By Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan
If you’re sitting down to tackle making an album, there’s a lot to think about; from clearing the rights for your cover songs to converting the cover art to the right format. These issues can trip you up, or cause the album to take a lot longer than you’d expect. Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan, authors of The Indie Band Survival Guide, have revised our popular Planning Your Album From Beginning To End guide. Here’s an excerpt from the revised guide, which you can download for free right now!
The following material has filled many books, so rather than go into detail about how or why you’ll want to do all the steps below, we’ll simply list them out so you don’t forget to do them as part of your music publicity campaign.
1. Plan your PR campaign
This should be your overall strategy for the album and any live shows you do in support of it. Most bands do both a traditional media campaign (newspapers, magazines, and radio), as well as a new media campaign (podcasts, music blogs, MP3s, entertainment blogs).
Promotion requires creativity
Music publicity is not just compiling lists and following steps mechanically. It can and should be fun and creative too. It’s at the planning stage that you should be channeling the same creativity you put into your music to build excitement and buzz about your upcoming album.
Here are some planning ideas to get you started:
Do a contest
Make a video*
Create a Flash game based on a song on your album
Partner with a blog or podcast
*The importance of video
What’s …Read the full story
Source:: Echoes