turn from an introvert into a communicative person in one moment. We are all individuals and we shouldn’t consider this a disadvantage, but if you take on the task of sending music and engaging in dialogue, make sure in advance that you will be able to complete it when you receive any feedback.

The electronic music community is a small circle of people, every act can affect your reputation because almost all of the big managers, promoters, label and venue representatives communicate with each other. So remember, if you correspond with a label or publisher for a long time and then suddenly disappear, it’s bound to affect your reputation.

Be clear about what you want and why you’re starting the dialogue

When mentally preparing yourself for correspondence with a representative of the industry, make sure that you have at least a rough idea of the whole chain of events from the first contact to the appearance of your work in streaming, advertising, movies and related areas of monetization. Assess the frequency with which the label you’re writing to releases, how often the curator updates their playlist that you want to get on: when you understand the busyness of the person you’re writing to, negotiating promotions and waiting your turn is much easier.

Prepare for feedback

If you’re not prepared to hear rejection or an inadequate response, delay sending the release. It’s not uncommon for a musician’s request for a promotional release to result in an email recipient demanding that they remove their address from all mailing lists and never send anything ever again. If you’re potentially hurt by such reactions, it’s really best to postpone the communication until you’re in a more prepared state of mind.

Make sure that all the contacts you provide are working and that you check them systematically

Keep in mind that when you provide contact information, you should be aware that it can be used, which means you commit to checking the email, messengers, and social media you’ve provided. You can abstract away from excessive communication so as not to be distracted, but make it a rule to check all incoming messages and respond to them at least once a day.

Clean up your information about yourself and your releases

Start with a nickname in working messengers – it should be simple and clear, related to your last name or nickname for easy retrieval. Prepare in advance all the actual information about yourself and place it in the cloud storage: when you have such a link at hand, it’s easier to respond promptly to emergency requests from promoters and labels, which means your chances of getting additional promo increases. Make sure that all the tracks in your folder are named and numbered correctly, that the information about your project is in an understandable presentation, and that you can really be contacted by the contacts given.

What details are important to consider when sending a release to a label

Be responsible for the text of your cover letter

When you begin communicating with a label, prepare a cover letter. The recipient should understand that this is not a “carpet bombing” of everything at once, but a personalized request. Write about yourself in two words – you don’t need to describe your biography in detail, focus on the main facts and stories, list the labels you’ve been published on, tell about the tracks you’re sending. A label manager doesn’t always have his headphones at hand – your letter should make the right impression even before you start listening to it, make a person interested just by the text description, so that they change the priority of your letter or close it as unread and come back to it later.

Write only on the merits – what you worked on, why it would interest the label. And, of course, don’t forget about the correct and full name of the files: note, for example, that not everyone reads Cyrillic. Do not overload the name with unnecessary technical details in order to impress the listener, do not forget to specify the author, so that the file was easier to find after downloading.

Another important element of the promotional letter is a description of your immediate plans. Tell us what genre and style area your search is in at the moment, indicate that you intend to record an album or EP, perform a live show in an unusual venue, or come up with a collaboration with someone from a completely different genre. In other words, make it clear that your creative life extends beyond this letter, so you’ll give the impression of a coherent, independent person to work with.

Send only completed, finished tracks

First, don’t comment on your work in a negative way. If you send a release, you automatically think it’s a finished work and you’re not ashamed of it. If a label employee appreciates the idea, he’ll hear it through all the technical imperfections.

Secondly, don’t admit that you outsource the mixing and mastering. Many musicians are rather inconsiderate when sending in a release to say that it was mixed and mastered at some famous studio working with the stars of the genre. Such information looks strange to the label recipient of your letter: a competent publisher probably has its own team of engineers, who comb the entire catalog to their standard anyway. Also, the label manager has a reasonable question: why did you spend this money if you haven’t signed this release yet? It either shows that you are so confident that it will be signed, or that you are very unsure of your mixing and mastering skills.

Follow the rules for submitting files

Keep in mind that the more comfortable the process of listening to your tracks is for the label manager, the easier your life is. If you know that the label manager you’re communicating with is not listening to tracks online, there’s no point in sending them a link to SoundCloud. Instead, upload the files to a convenient file-sharing service with an interface that’s available in the language of the recipient.

What to watch out for when sending a release to music streaming editors

Use release pitching tools. If your track wasn’t picked up for the showcase or playlist the first time, don’t despair – keep filling out the pitching form with each new release. If editors see an artist pitching their tracks every month or every two weeks, sooner or later they’ll pay attention to the release. It might work on the tenth, fifteenth time, it’s important to get noticed.

If your music is released on a label and the pitching is handled by its representatives, consider that not all publishers thoroughly approach the working out of each single. Therefore, it is very important that you fill out pitching forms in your own name and put all the necessary information to attract an editor.

How to communicate with radio music editors

Electronic artists have some sort of advantage when it comes to promotion on radio. Often non-priority hours on the air – before and after shows, nighttime and earlier – are filled with an automatic playlist. You can offer your track at an unpopular time and, if your accounts and listens start to grow after that, show that dynamic to the station by offering to move your music to a higher rating time.

What’s important to consider when dealing with DJs

Collaborating with DJs can benefit the electronic musician in several ways at once. Firstly, you can ask to test a track in public and see the response after his set. Secondly, get feedback from the DJ – he’ll tell you what’s wrong with the technical part of the track, whether your release rocked or not. This feedback is worth a lot: the DJ who takes your track for testing runs a great risk of being the first to get a negative reaction from the dance floor. In addition, DJs are good networking assistants. DJs can be called the evangelists of your creativity: if they like something and your musical ways haven’t gone in diametrically opposite directions for several years, you can be sure that they will support you by inertia.

When submitting material, it is important to pay attention to some nuances. First, you need to be clear about your intentions. No need to say that it will definitely “blow up the dance floor,” will be “the high-light of your set” – the DJ himself knows how to do it, even with a dozen regular tracks. Use a personal approach, accentuate the fact that the DJ plays music close to your spirit in your friendly establishments, emphasizing the fact that you do not create him competition in these clubs, but only hope for cooperation.

Don’t be shy to ask for feedback if you’ve sent something: a DJ should always remember that other people’s music has a certain value, time and emotional resources are invested in it.

Remember that DJs appreciate novelty, and it’s important to send only fresh releases. That said, if a DJ is interested in your new work, he’ll run through your back catalog as well, and maybe play old tracks in a club set as well.

What to watch out for when working with playlist curators

Playlist curators do not monetize for their own benefit the music they compile, while investing effort and communicative effort in assembling and promoting compilations. Obviously, then, they make their money primarily from paid placements paid for by musicians. Many curators also compile playlists for various services, brands, and public spaces because their taste and their speed are trusted. Often over time, curators create their own label, and then they already share auditions in shares with the auditioning musician. So, working with curators is first and foremost a long-playing story.

When sending music to curators, check the contents of your files – your track should fit the genre and mood of the playlist you want to get on, listen to it beforehand, and pick the right material. When posting, it makes sense to include your listening figures and experience with other playlists in the text. Be prepared that in most cases you may be offered a paid placement: no need to enter into an ethical discussion – if you categorically reject this format, limit yourself to a brief thank-you or try to discuss additional terms of cooperation.

It’s important to keep in mind that most curators are only interested in new music: based on the date of your release, they may decide not to post it at all or publish it on a playlist on less favorable terms for you.

How to offer your track to admins of large resources

In general, admins of large online resources are similar to playlist curators in their functions, but they are less subject to restrictions on all kinds of commercial activity. That’s why many publishers and channels openly post information about the cost of posting tracks. When deciding on a paid placement, keep in mind that administrators can show you nice statistics, behind which there will be no real listeners among your target audience.

Before sending your material to the publisher or channel administrator, study the posts on the page, the background of its creators and your audience, and also check who your colleagues appeared in the posts and whether they were paid publications or were noticed by yourself. Assess the genre relevance of recent posts to your music, remember that audiences in most cases can easily tell the difference between a native posting and a promotional purchase that is not worth responding to. Always start with a “suggestion”-format the post in the style of the publicity and wait for a response-and don’t send music in private messages to the admin without accompanying information.