"Calling all fans of THE VAMPING BLOODSUCKERS - if you want to really help our band please email the following DJs and ask them to play our new single Black Is The Night."
(Insert long list here, including the likes of Steve Lamacq, John Kennedy, Edith Bowman, Zane Lowe, Huw Stephens, Marc Riley, Mark Radcliffe, Stuart Maconie etc etc.)It's an easy mistake - and many bands make it. Depending on the number of Facebook friends they have, anything up to a hundred emails will get sent to every programme on the list. Typically most of these will be a generic message, CC'd to all the shows at once, along the lines of:
Hay There
Please please pleas can you play "Black Is The Night" by The Vamping Bloodsuckers - it's so great and their my favourite band and deserve to be herd on the radio.
Thanx (smiley face)
All radio shows need to have an email address so that listeners can get in touch. The biggest problem at our end is that genuine messages about the show get swamped by tidal waves of promotional spam from pluggers, club nights and indie labels alongside the inevitable Nigerian fraudsters, fake bank messages and offers to enlarge the programme's penis.
And that means some luckless member of the programme team has to go through the inbox every day deleting all the crap so as to find genuine emails from their actual listeners. If even five people request the Vamping Bloodsuckers on the same day, it's instantly obvious the band have put them up to it. Any further emails will get deleted on sight. And if you manage to clog up a working inbox with dozens upon dozens of messages, then you're fairly certain to get noticed and remembered by the all-important producer of the show. And not in a good way.
Whether a track gets played depends mostly on what it sounds like to the producer. And if it's not in the right style for the show (or simply sounds pants) no amount of emails from your fanbase will make it sound any different. The only thing that matters is getting the producer (or presenter) to actually listen in the first place.
Will getting a hundred emails make them more likely to seek out the Vamping Bloodsuckers from the hundreds of CDs stacked up on their desk? Not as such.
And yet it's still possible to make intelligent use of email to increase the chance of your record getting (at least) listened to. Here are your uncle Tom's suggestions:
1) Write personally to just one show at a time - don't send mass emails
2) No need to pretend to be someone else - it's fine to admit you're in a band
3) Actually listen to the show you're targeting, get to know its culture and how it works.
4) Email or text in while the show is on actually air.
5) Get their attention by emailing or texting funny or interesting comments on something you've heard on air. Take it slowly, once or twice per show is enough. Become a regular. If you sound like you're interested in them, they're more likely to be interested in you.
6) Once you've engaged with a programme, ask if "someone on the show" could give you some feedback on "this song we've got". Focus on just the one song. Give a URL where it can be heard online -
Bandcamp,
Soundcloud and
Reverbation allow you to link direct to a song. A producer or presenter can check it out with a single click.
But when it comes to my
Introducing: Fresh On The Net shows on 6 Music you don't have to jump through any of these hoops. Just nip along to our
Recommend Music page and tell us about any great new music we can hear online, your own or anyone else's. There's no need to send us CDs or personalised emails - we listen to every single suggestion that comes through that page and if we like it, we'll play it - simple as that.
TR
_178_100.jpg)
|03:00 UK time, Monday, 31 May 2010
