Advertising Tips for Musicians

Video Transcript

"How do you get the press to take notice of you? It's the same thing as looking at your message and crafting your message. The only way that the press is going to take notice of you, is if you're actually doing something that they care about. They care about things that are new and interesting. They care about things that are making a difference. They care about giving a story that their readers are going to care about. So if you want to get into a magazine, the best way to do that is to get to know the person who's actually going to be writing the story. You want to pitch your attack, your promotional efforts, at the individual person. Maybe that person, man, they have a real affinity for baseball games and you find that out and when you call up and you're talking to them and you say "Hey", you know, it's like you casually mention some sort of baseball fact, and they go "Hey, are you into baseball too"? They are much more likely to be interested in your story because they feel like you're on their side, you're wanting to help them get a great article. And then if they start talking to you, then they'll find out all the stuff about your message, all the stuff about your story, it's really interesting. Suddenly they become interested in it and they start writing about it. So getting into magazines is going to, you have to aim at the person. The other thing about getting into magazines is you want to do it at least two months before you're actually performing at a place. This requires a lot of advanced planning and a lot of advanced preparation, so a lot of times this kind of gets pushed to the wayside when you're by yourself. When you get more of a team, you need to understand how this works though, and you need to find out and do research before you try and work your butt off to try to get into magazines and newspapers."