From persistently contacting news agencies and conferences to leveraging a sake brand, this jack of many trades reveals huge publicity/exposure tricks for musicians.
The full video on these "hacks" is:
If you are providing value for people it will spread. As long as you provide value with each of your words and it's telling a part of that bigger story, people will engage. What are your goals that should be the deciding factor of what you ought to post and where you should post it. Don't just spend your time - invest in it. Focus on particular niche markets and if you you want to know more about that niche market. More about that on Simon's blog.
When I asked Google, "tell me about Asian-American bands," the number one result was my band The Slants. That's a very niche market - we started up in an era where there were no Asian American bands. There was not a single Asian American actor on television or lead actor in the film at the time (mid-2000s). We were decades before Crazy Rich Asians and Fresh Off the Boat was killing it. We were an invisible community but we were able to establish ourselves by focusing on these very micro markets: the Asian-American community, anime conventions, nowadays we work with a lot of lawyers. It'd be a big payoff if you find a way to deliver relevant value to your own niche market and also allows you to leverage relationships in a new interesting kind of way.
Our partnership with G Sake, a sake Brewery in Oregon. Not only did they write really large checks to help support our tour, but we also collaborated with them. I just kept asking how can we serve you better where's an area that you're struggling? They would say you know what we don't think we don't sell really any sake in Texas for some reason, Texas doesn't like sake. We're like let's build the tour where we play inside the biggest distributors of sake, give free tastings, we'll play music to draw people in, we'll talk about the product, we'll film it, and then stream it. Guess what? They became the number one brand of sake in Texas distribution centers quadrupled their order. Next time when I went around and I was like "hey I'm going on tour again, you want to invest?" They'd say "Absolutely!" And I'm like "tell me the states where you're struggling, that's where I'll book my tour."
We also thought, "how can we help them stand out on the shelves a bit more?" We realized that you know the sake bottle shelf looked pretty similar. People go to the store - has anyone seen like sake like at Whole Foods? You just see bunch of bottles and there's no explanation looks like this one seems more milky than that one this one has a cherry blossom on it. We talked the stocking company into making bottleneck tags. Let's give out a free song to everyone who buys this bottle of sake. They will get our new unreleased song. We ran 55,000 bottles of sake across Whole Foods and they sell so much sake that Costco is like "hey do you really want to pick up your production - let's bring it into our stores."
We kind of dominated a niche market using Yelp because our band loves talking about food and guess what nobody was using Yelp to promote their band so I was like I might as well do it. I wrote reviews of like different restaurants across the tours that I was on and always kind of linking back. Like "hey check out my profile if you like it you can download a free song." Between that the first year, the second year, and a couple other efforts we led to over 45,000 downloads. That is a lot of foodies into fans. Yelp actually has community boards where you say like "I'm in this particular town like come on by to my show", if you've been engaging and providing value to that community they'll show up.
There's no secret to this. I just went to Ted.com, I clicked on events, and I basically pitched every single event in the world where I could speak the language or where there was a topic or idea that I had that was relevant to that community. My first year I sent over 300 messages to those events and I got 299 rejections, but one said yes. What did I do? I wrote 299 follow-up messages, "hey this event in Seattle, Washington is going to have me speak. Let me come to your event this year." My first year I got three TED Talks. The next year I got four and I became a host. Now I just had a TED talk in Washington D.C. featured on TED.com. You can see this is just from being persistent and then saying, "how can I give your community value." If you do this if and you're persistent about it, that's how you essentially make it rain.
I don't think of rain as a singular event. I think of it as billions and billions of tiny drops of waters. Small efforts that lead up to one big swell especially when it's focused. Remember that success in the music industry isn't something that you wait for or hope or it's something that you create every single day. You get more out of 15 minutes of focused time every single day than you could squandering it on social media for hours at a time. Think about your goal and how you serve those goals. Don't say "I don't have time to do this." Yes you do, Yes you do. You can get up 15 minutes earlier or you can take a 15 minute lunch break and focus on your goals. That's 91 hours a year focus time period on your goals. If you're measuring it you will see a lot better results.
The full video of these in-depth topics is:
Email us at seth [at] collaboarator.com and it'll happen! This post was created September 3, 2019 by Seth Kitchen of Collaboarator LLC.