Music bloggers are the opinion formers of the digital age. They are individuals passionate about music who dedicate some of their time to writing reviews and articles about artists they like in order to reccomend them to their readership. Some, called MP3 boggers, focus on posting music for download and free circulation, while others are more journalistic. They are one of the great promotion channels available to aspiring indie musicians, as they are open to recieving music from anywhere. A good article written by a respected blogger has the potential to generate great exposure for you, and it has been proven that blog articles written about an album release can significantly increase the amount it is downloaded.This post should help you to understand how you can contact bloggers and hopfully to get an article posted about you.

Firstly: more on bloggers
•    Bloggers generally group around specific genres and sometimes affiliate themselves with certain scenes. So do your research! Take time to get to know which bloggers are keen on the kind of music you play.
•    Many blogs may want to post free samples of your music. So prepare a few promo tracks in MP3 format which you are happy to give away for free.

•    Bloggers will only write about music they like, which means if they decide to write about you, their reviews will generally be positive.
•    The great thing about the blogosphere is its interconnectivity. If a track is picked up by one blog then it is entirely possible that others will follow and a viral effect will be created. This is great!
•    To find out the blogosphere you can use blog aggregators. They collect information about the blogosphere and are updated daily.  They will give you a good idea what is being written about on blogs.

The process:
To get featured on blogs, you can use the following procedure:
Step 1: Go to a blog aggregator, we recommend Elbows or The Hype Machine, because of their sheer size.
Step 2: Search for an artist or band who has a similar genre or sound as you. If your band shares a similarity to Miracle Fortress, search for blogs which have written an article about this band.
Step 3: Contact the blogger who has written about that artist and send him an email along with your artist biography while offering to send a few promo tracks. Take the time to find out his real name if you can, tell him about your favourite posts, it adds a familiar touch.
Step 4: Go back to the aggregator, find another blog, and do the same again.

The email message
The email message could contain something like the following:

“Hi <blogger name>. My name is Hefner, I noticed that you have written an article about “The Bonzai Killers”, great band…our music is not at all dissimilar to this band, and I was wondering if you would be open to me sending a few sample tracks to listen to, and if you like them, to give them away on your blog.  I have attached an artist biography if you are interested. Our website is…..our myspace is….etc etc.”

Tips:
•    Find blogs which you like and follow them. Be sure to leave lots of comments (bloggers like these), and provide your band website in the option URL field.
•    Develop relationships with bloggers, and become their buddies. They are generally good people, and a solid ally.

Tags: blog reviews, how to get reviewed on blogs, independent, indie promotion, promoting through blogs, Promotion advice, Promotion Advice, record union, Recordunion

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Promotion advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.