News & Press

The recent proliferation of services which suggest they offer some guarantee your demos will be listened to by festival bookers/agents etc, in return for a fee, is another way of creating a financial handicap for bands-now, you have to get your stuff recorded, get some kind of video up on youtube, spend countless life hours updating your 15 different web pages and websites, for which no-one is going to pay you, and find £7-£15 for each submission. which means arts careers will increasingly become open only to those who can afford to work for free for several years. Wannabe journalists, for example, have to find the money to go to study journalism, often after a BA at university, and then secure unpaid placements at newspapers often for years before getting a paid job. THe music industry is casting around for a new business model as it becomes harder and harder to get money from selling recorded music, and this seems to translate into new mini hierarchies that discriminate against bands and artists who don't have a load of money to match their talent. If you have a small sum of money to spend on promoting your band, submitting to 20 fests at £10 each isn't likely to help-that kind of statistics based targeting only works in your favour when you can max it.
Some internet radio stations allow you to purchase a certain number of plays. In their blurb, they advise that you will probably get 5-10% of listeners turning into fans. The fact that there's such a clearly predictable percentage makes it into a numbers game. The more plays you can afford to buy, the more fans you'll have.
So how do you stave off disillusionment and a certain sense of futility if you've been plugging away and scraping those pennies together to record?
I'm working on the answer to that. I'd like to believe that for every 'expert' out there telling you how to get your band heard, there's someone else who chugged along doing their best and eventually acquired critical mass. The cream floats to the top? maybe, but as Jarvis said, Shit also Floats.