COVERT PR

the promo bay – pirate bay announce free artist promo page

admin — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:27:57 +0000

The Promo Bay - Pirate Bay Announce Free Artists Promotional Page. If your site has songs or movies, etc., available for free download and want to be in with a chance of getting featured on The Pirate Bay torrent website, then go there and upload and image, link and a short description to be considered. Not sure how you might feel having yourself associated with The Pirate Bay, but it would be good to hear your thoughts. If your comfortable with it and want to know more.... go here... http://thepiratebay.org/promo
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monsters build mean robots release new single

admin — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 18:11:45 +0000

Brighton's aptly named Monsters Build Mean Robots are releasing a single taken from their forthcoming new full length. The single, entitled "Lament 77 [We Will Follow!] is to be release on 25 July a few weeks in advance of the Album "weshouldhavedestroyedourgeneralsnottheirenemies" due out 15 August.

I know we have a vested interest in the stuff we promote, but you need to do yourself the favour of checking this out....

for free or not for free… that is the question

admin — Fri, 27 May 2011 01:03:21 +0000

I recently had to address the issue of giving away music for free with a client, which lead me down a deep rabbit hole of research and thought. These musings took a while to pull together, so rather than hide my hard efforts under a rock, I thought I would share...

Music blogs are proving hugely important for new music these days. They are usually run by private individuals / fans, who have no ‘vested interest’ in the music industry (there are always exceptions to any ‘rule’). These sites post mp3s of the music they ‘discover’, which their readers download for free. There are literally hundreds and thousands of these sites. They are good, well informed and an together make am amazing resource for brilliant under the radar music. These social journalists are fast becoming more relevant to music lovers than traditional journalists and others in music media, many of whom live in fear of losing both their position as market influencers as well as their jobs.

Aside from the fact that blogs are a world-wide phenomena, the main challenge is their sheer numbers. The solution:- the blog aggregator / indexing site. Arguably, the most important of these is hypemachine: http://hypem.com. It is worth a look if you haven't already. Basically, it automatically scans music blogs and presents you with info and links to the free music they post. It does not create the content, it simply shows the blog posts to you in one centralised, ordered space. You can playback the tracks as they are posted anywhere across the globe in real-time. You can also download them because the links to the posts are made available. Interestingly, once registered and logged in, you can see what other users of hypemachine are listening to live! This is priceless real-time market research for anyone wanting to see music trends as they happen – all this data is totally gratis to you and me – if you know it exists! Obviously, the industry and media watch this very, very carefully – as do music fans, like myself, looking for amazing new stuff from both undiscovered and name artists. If a band gets blogged about and appears on the hypemachine stream or other similar sites, that can be very good on several levels. There are now artist who have created global brands using this route alone. Some have sidestepped all labels and industry completely and simply sell ‘stuff’ from sites like Bandcamp on the back of this exposure. Examples might be found here: http://hypem.com/#!/zeitgeist/2010/albums. Artist like Surfer Blood, Morning Benders and several others listed have benefitted massively.

Uniquely, music from this source is by a ‘consensus’ of private music lovers / fans who share and research music online. It is not filtered by the industry, radio producers, magazine editors or any other professionally manoeuvred / financially vested party broadcasting music for personal / professional benefit! Some say a good thing, others disagree.

These blogs will not publish a post unless they can 'share' an mp3. They will post tracks without permission, offering to remove them if asked by the owner. By providing them a track you allow them to post freely, you have a better chance of them writing about you if they like it.

None of this matters if you do not want to be featured in music blogs. However, if you do... read on... this is how it works…

I generally advise using a track for your MPFree which is not otherwise being made available commercially. It could be a remix / live track / anything you are happy to give away. This makes it easily identifiable. If you decide to use a track you wish to sell, that's fine too but be aware it will get posted and shared freely and once out there can never be retracted, which may effect the paid downloads of that track – some argue it increases sales!

The process works like this… We have ongoing relationships with a few hundred influential blogs. We simply contact them, generally via email. They are actually very difficult to get a response from. Many bloggers have day jobs, most make a loss and countless bands compete for their attention. Some bloggers get literally hundreds of tracks a day from people pushing them to post their music. We pitch the band and provide a link to the mp3 for them to download. If they like it, they then post it on their site. We use Soundcloud, but can use Bandcamp, which has the advantage of allowing us to farm the emails of those who download it – a double edged sword. Email farming adds a further barrier to achieving the goal of getting exposure and is only really useful if the email belongs to the end user - the person who reads the blog - not the blogger. We already had that email in the first place!

The short answer is that the process is as simple as providing us with an audio file of a track you are happy to give away and we handle everything – with your approval of course! There is no third party digital distributor or anything else to put in place.

Is this all a good policy? Well the l ‘for free or not for free’ question is a HUGE debate with many of facets and levels. Ultimately, music should be paid for. If not, it becomes devalued. However, this does not make the argument any less fierce. Here are a couple of interesting articles written by people far more eloquent than me…

Make It Free

www.relevantmagazine.com

A bit out of date and slightly off topic this one, and a lot about DRM (copy protection) but skip to the end. Gert is an old friend, who I really respect. A powerful point he makes is there are 75,000 devices on the market that play mp3s and only 75 devices play copy protected files. Everything we use to play music allows us to share music freely.

Make ‘Em Pay (Even in kind)

www.musicthinktank.com

My experience tells me once a record is released, someone will take it and share it online for free. This is fact these days. There is actually no other option than to work with it.

brasstronaut are at #4 on the hypemachine ‘most popular’ chart

admin — Fri, 20 May 2011 17:41:25 +0000

Brasstronaut are in at #4 on Hypemachine 'most popular' chart as we speak with "Slow Knots"!

Hypmachine is a site that keeps a close eye on the conoscenti among the blog community, watching as they post the music they like. All of which only goes to prove that these hard-to-please tastemakers believe Brasstronaut to be an amazing band creating fabulous, much loved music. The best thing about this is that they have come to that conclusion outside any influence from the media. A more candid, heart felt accolade you can't have. Give it a listen and see for yourself.

new music from minnaars, peoples persons and my little cheap dictaphone [mlcd]

admin — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:23:43 +0000

New music flying out the doors into the arms of the lovely press and media as we speak:

“mark corbett: an artist to watch very closely” by uk music review

Rachel — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 11:19:53 +0000

UK Music Review and Tasty Fanzine loves Mark Corbett's first EP "Crocodiles". Both reviews stress the delicate and beautiful sounding vision of his voice and guitar. UK Music Review rate the EP with a 8.5/10 and advise that Mark Corbett is an "artist to watch very, very closely in the coming months".

love parry iii review in planet notion

Rachel — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:24:36 +0000

The awesome "abilities and artistic significance" of Love Parry III have been unwritten by Notion Magazine. "The race for the Poison Chalice" EP review also highlights the influences that make Love Parry III an explosion of pop-dance fusion: "The aura of 70s/80s dance is there and credit for the band taking their influences on board and crafting songs that can be enjoyed and listened to present day".

more, more, more brasstronaut reviews – raised by sainted pr

Rachel — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:47:55 +0000

Nobody can stop Brasstronaut's rise. The band from Vancouver is becoming more and more prominent in the UK press. And most importantly... all raving coverage from the likes of Uncut and Q...

Uncut

Q Magazine

Q Magazine "Essential 50 Singles"

love parry iii, a pop dance explosion ep

Rachel — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:56:08 +0000

Latest news! The Cardiff band Love Parry III release their debut EP "The Race For The Poison Chalice" on 13th December. The band, formed by late 2009, is led by Luke Taylor (ex The Hot Puppies) with members Daniel Strange, Ellie Jayne Burton and Sigrid Muller.

If you want to listen to their whole EP you can do so here. You can even download the mp3's to post on your blog if you like.

more brasstronaut reviews ??????

Rachel — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:58:20 +0000

The Canadian band Brasstronaut are being really well received by critics. The Independent announced "here's something different", and now it's time for Clash Magazine and Metro to also review "Mount Chimaera". Clash Magazine marks the band with a 7/10 and Metro with a 4/5 concluding that "this weirdly lovely record is as strange as it is satisfying".

Shout goes out to the lovely Sainted PR, who raised all the press for Brasstronaut.

Clash Magazine's review Metro's review