blog| Promo Til It Hurts | |
|
|
|
|
For those of you who have never had the pleasure of trying to promote your own music allow me to give you a quick crash course in how this stuff works. You have a band, you spent obscene amounts of money and time, writing, recording, producing, mixing/mastering and finally printing your work in CD form. For SWG the dollar amounts and time is a little more extravagant because we circum-navigated the afore mentioned third parties and settled on doing it all ourselves. It may have took years but in the end it was worth it as we do not have to rely on anyone, that has always been the theme of our lives and we wouldn’t have it any other way. So you have your product in hand, now what? Well now you have to find an audience, after all the six copies your grandmother bought isn’t going to re-coup the money you put into it; this is where promotion comes in. Before you actually release the album you have to get your music some attention and the only way to do this is through the usual list of suspects, blogs, print, radio, social networking and so on. This is a little trickier and as time consuming as it gets, but no one is going to get your music to the masses like these avenues. To give you an idea of how challenging this task is, let’s use music bloggers as an example. Music bloggers do not want you emailing them like some generic spambot, they want to know you know who they are (they are people too after all), so you have to search out their websites, read their stuff, try to get a sense of who they are and what their taste is in music. It may not sound like much, but this takes huge amounts of time as there are literally thousands upon thousands of these blogs out there not to mention these folks receive thousands of emails a year and there is no guarantee they will even get to your stuff (patience is a virtue). I offer one example because radio, print and everything else all have their own challenges associated with them and I have to get back to work! Now Saltwater Gypsy is not made up of a couple of teenage kids living at home, we are grown men with families (well Kevin has a family, I just live vicariously through him) and jobs. I (Justin) am a construction worker and recently completed a three year project as a shift supervisor for a 52 story tower built in beautiful down-town Calgary. I worked twelve hours shifts, starting at 7pm (that’s not a typo) and would come home each morning to the monumental task at hand. At that point we were promoting the release of our first Fifth and were still in the midst of building our studio, not to mention our online presence, it was crazy! I hope it gives you a little idea of what every independent band goes through if they want to make their passion into their career, it’s the business and I am not complaining, hard work is something Kevin and I live for, I just want you to know that when you share one of our songs or suggest a friend to check us out we truly appreciate it. Why? Because we had to fight to get every single one of you and that makes you something to us. Thank you. Update for the week, keep an eye out for a sample track to be posted soon and on 11/11/11 we will be releasing a new song off the new album! Keep doin’ what you’re doin’ SWG |
|
| SWG Spam | |
|
|
|
|
Hey everyone, Justin and Kevin with a little spam for your inbox... ummm, take it how you want to I guess? So we have been busy taking care of our internet presence, perhaps the most loathsome part of the job, but absolutely necessary. With us being more than aware of the promotional value of YouTube for the independent artist we knew that eventually we were going to have to get off our asses and put together a video. With a limited budget we decided that the way to go would was to buy some software, come up with a concept and make it happen. The picture slideshow was the easiest format and let’s face it, neither Kevin or myself are any kind of a film-maker so the decision was simple. The concept was also easy as we had decided on Everything Heals so lastly we had to make it happen. That took a lot of work but we were pleased with the end result. Take a look and let us know if you like it, we’d love to hear your thoughts. We have also launched a Facebook add campaign recently that appears to be having some positive results. Included is a free download, if you already are a fan and haven’t received your free download message us and we will hook you up. We also put together a store in reverbnation which can be accessed from our facebook page as well. Tons of SWG swag (men’s and women’s, sweaters, t-shirts even coffee cups!) as well as ringtones, cd’s and downloads. So one of the big things that happened recently on the writing front was some new lyrics for a song that was lost in musical limbo. The lick we used was one that Kevin wrote a few years ago and remains one of our favourites and we had written verse lyrics that we really liked as well. But alas a hook eluded us and we had put it on the shelf a while back. With the writing of our second album the song came up again and this time the hook came along with it. So we will be putting it down and will be sure to release some samples prior to releasing the song in full. Lastly we want to thank Terry at Signal9 Radio for adding us to the rotation and having this to say, “Finally from Calgary, Alberta, Saltwater Gypsy, catchy and complicated with great lyrics and definitely worth pushing the “repeat” button.” It’s awesome to hear positive reviews after all our hard work, thanks again! So we have been busy and it is paying off. We want to thank everyone who has recently become fans of the music, you guys rock. Please if you have any questions, hit us up on facebook, we would love to hear from you. One last thing to mention, new to Indie Review we have added "Little Jack's Corner" to the radio player. Be sure to have a listen! Keep doin’ what you’re doin’. Saltwater Gypsy |
|
| Hi all! Welcome to Saltwater Gypsy | |
|
|
|
|
So a little bit about us first. We are a writing duo first of all out of Calgary. Kevin handles all production on all Saltwater Gypsy recordings. All recordings we are releasing are a studio samples and are NOT mastered. We are releasing an album with a release date somewhere in the beginning of 2010. Our music is easily explained. We write tunes you can sit down and drink to. Party tunes and our songwriting approach is that of a story teller. So we are new here but look forward to being around for sometime to come. On Sunday, the 27th of September we are putting up a new myspace page designed by My Black Guitar and are releasing 2 new songs as well. We shall post them on here too. So check back often and get all the news, music and everything that is Saltwater Gypsy. |
|
