Random

Thoughts on promoting a band – suggestions welcome

Jeromey Balderrama

Over the last few weeks things have really started to roll for Greenfoot (my band), and we’re really starting to build up some momentum.  Back in early October we were getting ready for our first gig and over the course of the last few weeks we’ve played a number of shows, spent time in the studio and have our demo CD cut, released and ready for distribution.  We’ve definitely made a lot of growth over the last few weeks, but now we’re exploring ways to take things to the next level.

Last night we started a discussion about our next steps in promotion, and coming up with a plan.  We bounced a lot of ideas around, and I spent the drive home dwelling on those ideas.  Right now I’m in the midst of two interesting scenarios: promoting a band, and marketing a new business.  While I thought that I could employ the same methods for both, but I find that promoting a band allows a lot more liberty and enables us to take more risks.

From that comes a laundry list of random thoughts, and I thought I’d do a brain-dump:

  • Don’t sell the demo CD’s under any circumstances.  The amount of money we would make from sales can’t buy the PR that we’ll make by giving the CD’s away.
  • Put the MP3’s on the web site and make them available to download, encourage fans to share our music – make it known that people can get the music (put "download free music" at www. on the promotional posters)
  • Put up our promotional posters on college campuses, venues, coffee shops – anywhere people hang out.  Put CD’s in sleeves and tack the sleeves onto the poster so that people can pick CD’s off the poster.  Yes they may get "stolen" but what’s a thief going to do – listen to it?  This experiment may be worth it.
  • Make better use of our mailing list.  We’ve talked about using Evite or another events planning tool to track attendees, provide directions and generate discussions.  This goes back to trying to build a community of people who like our music.
  • Put together our promotional kits. I found a great web site that talks about some things to include in the promotional kit.  We’ll be sending these out to venues that we’re looking to play.
  • Connect with bands that we’ve previously played with, or bands in our area that sound like us.  If they’re looking for opening bands or maybe we can find some way to share events.
  • As we’re getting established, promote ourselves to booking agents as a band that can also open for other acts, as well as headline act.
  • Get some stickers out there, capitalize on our logo and hand them out
  • Get a big vinyl sign that says www.GreenfootMusic.com

Those are just a few ideas we’re kicking around.  This band promotional stuff is very "chicken & the egg".  Venues won’t let you play big nights unless you can guarantee a big crowd, but you can’t build up a big crowd if you don’t play where people are (at big nights).  I would definitely appreciate any ideas or suggestions regarding this – no idea is to outrageous.

Office Frustrations (not MS office – the real office)

Jeromey Balderrama

At work I was previously working from home the majority of the time, and in the recent months there’s been an initiative to bring people back into the office.  Right now my office-to-home ratio is about 60/40, and for the most part I’ve been challenged by being in the office.  While I admit that working at the office increases my technical productivity (less distractions with the temperamental home computer) – my overall productivity has decreased with the amount of distractions.  With many recent job cuts my work area has been reduced to essentially a ghost-town.  Once upon a time my aisle had 14 offices, but over the years that has been reduced to four people, three of which spend most of their time from home.  Sometimes things are lonely, but I have grown to appreciate the quiet atmosphere.

All that changed today.

Right now we’re doing a bunch of building-moving, and with it there is an attempt to consolidate the current occupants on my floor and move us either upstairs or downstairs.  As they are in the process of moving everyone, they’ve arranged our area as a temporary work area, where people will work for 2 months before they permanently move.  Today they began converting all of the work areas around me to have the new equipment and furniture, so I’ve been working in a construction zone throughout the day.  I’ve been listening to a lot of music and podcasts to help reduce the distractions, but this is a polar opposite from the quiet area I’ve enjoyed.  Now I have a slew of new neighbors, none of which I regularly with with.  I find myself looking forward to moving myself just to be able to connect with people in my organization.

To make matters worse I went to go buy a pop this afternoon, only to find that they’ve raised the prices again.  It’s now $1.25 for a 20-oz bottle!  How outrageous!  After a 25% increase from the original $1 price I’ve thought about setting up my own back-alley pop business just to bring some competition to the thugs running our vending machines.  This is nuts!

Great Gig Tonight!

Jeromey Balderrama

I spent Monday evening in Denver at the Larimer Lounge, playing Greenfoot’s second gig, also our second one in 10 days. I was really pumped up with how we played and pleased with the gig overall.  Going into the show I was a little nervous about not being able to practice in between gigs, but we were able to knock off any rust that we had right away and played very loose.

Larimer Lounge at 10pm on a Monday night had the crowd one would expect late on a Monday night – definitely not big, but it was great to have family and friends out there to support us!  This was also a great opportunity for us to get our foot in the door at this venue and we hope to be back soon with a better time slot.  Larimer has a really cool stage, it’s elevated and it has some great lighting.  The one thing I was frustrated with was the sound system monitors, and the fact that I really couldn’t hear anything.  The people out and the crowd said that the mix was pretty decent, but I found myself having to rely on my muscle memory a lot more.

Personally I was really happy with my drumming at this show.  Being relaxed definitely had a positive effect on me, and I lucky was able to relieve a lot of tension that built up throughout the day.  I was also pleased with how I was able to physically sustain myself during the show.  At the end of the night my drumming chops were definitely warm, but they weren’t tired or sore.

Overall a very good night!

12 on the 12th – Once again sneaking up!

Jeromey Balderrama

While Friday the 13th (in October no less) is definitely a memorable date, it’s important not to forget Thursday, October 12th for the latest rendition of 12 on the 12th!  This almost slipped past me so I wanted to shoot out a quick reminder and ask those to participate!

The concept is simple: On Thursday take your camera, take 12 pictures, post them on your Flickr, blog, MySpace – somewhere where people can see them and share them!  Show off your corner of the world!  If you’d like, check out my entries for September, August, & July to get an idea!