Lots of tracks, now what?

I like your tracks, i think they would fit very good in a Bar /Pub enviroment.

I would try to find out, what are the live clubs in your area. If there is currently only some Bar´s which do live music, find the one, that doesn´t have a programm yet. Ask the owner, if he would be interested, and do a reoccuring show. Meet with other artis from your area, which also like to do gigs. (So the evening can be filled, either team up with a DJ or another live act.) I dont know where you live, and certain types of music get easier attention in certain destinations. In Berlin there are a lot of Bar´s and fight for competion, so something which creates interest, may be also interesting for the owner.

Performing live music is definitely a good school to sharpen your tracks & skills… :slight_smile:

You may do it in front of a cam, first, and publish it on YT
But nothing replace a crowd feedback.

Best thing to get your name out there and to get a following is to get a social media presence.

Instagram is a must for random photos and little videos of jams or recording sessions.

Twitter is great for people keeping up to date with what you are doing. More of a younger audience than Facebook.

Get a Facebook page and post the same stuff you post to Twitter. Facebook is more of an adult audience. The kids are leaving it in droves!

If you are filming any of your gigs, jams etc then get them up on YouTube too :slight_smile:

Very interesting thread.

Let’s assume one has tracks which one thinks are in a good enough state to publish in a commercial context.

How does one approach a label today? How does that part even work? What is the function of a label these days?

Being with a good label can take away a lot of the hard work of getting noticed, scoring gigs and organising tours. Bear in mind though that this comes at a cost (well, a percentage usually).

These days will usually expect you to already have a large (and manage your own) social media following. The more popular you seem and with a large following they are looking at less of a gamble when signing you.

Of course your music is important and the more you can finalise your own work the better for a label. The less money they will have to invest in studio or mastering time. Having said that, I’m sure if you were knocking out the most groundbreaking stuff they’be ever heard then you’d get away with that alone.

The money that artists see mainly comes from touring and merchandise rather than album or single sales nowadays so I’d imagine that labels are looking for people who can kick-ass live.

I would see a label as likley minded artists - so you get other musicans in your network, which do the sound you like. When i think of the “Iboga” sound, than there are a lot of similar artists which eventually shape a genere.

I would check out what there is locally, nothing beats contacts from your area. If you´re area does not feature the music you like - then move to that area which does.

From my area a lot of musicans in the psytrance genere moved to hamburg, because its the most active scene for that type of music. I think its somewhat sad, because it depraves the local area from that sound.

So i would vote for creating your scene - if its possible. Yes its more stress as you need to convince local authoritys if you want to rent public space - but its doable. I organized a punk concert in my area, and allthough it was a lot of work - it was very rewarding.

Start small, and if you earn something invest it again in the venue.

I thought recently about coupling it with other interests, i.e. animal rights, and do somehting which is benefical not only to you. It may be that the authoritys may be sharing your interests, and that if you do a benefic style venue - you create change for your local enviroment, and also interest an audience which would like to support the good thing.

(Animal rights is an example - insert your topic where you would like to see improvements.)

Probably it would also an idea, to do provide a jamming area, at first without audience, just for musicans who like to meet up, the audience is optinal. If that continues for a while i belive the audience will come automatically. (continuity will help.)

Hmm, lots to think about here. As Sternenlicht suggest I really like the thought of coupling music with other interests. In our case, we already spend a lot of time reading and discussing politics, religion, feminism and racism, and since these are issues we really care about, they already tend to turn up in our lyrics in some way or another. Spending more time on writing texts with well-formed arguments for our views could be something to consider. As long we are being sincere and don’t try to create controversy for attention, I think forwarding our views in the public debate with music could suit us well.

Performing live is a bit intimidating at the moment. But yeah, starting small by rehearsing a couple of tracks on a subset of our gear doesn’t sound too unrealistic. The main hurdle would be live vocals, though…

20 years ago I know people used to send songs burned to CDs by mail to specific radio shows that sometimes got played. I have no idea how to get the attention of radio broadcasters these days, though. I recently tried to find some submissions info or email address for a couple of norwegian radio programs that play music similar to ours, but didn’t find anything.

Abhoth,

The best way to reach out to labels or artists is via their social media.

If your chat is good or they like the music you are doing then they’ll reply. Do or say something different to stand out from the other noise they get sent daily via these channels.

@Abhoth Great tracks! I enjoyed listening to them.

Could you perhaps give us a little insight on what you did with your Elektron boxes (or whatever) on these?

In a rush but checked some of the first track. Sounds nice. Vocals remind me of Broadcast, wish I lived with someone that had those vocals on tap :wink:

Re what to do. It’s up to you. If you have the urge to play shows then find promoters and send them your music. Or put shows on yourself by hiring a venue. Possibly risk losing money doing the latter tho depending on the deal you make with the venue and how many people show up.

Besides that it’s all total luck of the draw. Hit blogs and online zines. Make videos. Stock footage is an easy option if shooting your own footage isn’t possible/appealing. If people like it then great, if they don’t, fuck it and carry on :wink:

I’m not really in to standard edm so I don’t really know the score as far as what blogs are out there/how popular those blogs are etc. Or if there are djs etc worth sending to. But I’d send it out to as many places as possible. Then link any write-ups/reviews etc you get on your Facebook. Then if you’re in to trying to get someone to put your music out, send them music and the press links etc…

Or just start a tape label and put it out yourself via bandcamp etc.

Good luck with it all :slight_smile:

On “Genes and Memes” we recorded the vocals to the Octatrack. Those weird pitched vocal sounds are some short sample buffers continously sampling the vocals and played back as small snippets here and there. An A4 sequences a Folktek Matter and plays the arpeggiated synth. The rest is an Electribe MX and an Eigenharp played by my wife.

On “All Across Europe” we deliberately switched things around. She used the modular and Elektron boxes, so I don’t know the details. I was using her Electribe and did my best as a vocalist. “My best” is quite crappy, btw. Lots of autotuning going on.

Callofthevoid: Music blogs hadn’t even occured to me. I did a bit of searching and found some nice, serious-looking ones that apparently push our type of music.

I’m not going to make a comment, just a random post so that I can stalk myself later and check these tracks out.

All across europe is great! rsp

how do i foll you on sc?

you should really consider doing live gigs

Thanks! This is us on soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/gallerine

We also have a blog. A bit thin on content at the moment, but more Elektron related stuff is most likely on the way:
http://ticticelectro.com/

Looking forward to listening to those tracks. I’ve had a quick read of your blog on my lunch break and really like what you have to say - inspiring stuff!

On “Genes and Memes” we recorded the vocals to the Octatrack. Those weird pitched vocal sounds are some short sample buffers continously sampling the vocals and played back as small snippets here and there. An A4 sequences a Folktek Matter and plays the arpeggiated synth. The rest is an Electribe MX and an Eigenharp played by my wife.

On “All Across Europe” we deliberately switched things around. She used the modular and Elektron boxes, so I don’t know the details. I was using her Electribe and did my best as a vocalist. “My best” is quite crappy, btw. Lots of autotuning going on.

Callofthevoid: Music blogs hadn’t even occured to me. I did a bit of searching and found some nice, serious-looking ones that apparently push our type of music.[/quote]
Yeah if you type name of similar artists with recent(ish) releases + blog (or Google maybe can filter results to blogs only?) in to Google search you should get tons of blogs that are currently active and pay attention to stuff like your own. Kinda tedious writing to them all but it’s how I got my stuff out there (couple of tracks, one with a video) and things subsequently went pretty well :wink:

I’m necroing this thread for an update on what we’ve learned since I initially posted.

We have made a bandcamp page, tried to be a bit more active on social media, etc. We’ve also learned that “indietronica” is a suitable description for much of what we are doing.

However, our most interesting discovery has been submithub.com. This is a page that makes it easy to submit music to lots of music blogs at once. If you pay for “premium tickets”, the blogs have to listen to your track and then either accept your submission or write a short comment on why they don’t like it. Getting lots and lots of thumbs down and comments telling you how much you suck can be a bit depressing, but as a whole, the feedback has been useful. Particularly when several responses are pointing to the same problems.

We’ve spent aprox $50 total, spread on three different tracks. A couple of blogs have accepted a track, either writing a bit about us and sharing the track on the blog. Or more often, the track gets added to a soundcloud playlist, which has resulted in a small bump in listening numbers. A couple of really big blogs showed an interest, but unfortunately that hasn’t amounted to anything yet. The feedback has been valuable, though. And a bit surprising. Everyone “hated” this track (that we like):

…while this one that we weren’t all that pleased with was generally well received:
https://soundcloud.com/gallerine/let-it-go-free-download

All in all, I’d definitively recommend submithub. One lesson learned is that a submitted track appears to fare a lot better if it “gets to the point” quickly.

Do anyone know of other web sites or services worth knowing about? Some decent mixing/mastering service perhaps?

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I’ve received a free coupon to publish a single through an independent label Spinnup.com. Their prices are super low and you can get your tracks on sites like Spotify, iTunes and Amazon in a matter of 2-3 days.

With that being said, the exposure my tracks have gotten was very small to non-existent. They were there alright, but stuck in a vacuum. There are many similar publishing services, however I suggest you create a fanbase first. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the submithub, I’ve just submitted a track for free, will see how it goes. :slight_smile:

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The problem nowadays I think is that music is so disposable now, there is so much of it and much of it is free. You don’t seem to want mass market success, and your type of music wouldn’t get it anyway, so there is no point chasing a label (you would also have to compromise a lot to please the label anyway). So I think you will only ever have a small specialist audience.

Don’t worry about being out of the loop, many of the most famous music innovators didn’t have any idea of the “scene” they were aiming at, it actually helps if you don’t follow the crowd.

I agree that you should use a Twitter account. I followed a few bands with my account, and a couple of musicians in other countries started following me even though I don’t post any music online so I naturally returned the favour and follow them now too.

I agree with the others that playing live is the future. This does mean you will have to change your songs to make them easier to play live, and tailor them to the audience who will be listening. If you are nervous about it, try going to an Open Mic night. I went to one once, everybody does one song and some people messed it up completely, but nobody really minds. The problem is that you will have to be very economical with your equipment because you have to get in and out of the playing area quickly and it is not worth setting up a lot of equipment for one song, so you may have to make more use of samples and/or a recorded backing track.

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sounds like Lounge Music, idk that style, but definitely something played in a Bar or in several Chillout areas. So Chillout/Lounge - something in that direction :slight_smile:

I would try to find some good Bars or smaller Clubs around there you are and give them a Tape - ask if they would play your music. Here in Germany i know some Artists who started like this. Also try to perform live and record that on video for YT Upload. You can then use this as reference work if you wanna build up and audience. Quite hard to tell where to promote your music - i struggle on that as well :slight_smile: but i guess that looking for a forum or blog dedicated to Lounge/Chillout Music could help your Videos get an initial “kick”.

If you use soundcloud, post your tracks to groups that have similar or equal musical styles. this helps alot. however: bad thing about that is that you have to repeat this process several times a day if you wanna stay up in that groups track list.

its all about the combination i think. i still try to find my way; YT and SC is working good, but obviously you cannot expect to catch attention in a short time.

i would - however - NOT post your music to Services offering you cheap prices for bringing your music to several platforms !!! dont do this! google their names and read through user experiences and you will notice that most of them got ripped of by those platforms. they barely saw money or their tracks havent reached spotify, itunes - whatever - at all. but they still had to pay the price - things like that. and others even found their tracks “warez’ed” on the internet - tons of illegal copies while they were still not published on spotifiy and so on and so forth - but rather on unknown sites no one really buys a track from. in short: DONT DO IT!

take your time and start slow. YT and SC work on a long term - combined with style specific forums and blogs. and dont forget to ask in some Bars and Clubs around and use your YT videos for practice to do live jams. Although you wont reach a massive audience that way you will reach an audience that is really attracted by what you are doing. and that matters most, doesnt it?!

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