The Effects Of Advertising...

Back when I was a youngster and, like, signed and stuff, one of the things that I had to pay attention to (and yet disliked extremely) was what the label was doing for advertising, both for the albums themselves and for the show. Generally, media buys in any given market could easily be correlated to attendance at shows. This was all, for the most part, pre-internet, of course. We started the first SMG page in 1994; it was, uncomfortably, www.nin.com/smg. We registered smg.org shortly thereafter. Whois sez Created On:12-May-1995 04:00:00 UTC.

(The story behind the nin.com thing is somewhat humorous; I won’t, however, bore you with the details.)

But very few fans at that time even knew what the internet was, let alone used it for finding out anything about their favorite bands, so the endeavor didn’t really bear fruit until my wife and I started a label, some 3 or 4 years later. So that’s all kinda moot in this here story.

As a return to the original point, we could tell by the time the second opener was on if TVT had done a media buy in that market, or more to the point done the right media buy, since (unlike almost anything else they touched) they were fairly reliable in that regard. We could also plainly see on Soundscan the markets where they had purchased whatever-the-fuck (endcaps, some sort of in-store promo, local paper ads, whatever) that were direct ads for the albums themselves.

Now, I assume that the vast majority of my dear readers that release music do so through a vanity imprint like myself. So where does that leave you with respect to advertising? Do you just take advantage of the free services available? Or do you do a sub-set of normal label operations, paying for a press release service, perhaps buying a few banner ads, etc.? Or do you just rely on your blog, the forums you post in, and your Circle Of Friends? What’s the best way to promote yourself these days?

As an aside, my own experiences aren’t too helpful here, since I was already A Kind Of Famous before I got in to this whole self-promotion racket. My interest lies in perhaps exploring some ways a complete unknown might get things rolling.