Although it may seem obvious to many artists, Chris Robley here warns against an all-to-often committed sin of many DIY artists who somehow fail to make their contact info easily available on their social media profiles, often sabotaging their potential chances of being hired.
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Guest post by Chris Robley of DIY Musician
The tweet above is from an artist manager and publicist based in Los Angeles. My buddy Brad saw it and wrote a cautionary tale for artists called “This tweet better not be about you!”
In it, he says:
If you’re not making it simple to contact you through your website, you’re at risk of missing out on a lot: gigs, press, heck – even sales. Seems like a lot of artists these days figure people can contact them through their Twitter or Facebook profiles, so they don’t explicitly provide contact info on their website – or even on their social networks.
Don’t assume people will do this! Email is still the preferred method of communication for bookers and bloggers, and for the press, this is even more true.
Seriously. Even over the past couple weeks, as we’ve tried to contact artists about performing at one of our three upcoming DIY Musician Conference showcases in Nashville, it’s surprising just how many musicians either don’t have websites or don’t have contact information clearly displayed on their website.
Make us work for it? We won’t.
Don’t make us work for it. Don’t make us dig down to the very bottom of the 20 paragraphs on your band’s Facebook ABOUT Page just to find an old email address that your bassist stopped checking 6 months ago. We’re trying to BOOK you! Or give you press coverage, a review, a label or management deal, or something else you don’t want to miss out on. As Brad says:
Folks who write about music or book bands aren’t in the business of checking messages in five different places, nor are they going to go searching around for the best way to get a hold of you. Make it complicated? They’ll move on to somebody who doesn’t.
Your site should have a dedicated “contact us” or “contact” or “talk to us” tab or something similar that is clearly visible when reaching your home page. And on the other end, you should have a dedicated person in your band who checks this contact email regularly. We’re aware of more than a few instances where artists missed out on big gigs or other opportunities because they were going weeks without checking their email!
Okay. So you’re not going to let that happen to you, right? Your contact info is easy to find, right? You have a dedicated contact page on your website, right? You’re quick to respond whenever you get a message, right? That’s how you’ll build a reputation as a reliable artists, and — hopefully — get better gigs, better press, and a bigger audience.
Chris Robley is the Editor of CD Baby’s DIY Musician Blog. I write Beatlesque indie-pop songsthat’ve been praised by No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, & others. My poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, & more. I live in Maine and like peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, a little too much.