getting stuff reviewed (Page 2 of 5)

Lazerbeat, you're right... but... I'm massively discouraged by the way that a successful musician also has to be a successful PR agent, constantly expounding and exaggerating their works, projecting a serious and consistent image and performing many other activities essentially irrelevant to the act of making music. I lampoon myself a lot, spread a little silliness and mystery around my own works, since there's no end of trouble wondering how you can have humility and success at the same time - when you see people in interview being incredibly overconfident in a product essentially anyone could have made, surely it makes you wonder if you're also being too brash?

I treasure anonymity, wonder why a review of a thing can't be separated from the review of a person; does it make a review more interesting to say that I live in south yorkshire and have a real name, or does it just make it lengthier? I idolize bands like the Residents, who concealed their identities, and Magma, who created a language and a credo for themselves, refused to really be interviewed about anything other than the art itself - to say that, now Myspace has come and gone, you have to share your life story to be palatable, makes me more skeptical about the goals of everyone involved. You know... I think you successfully dissuaded me from pursuing this, haha.

Everyone made really good posts here though, I still wanna read the discussion of how you make these things work.

i'd like to review music but i am not very literate
i really liked the #8brot for the 2 reviews it produced although hours of idling and nonsense is OK too

zan-zan, even the anonymity of the bands you mentioned is part of their persona (ie, they too put up a play to make themselves stand out). The internet is a blessing and curse for this, too; while allowing to easily share your music, the competition has gone way up. You'll need some PR if you want any kind of exposure.

gotta hustle and shamelessly self-promo. There's a fine line between self-marketing and spam, though. ZZZV, in all honestly I think you'd be fine. Like stated before, playing out essentially is one of the better ways of promotion because it basically advertises itself.

i can't tell if that's coherent or not i've been up for 24+ hours by now sry

To be honest, exposure is great (artists who have a name are logically more likely to be picked up on), but I don't think the chipmusic artists who have lovely professional profiles necessarily have a significant press/blog response. The most important thing by far is networking. If a critic happens to like your music there's every chance they'll write about it. Send your release to relevant people. There's no real secret to this though - you just have to be good at it!

Yea thats another reason why i dont review stuff, If I dont like it, I dont post it. Everything on tctd should be seen as tacit approval. Who cares about what i think about it otherwise?

I think playing shows is kind of huge in terms of getting reviewed, simply because it forces the people there to form an opinion one way or another through sheer volume (of sound). I wouldn't say that I'm well known (at all!) in the chipmusic community, but both Mike Bleeds and I are getting at least modestly well known in our local scene simply because we've been playing a ton of shows lately.

Having someone come up to you after a show to tell you that your stuff was great or that it was shit means so much more to me right now than having someone write about it on a website, simply because there's so much music out there (not that having stuff written about me or Mike isn't cool!). It's actually pretty rare that anyone is impressed with a band enough to go up to them and tell them what they thought, so the fact that it happens at all means that at least the music had some sort of effect on people!

And reviews nowadays are really just reference bombs because it's so hard to get someone's opinion of music without having them reference other bands. That's just how it goes now. It's not that anyone's lazy -- it's just that people have seriously developed a vocabulary of music critique that relies on comparison to other music!

EDIT: It seems that lots of reviews and coverage on the internet is really just right place, right time. As an example -- a local band named TV Girl got coverage on Pitchfork for sampling a song and playing some drums over it and singing. They've played all of 4 shows around here and have like 2 EPS with 4 tracks each, whereas my friend's band Jamuel Saxon has been playing shows in San Diego for 3 years and have only recently won nominations/awards for electronic music locally. The internet is really fickle, and it kind of reinforces my opinion that local pull is a lot more important than internet recognition, especially considering that internet recognition these days is really just getting a link put on a blog.

Last edited by spacetownsavior (Nov 4, 2011 8:40 pm)