Elbows Music Blog Community

Abe from Secretly Canadian is fantastic.  Unfortunately, he just got promoted, so he's not responsible for helping us any more.  I'll reserve judgment on his replacement, though she seems to be following in his footsteps.

i like what i get from fanatic. easy to navigate, all the necessary links, etc. and i like the music, most of all. : )

I think Wendy Williams' (toolshed) emails are good.  And Torr Leonard from Filter Magazine doesn't really bombard me with useless crap.



As far as quality of artists though, I think Su at World's Fair has one of the most solid stable of artists as far as promo people go.



Oh, and I can't forget Mark Gustafson from Smithsonian Folkways.  He hardly sends any bulk emails, he ships stuff via FedEx 2nd Day, he'll dump some great great stuff on you if you just ask, and he's an overall nice guy.  Probably my favorite.

4AD have a lot of good stuff, and second secretlycanadain for good emails

I like Frank at 230 Publicity, and Cam at One Little Indian.

no one.

World's Fair, Toolshed, Tell All Your Friends, most stuff from Cornerstone, Lucas @ TC and any of the 2:30 stuff

Posted by: Matt Picasso

Posted by: eric marathonpacks the guy from 2:30 i finally met at P4K

 Frank from 230. He's great. We have a running gag that he's slowly accumulating each of my favorite bands under his press umbrella (Of Montreal, Page France, Grizzly Bear and now Jens Lekman).

yeah, awesome dude. met him at the Of Montreal show.

I send (maybe) 5-10 bulk emails per month.



Thanks though, folks! A band recently contacted us to do some promo and said word was that we were among "the least annoying" promo companies, ha-ha. Nice work if you can get it ;-)

hey, I try ;-)



It helps that I am a music snob working for a music snob company

Other than the ones stated above I've really enjoyed working with Nettwerk.  They got me backstage at the Anathallo/The Format concert.   I've also gotten some pretty cool stuff from specialops.

I'd say that Forced Exposure does everything right, and that everyone else does things in varying degrees of "wrong."

Taylor/Music/Ants
Other than the ones stated above I've really enjoyed working with Nettwerk. They got me backstage at the Anathallo/The Format concert. I've also gotten some pretty cool stuff from specialops.



god, i would never want to go backstage! i'm so awkward and nervous in any and all public situations involving anyone i dont know well.

Lucas, don't take it personally! I just think Forced Exposure does everything right -- they send out a list and ask you want you want and only send that to you, they only work with interesting and awesome labels, they don't send follow-ups, and they are excellent with securing permissions on short notice. I love them.

Okay.  That seems a little whinier than I expected!  Oh, well...just thought you might want to hear an indie publicist's side of things.

you're totally right, lucas, on most of those points. i guess the point that i'd make is that regardless of how much or how little i feel a *responsibility* to (dis)cover small bands, i'm not going to be able to spend 10 minutes on every one of the 50+ that write to me every day. so what a publicist (or band!) should try to do, if they want to solicit me, is to make it easy to fit their unknown band  into my listening patterns. whether those new songs GET TO MY EARS. i guess what we're talking about are the optimal conditions - the things that make it easiest for us to hear things we end up liking. for me it's an email from someone who sounds human, and friendly, and clearly knows what we do; and who can succinctly describe a music with a link to an mp3 (not an ugh myspace stream); and then who can send me a cd if i like what i hear (or, ok, if the band's too hard-up, a zip file). your mass emails, like ariel's publicity sum-ups, are i think the best i see - but it's still nowhere near as helpful as essentially getting a personalized tip from someone who knows what you like. I don't actually get things from Frank at 230, for example - Grizzly Bear records or whatever. But when he has a new client and thinks of us (in the case of THrow Me THe Statue, for instance), that's when he gets in touch. and because it's only rarely, i give a lot more time/weight to his suggestions, like i would to any reader.



i realise that there are issues of economy of scale, etc. no one can afford to have a real, thorough personal relationship with every blog out there, with regard to every single client band. but what we're discussing here are the OPTIMAL conditions, really. so i apologize if it's frustrating.

I try to contact you guys personally as much as I possibly can, and I do due diligence on every record we work to try to find previous fans.  As far as Said the G. goes, I actually think that ya'll's taste is pretty broad and often surprising and you usually seek out good songs more than anything else, so I try to leave you alone and let you do your thing.  I don't know...ya'll are pretty responsive.



I think it's pretty obvious that a personal email is better than a mass email in every instance.  That goes without saying.  More helpful to me would be to tell me how you would like the unfortunate mass ones that I have to send out.  I try to include funny stories and esoterica or whatever about my life; I never get a response on the ones I think are funniest, btw.



Craig, I know that you write about a lot of smaller artists and you have supported many of mine.  I appreciate it.  No, the elbo.ws charts aren't the end-all be-all, but they are a useful barometer of one aspect of success, which is quantity of blog action.  And I'm sorry, but things have changed there.  I got bands like the Candy Bars in the top ten there only last year.  I haven't seen much like that this year, and plenty of other forum posts have discussed the lack of the so-called blog bands in greater detail.  I'm surprised you got so defensive with me about trolling MySpace.  Yeah, I KNOW there are other methods of seeking out bands, man.  I'm a publicist.  I just used that to elucidate a point.  Maybe you're just better than everybody else.  I don't know what your methods are.  We can't all be you.



And, yeah, I service most of my albums digitally because I see the future, and I know that CDs are just plain wasteful if not heading towards (indie rock) irrelevance.

lucas i can honestly say i troll the hell out of myspace and the internet in general. ive posted several of your bands before i even knew you were working with them.

i almost find it to be a bummer when a band i like a lot already is being shopped around. for example, the lodger. i was listening to that record for a month or so and loving it and then all the sudden it was being rammed down my throat at every angle and it just kind of kills it for me almost. it takes away the mystery a bit, i dont know

your mass emails are good, lucas. the jokey stuff is funny, but it's always a little weird, you know? like it's pretending there aren't 50 of us getting the email...



what i like in these emails is basically as you do it:

- several bands

- 1 paragraph on each

- pls do a little namedropping in that para, if poss (even for influences), so i can ignore the people who like Staind

- direct link to one mp3 for a taste

- coordinates/instructions for obtaining the rest (even better if, as usually with Team Clearmont, there's a direct album dl link right there)



The thing i HATE most in mass emails, more than anything, is getting emails just about tourdates/videos/etc - like with Paul, this suggests the publicist has no idea what my blog does.



the thing i hate SECOND-most is getitng more than one email about the same band. there are only two reasons i should ever hear about a band more than once

1) i've expressed interest in, or written about, the band, and an update is appropriate

2) the publicist/artist/label really really thinks that i (as in me, sean michaels, not "general bloggers") will like it and wants to make 100% sure that i did hear it. these shd never be mass emails.

i think theyre pretty solid, for the most part. the album can be a bit spotty, but they've got this like, seamonsters-era wedding present sound that's real real nice when they excute it well. plus i have such an immense respect for slumberland records that i'll devour anything they put out.

Lucas, I love the drinkin' stories.  And even though I didn't respond to that memorable tale of cat watching and having cat piss on everything, that one was enjoyable, too.  I could relate to that one.

i never said i disliked lucas. lucas is my boy.

Lucas I wasn't actually saying you were wrong to send out so many emails.  What I was saying was that because you tend to send out good stuff I actually want to read all of them and not just delete or skip over anything, which I probably would with almost anyone else who sent so many.  This takes up a lot of time and I always have a bit of a backlog of Team Clermont stuff to read.  But the only reason it's a backlog and not a full trash can is because I actually make sure I do read them. 



This also applies to Wendy, actually.  So although it was maybe a little too backhanded to be obvious, it was actually a compliment in my eyes.  If I didn't want to read all of your emails I simply wouldn't bother.



As I said before, mass emails are absolutely fine - unless absolutely tiny, I know no band is likely to drop me a personal email.  The ones that piss me off are the ones that either pretend not to be mass emails when they clearly are, and the ones that try and be far, far too matey.  I agree with Sean though, the best ones are the big lists with a bit on each band, a couple of mp3s and a *.zip link for the album.



And stop fibbing, you know you read my blog every day.  Pshaw!

DON'T YOU BE SO STUPID