Rock Band Promotions Blog

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It’s a shame when a good band sends us a promo pack that is complete crap. It happens a lot. Some bands are good at playing music but when it comes to producing printed, promotional stuff, they fail to do themselves justice.

Here are some horror stories about promotional packs received at the GYBO office

Blank CDs sent in without even the band name being written on the CD - so now we have a collection of blank CDs and have no idea which bands are on them.

No date on the CD to tell us when the tracks were recorded.

No song titles - so if we want to discuss a song we don’t know what it is called.

Info sheets without any contacts details on them - a two page closely typed essay about the band’s history and no contact details — not even a phone number.

Hand written letters in spidery writing which we have difficulty reading

Failure to understand the difference between a website address and an email address - email addresses beginning with www.

Band info sheets that tell us the band is based on the UK but not where exactly

Photos of the band that are so poorly reproduced you cant make out what they are

Biog sheets with masses of irrelevant information - we havn’t got time to read all these minor details and really dont need to know all that stuff anyway.

Photos with no explanatory captions, so we cant understand much about what the photo shows us.
Biog sheets that fail to explain what type of music the band plays - are they heavy metal, punk, pop rock or rootsy folk rock - it doesnt say.

Sometimes we are unsure as to why this stuff has been sent in.

Large amounts of material, CDs and even DVDs but no covering letter asking us what to do with it.

What do these guys want? Show bookings? Album promotions? Management services? A review? They forgot to say.
A one line letter or note asking “please consider this band for a show booking” or “Please write a review of our latest album” would at least tell us what they want

So if bands are sending out this stuff to venues or record labels, it is hardly surprising that they are not getting any bookings or interest back.

We now have a large collection of band press and promo packs and 100s of sampler CDs

This rather poor collection of material helps us to figure out how to make an effective pack that will actually be worth the postage and get the band results.

For tips on how to write a good pack read the comments on this blog entry.

See details of our promo pack writing service on our main web site Get Your Band On

We now have a blog on OnLine Rock

Take a look and may be post a comment

The whole idea of Get Your Band on is to help unsigned bands in the rock genre to make progress with their musical careers. GYBO is limited to bands resident in the United Kingdom (or Great Britain if you prefer.)

Not an easy thing to do as there are just so many bands and lots of them are really good. We already have well over 800 bands in our Uk Bands Index.

The core of the project is to work with venues to increase bookings. At least, we want to make it easier for venues and promoters to find the bands they are looking for and get them to play.

Ideally we would like to open up new venues to live music. This is something that we will work on over the year ahead.
We will soon have cleared the backlog of registrations from bands and will then move on to extending our database of venues and promoters that hire bands.

Our aim is to encourage venues to post their requirements for bands through GYBO. We want venues to see us as being an agency that they can reply to send them really good bands.

All bands need gigs to play and our aim is to help provide bands with new opportunities to play and to encourage new venues to come on stream.

It is also about audiences, encouraging people to enjoy live music and to support bands.

We believe that live music is the best music and we coined the “campaign for live music” as one way of promoting first hand experience of what making music is all about.

Get Your Band On was set up to help promote unsigned rock bands in the UK. The people who thought it up and created it were rock dudes who were crazy about the strength and power of live music in the UK.

We know of so many really good bands in the UK who play great music and deserve to be promoted. So we created a web site that was about finding and promoting rock bands.

Our roster of bands now is well over 800 and many have signed up to our page on MySpace.

No week goes by without we get new bands contacting and most of these produce and play good music.

The UK has thousands of rock bands - of all types of genre - of all ages - from short-lived young bands through to professional musicians who earn a living from playing.

We want this blog to contribute to understanding about promoting bands.

This blog is about promoting UK Rock Bands. It is the blog for our main web site Get Your Band On.

You can comment on postings to this web site. Note however that spamming is not allowed. This blog is moderated: that means that your comments are vetted for relevance and appropriateness before they are posted.

If your a serious writer about promoting rock bands in the UK you can apply to become a registered contributor. To do this, contact us through the main web site.

We welcome links from appropriate and relevant web sites.