Blog Science: WE NEED TO TALK

Posted by Justin Boland on Jun 04, 2010 | 0 Comments

This is probably one of the most important topics I’m going to cover this summer. For independent artists, blogs are one of the only promotional platforms we have access to.  Radio doesn’t give a fuck about you, magazines won’t even cover you if you could afford ad space, and music television doesn’t even play music videos anymore.  More importantly, the past decade of sales numbers clearly shown that all three of those channels are losing their power to convert attention into album units sold. That’s actually the good news…

The bad news is that hip hop is currently so over-saturated with new artists that you’re going to have a damn hard time breaking through the wall of white noise. The other bad news is that hip hop blogs themselves are increasingly over-saturated, too, which creates two separate problems.  First, the major outlets that have been around for a few years are already out of reach for new artists-more focused on being a digital version of The Source or Complex and giving coverage to major, established acts.  Second, there’s so many new operations starting (and failing) every month it can become a full-time job just keeping up with the sheer number of outlets available.

There’s a ton of material and points to cover here, and I’m working on an in-depth report about my past 30 days of SERIOUSLY attacking blog submissions/promotion with the World Around roster.  (It’s been a surprising learning experience to say the very least.) In the previous installment of the Blog Science series, I interviewed three bloggers about what they do.  So to start this conversation off right, let’s hear from an eloquent and frustrated artist…

An Open Letter from Willie Green

Willie Green is a New York based producer having a great damn year (just got featured in the Village Voice, too) and I’ve interviewed him before here on Audible Hype.  Today, he dropped a short but important open letter that inspired this article…

“Dear bloggers, and to NO ONE in particular. I understand you get a lot of music, from many people. And I legitimately appreciate what you do. But the “Send it MY way or fuck off” attitude is a bit disturbing. For the life of me, I can’t remember which blogs want links, which ones want attachments, etc. and I’ll be honest, I have a promotion only mailing list that I use to send mailings. If you can openly have the ego to say you’ll only accept something to your self-described specs, I can openly have the ego to say I don’t have the time to hand script each email to each individual blogger’s taste. If you take that as “Green doesn’t have time to cater to me, then I don’t have time to post his shit” then you’re overblowing this and you may need to fall back.

We’re all just a part of the process. Artists are just trying to reach as many people as possible, and since a number of you only post shit from your friends and associates anyway, we need as wide a shot as possible. As an engineer, I’m flexible enough to accept projects and files in a manner of different delivery formats, as long as they’re reliable. That’s how things work. A professional product isn’t sent with viruses and corrupt links, and you can tell if someone is a pro long before you get to the point of downloading. Until there’s some universal standard for submissions, you have to expect that there may be variances. If you get a link from me, trust that it is clean, I stake my career and reputation on it every single day.”

A COUPLE POINTS:

1. “If you don’t have time to cater to me…” is definitely a selfish mentality.  However, most bloggers aren’t getting paid to anything and they’ve got at least one other job and one other life occupying their attention most days…just like the rest of us.  I can understand bloggers setting clear cut rules of engagement.  What makes less sense is the bloggers who lecture artists for “not doing it right”-mostly because in the time it took to have a bitchy email exchange, they could have easily just posted something to their blog. Fortunately, at least in my experience, those are few and far between.  Most bloggers are polite to artists and love what they do. 

2. The most common “rule” I see is bloggers who want new artists to submit one single track, and that makes perfect sense.  It’s an attention span thing.  Asking someone to send their best song is less time-consuming and more effective than being hit up by a total stranger and their 30+ track mixtape. 

3. Everyone is trying to cope with information overload in 2010.  Artists don’t have the time and bandwidth to send individual emails to every blogger they contact (except retards like yours truly) and bloggers don’t have the attention span to cope with a 3 page inbox every week.  Which leads us to…

Some Important Open Questions

I’m fortunate to have readers who are mostly smarter and more experienced than I am.  So I’d like to take advantage of that (for once)…and instead of broadcasting My Ideas, I’d much rather start a conversation with you folks.  I have a few burning questions, for artists, bloggers, promoters, managers and label-owner lunatics alike…

Is there a Universal Standard we can agree upon for submission standards? Is there any way to streamline this process for EVERYONE involved?

Is the burden on the bloggers or the artists? Speaking as an artist, I think the burden is on ME, not the people I’m asking for free coverage. What’s your call?