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Originality Is Everything with john McGlasson

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Submitted By: JohnMC | Added On: 4/22/2007 | Total Views (632) | Total Downloads: (0)

So I know a lot of people who frequent nr.net probably wouldn’t be into Backyard Tire Fire, with their down-home feel and songwriting skills…metal it ain’t. But I’m constantly amazed at the cross-section of people we see at the shows around the country, and the diverse group of artists BTF tours with...one week it's indie darlings JJ Grey & Mofro or William Elliot Whitmore, the next week it’s Robert Randolph & The Family Band, and now they’re touring with Clutch thru May. After that, who knows? My first column for nr.net was a promise of progress reports on BTF’s success since we’d just released the new album, Vagabonds & Hooligans on 02/06/07, and were in the middle of a huge, expensive promo effort to push it on the public, press, and radio. Our promo effort included the hiring of a major publicist (more on that later)…a college radio promo firm, a AAA non-commercial radio promo firm, and now a AAA commercial radio promoter, since we had some success getting airplay in non-comm, it’s natural to make the jump to commercial. And pricey. Sales have remained consistent since the release as far as retail, doubling the expectations of our distributor week after week. If I don’t seem excited, let’s just say our distributor’s expectations were pretty low in the current industry. But we’re doubling them! BTF has always had good cd sales at the live shows. They’re a great band to see live, and when you combine alcohol with that, you’re going to sell some cds after the show. Labels are surviving right now on show sales for the most part. How are our digital sales you ask? We’d all love to know, there’s a 4-month delay on digital numbers, so it’ll be 07/01 before we find out how we did in digital sales for a 02/06/07 release. Crazy, I know. I’ve learned a lot from paying publicists…they cost more than any single expense on the budget, promise the least, and from my experience, deliver the least. If I regret any spending, it’s in the area of publicity. I’ve learned a $20,000 lesson…hire the smaller, lesser-known publicity firm. For a label at our level, with a band at BTF’s level, (largely unknown to the ultra-elitist music press), there’s no point in hiring the big-name publicist who’s used to pushing albums by artists that already have a big name…they’re lazy and spoiled. They type a letter, send out the cd, send a follow-up email after a couple weeks, and their job is done. This didn’t work for us. We didn’t get the press we needed at first, and it cost us some buzz. The truth is, the lesser-known publicist has to work to get articles, they’re still trying to make their name, and they work a lot harder to get results. While they promise nothing, if they don’t get results they don’t get referrals. The publicist we hired came highly recommended, by people who push bigger-name artists who, like us, thought that to have the right publicist’s name attached to our stuff would bring more attention, but we learned it’s not the publicists’ name that has meaning, it’s the artist’s name recognition that gets results. The truth is, we only hired a publicist to free us up to do other promo efforts, but had we just done the publicity work ourselves, we’d have gotten a lot better results, and had a lot more money to work with. The press we’re getting now is largely the work of the band’s manager and the label. The publicist we hired sent packages to high-end media that we had no chance of getting coverage from, and we didn’t. They had no idea how to market to the indie music world, something we know very well. Lesson learned; know who you are, know where you are, and don’t try to make a big jump too soon. Just because you can get a big publicist to take your project doesn’t mean you should if you haven’t built up the name recognition to benefit from it. Spend wisely!

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