For many bands, marketing their material to record labels is one of the most gruelling things they have to do (aside from gigging!) Here at Revolver Towers, we get tens and hundreds of demo packages every week – we have boxes full of them – and unfortunately we don’t always have time to actually open and listen to the music.

You’ll find this situation at labels all round the country – and the larger the label, the less time you will have to make an impression on whoever’s listening to whatever they’ve received. The golden rule is this: from the moment a person picks up the jiffy bag with your music CD in and opens it, you have approximately 20 seconds to impress them. If your CD is just a blank CDR with a black and white A5 sheet with a poorly-spelt band bio on it, I can tell you where that CD is going – right back in the bag, and into the ‘Listen To Later’ box.

You might not think this happens a lot, but it’s far more common than you’d expect. To stand out from the crowd, your music must as well.

As most bands still don’t properly harness the power of the Internet to market themselves, here’s some top tips to help increase the interest in your music:

1. Get a web site! Not just a MySpace, a proper web site. Bio, pictures, music, all there to view instantly. Buy some proper web hosting and a domain name (total cost about £30-40 a year), and use this as your base of operations for all your promotion and marketing.
2. Put high-quality MP3s of all your demo tracks up on your web site! Please, no crappy MySpace Music Player audio, it sounds horrible.

   If you’re sending emails to record labels, include direct links to all your demos so that people can click and listen without having to leave their email! The second best thing is to use one of the several music-uploading sites (like MusicV2) which allow you to link to songs, but it’s always preferable to have your MP3s on your own web site so you can link to them with one click.

3. If you have a presskit, make sure you also have an EPK (Electronic Press Kit) which mirrors the content. At record labels, most people are often sitting in front of their computers for most of the day, so if they receive a link to an EPK along with some MP3s, they’re far more likely to click it and spend a couple of minutes listening. Jiffy bags often go unopened because people forget about them. They also produce a lot of clutter, so often unfortunate band demos get tidied into a cardboard box and forgotten about.
4. Do NOT send out emails indiscriminately to hundreds of record labels! This is one of the cardinal sins of self-promotion.

   Do your research, pick your target labels carefully and market yourself to them. We receive loads of emails from bands who have clearly just found a big list of record labels and are emailing everybody at once. It looks unprofessional and is also incredibly frustrating for labels who are not interested in your style of music… And before you ask: no, they won’t pass your email on to another label. No, they won’t get back to you. No, they won’t visit your MySpace.

   It’s ruthless, but then you have to be to cut through the noise of everybody else fighting for peoples’ attention!

5. Be short, sweet and to the point. If you are going to send an email or a jiffy bag with your CD in to a record label, make it completely obvious what you are after – be bold! The best emails I’ve received are only a few lines, introducing the band member or the band, stating that they’re interested in feedback or a distribution / release deal, and some links to all of their material (on their own web site).

   If you’re going to send out emails along with CDs to labels, then mention the web address in big bold letters on both the CD and the onesheet – you may find that most people end up listening to the tracks on your web site, and not even putting the disc in their CD player! With some simple analytics, this also allows you to track which tracks are the most popular, and figure out what’s popular.

Of course, don’t stop doing things like running a MySpace page, doing all the other usual promotion – but just remember that record label A&R people don’t exist in the same ‘headspace’ as your music fans. You need to grab their attention – and often quite quickly – with a slick, complete package, with MP3s, presskit, photos and other multimedia, targeted at them… And not just sent a ‘John Smith’ email along with hundreds of other labels. Take a little more time, refine your choice of labels, and knock them dead. Good luck!