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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Why don't bands want to promote themselves?

Linda is busy trying to put together publicity for the upcoming Memorial festival. The frustrating part is bands do an extremely poor job of having material that is press ready. Snapshots of fans, lots of them. Professional photo that tells a story for the newspaper, few or none. Color photos that most web sites and newspapers want, not to be found.

Where is the biography of the band that has a story versus Joe plays banjo, Tom is a great guitar player loved by his mother, etc. Don't bands ever read a newspaper story or look at some of the bluegrass magazines? Buyers of magazines, papers, blogs, etc. want a story not dry copy. Why is it up to the event producer to create this?

OK, some bands change so often that only the band leader is common from month to month. The leader could still have an interesting story to tell and a professional publicity shot.

Most bands now have a web site that someone has sold them on using the latest and greatest gizmo. Today that seems to be Adobe flash. Guess what, you cannot easily extract information from a flash presentation so it is unusable for publicity outside of the bands web site. If the band doesn't have an Electronic Press Kit, EPK in the jargon, then please, please create a web site that will allow copy and paste. I'm not going to retype your stuff!

One last word, a high resolution photo is not a photo that displays well on your web page. A high res is 1,000,000 pixel or larger not 1,000 pixel. The band has that high res photo when the picture was taken so put it on the web site someplace.

I feel better.

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