Monday, 26 April 2004

Radio.... Thanks for sending us your CD, Transit.  We've listened to the whole CD, and while we really enjoyed the project personally, we're not sure we can help you in terms of our area of focus, Smooth Jazz radio promotion.  Your music isn't a great fit for what the Smooth Jazz radio stations are looking for these days, and we wouldn't want to go after airplay on the Smooth Jazz stations if we don't think we have a real shot. From a company that promotes music to radio. Names have been removed to protect the innocent or guilty... These are the same stations that used to play NF a lot in 1990. That's how much radio has changed - Jon's record is so far outside their narrow, narrow scope that one shouldn't even bother. The only alternatives are NPR, College radio, and real Jazz stations... 8:38:56 PM    comment []; Creative Collective Comment Did you know you got it right immediately upon completing NF or you had to wait until CD sales numbers showed it to you? From your previous comments on this site it seems you are very pleased with La Semana - it sounds like you got it right again but not on an unconscious manner . . . you and your muse must have planned it this way.- Flavio A. Manfredi Lebrao • 4/24/04; 8:39:13 AM I think these are very separate issues, at least they are for me. The first, and really only measurement I can use is whether the music pleases me, whether I reached for something and was able to get there - or at least into the vicinity... The second issue is whether I hear from people that they like the album... And the third is whether the album sells. This third issue is very different from the other two. Several things have to come together to create a hit. For example, I know artists who have tremendous success in getting radio airplay. They are always at the top of the radio charts....but they don't sell a lot of records. Something has to spark the interest of the consumer, something that goes beyond the "that's pleasant" or "how quaint", or "how cute". So, while I was personally pleased with NF, I had no idea that people would like it and certainly no idea that it would spark interest like it did. At 500,000 sales I was amazed and at a million I was astonished. Other people involved in the making of NF didn't have a sense of its success either, because everybody preferred getting paid instead of taking points..... "La Semana" is a success for me, because I like where I went with it. I like the journey and I like the end-result. Whether it sparks the consumer's interest I don't know. It don't believe it will get the radio-play that NF received. Not by a long shot. Radio is in a very different place these days....I think now more than ever I will have to depend on word-of-mouth - the best advertising there is. 6:42:58 PM    comment []; The Music Biz After an employee of Virgin's "indy" label V2 quit last week, he sent a great poison pen open letter to a bunch of music industry types: "So, before i got let go, we had our weekly marketing meeting yesterday. They brought in a psychic person and everyone joined hands and did a seance... I'm not kidding, even if I wasn't fired I wanted to quit on the spot." Link (via Gawker) Update: Boing Boing reader Don Richards-Boeff points us to a Rolling Stone article revealing that the email above is a marketing hoax. [BoingBoing] Hilarious! The title link of this post will take you directly to the Rolling Stone article that debunks the story. I don't know what is funnier - the music biz doing what they do best, or the blogs that wanted this to be true so badly.... 6:36:10 PM    comment [];

© Copyright 2004 Ottmar Liebert. Last update: 01.05.04; 21:16:01.