Quest for knowledge....

Well to further my quest for information on the current music scene, emerging artists and marketing, and with the local media survey not offering up many results (the results we did get were very useful - but I think we went about it the wrong way, we were looking negatively at causes, instead of looking proactively at solutions), I decide to go a step further and start asking some people in the know, what their 'top 5 suggestions, relating to strategy and creative solutions with regards to the 'emerging artist'' might be.

I have not only put this out to music industry people, but the President of my University, our PM and Premier, media personalities, web strategists etc. Anybody and everybody who I could think of, that has had success in the business world, and who has 'been there done that'.

I also signed up for a course on writing marketing plans.

And I tried an experiment as well! While preparing to work on some PR for this weekend's upcoming shows, I looked to see what was new on MySpace, see me embracing technology. I read that they had finally updated their mail program. So on one artist's site I sent out personal 'mail' invites to hundreds of people and on another site, I just posted a bulletin. Sure enough not only did the first site get about 80% more hits, we received lots of personal messages back. I did go back and use the same strategy for the other site and within an half an hour the hits had increased tenfold.

This brings me to our first response to the query, and it came from Derek Sivers who sent 7 of his best ideas. I was happy to see that we think alike, and as he mentions, the simple (and age old) idea of treating others the way you like to be treated, has already shown success in my little experiement.

Read what he has to say here:

http://arielpublicity.com/blog/archives/derek-sivers-7-critical-marketing-basics-musicians

I'll be posting the Top 5's as they come in.