Tips for Prospective Artists

The Editors

[December 2017.]

Hello there! It seems like you’re trying to get us to cover your album and don’t know us, so here are a few suggestions to get you started…

1.

It’s probably a good idea to confirm whether your hot new release aligns with what we cover.

2.

Not to cramp your sense of style, but misspellings and funny uses of letters and numbers have to be really clever or elegant. We don’t do cute. Not that we’re experts in that genre, but we don’t think psychedelic is spelled that way.

3.

It’s still a good idea to see if your album matches what we like to talk about.

4.

We scan most every press release that appears in our inbox, but usually stop if there are typos or emphatic mentions of instruments and genres we don’t follow. Sorry.

5.

Generally speaking, a tag line is a good idea. But we don’t understand yours, and the 500-word multi-font, multi-color explanation isn’t helping. You’re mentioning bars and singers, recording engineers and venues that we just don’t recognize. Did you even take a peek at what we do?

6.

Do you really want that to be the picture you put in your press release? Maybe we don’t “get” your type of music, but wouldn’t you be ashamed to show that band photo to your mother? What about your kids? While we’re at it, not that we’re prudes or anything, but the four-letter words aren’t helping.

7.

The way publishing works — for us at least — is that we post articles on the things that we like, and the things we think we’re in a position to understand. It may seem a simple strategy, or even old fashioned, but it works for us. If you don’t see things on our site that you recognize, then we’re probably not for you.

8.

Yes, we’ve never met. I don’t know where you got our email address from, but you might want to spell our names correctly. If your music fits what we cover, it helps to start things off on the right foot, don’t you think?

9.

If you spent some time at our site, maybe a few minutes, ok, maybe even 10 seconds, you might realize we don’t have playlists or cover individual tracks. We don’t point to downloads, we don’t post videos. We also don’t do much in the way of interviews. This may seem cruel, but we’re probably not interested in your Kickstarter campaign, or how a percentage of revenue from your recent tour is going towards a cause that is important to you. Nothing personal, but we probably never will like you on Facebook. We don’t know whether an Instagram is smaller or larger than a kilo. We like to let the music speak for itself, which we encourage our readers to go out and buy, or experience firsthand in concert.

10.

Sorry, but we’re actually not very interested in your favorite type of BBQ sauce. Sure, who doesn’t have a bottle of Sriracha at arm’s length these days, but we don’t quite get how that’s going to help us understand your music.

11.

Our site is up pretty much 24/7, and there’s no paywall, so you can take a peek at any time, no charge. If you want to take a look now, that’s totally fine, we’ll be here. You might just get an idea of what we’re interested in by looking at what we actually write about. It’s ok, we can wait for you to look. No, go ahead, please!

12.

What’s with the hand gestures? The photos of things on fire? The balloons and small animals? We can’t help you if you’re in pain or if there’s an emergency. Please call 9-1-1 if you need to.

13.

Ok, we can see you’re having trouble with this. Mistakes in your press material don’t help you. Not that we’re judging, but you lost us after alternative / darkwave / punk / un-plugged / bluegrass / Britpop / progressive / funk / rock / country / steampunk / blues / eclectic / acoustic / schoolhouse / submarine.

Thanks for reading, and good luck out there.

P.S.: We also don’t really care about what logos are on your sneakers.