The Glasgow Journal was recently awarded “Student Publication of the Year”. Well done to them.
It’s just a shame that in their article on Metronomy bassist Olugbenga Adelekan, they accidentally printed of photo of dubstep producer Benga. And mentioned Benga in the headline. Still, it could’ve been a photo of Adele.
Bit embarrasing.
Want to want live reviews and not get paid? Well there are plenty of opportunities for you out there in the world of ‘media’, from the smallest blogs to the biggest newspapers. But ‘Guitar Media’ magazine (hmmmmm… nope) recently took it a step further by asking for a £49.99 annual fee for privilege of writing for their rag.
They try to reason
We need to make sure that we get only serious applicants. Paying for this service means that you are committed to creating informative reviews that meet deadlines. At the end of the day you will be getting into these concerts as a member of the Guitar Media press team for free and we could be sending you to many many concerts every year. If we offered this for free we would be inundated with people just wanting free concert tickets and its [sic] possible that no reviews would be sent to us. This is why we have to charge a fee.
Or you could, you know, pay your writers.
(And you could probably do with a sub-editor too.)
The blog post has since been taken down but fortunately Google’s saved a copy for you to read.
Live And Unsigned, the “UK’s largest competition for original music” (it claims), is being probed by the Advertising Standards Agency after failing to provide the prizes originally advertised. Serves the bands right for entering a pay-to-play contest, really. One band (OOH, A SECRET SOURCE) told us they went through the first stage (£10 entry fee) but pulled out of the second one when they were told they’d have to sell 25 tickets at £8 each as well as show the ‘promoters’ all the evidence of how much work the band had done to publicise the event. Oh and they were only allowed to play one song.
Hey bro, come and give us £8 so you can see us play one song.
Nah, that’s OK.
But the problem with the prizes being offered of festival slots for the winning bands? The two festivals were cancelled. Brilliant. Full story over at the Beeb.
LOL wut.
[via Buzzfeed]
Sometimes, bands just like to copy us in on email discussions. Well, this has only really happened one time and we never got to see the response from the promoter, if there was one.
A band responds to a gig offer from a promoter.
From our discussion I understood:
you hire a venue with a capacity of 100 people
you book 6 bands
you charge 5 pounds on the door
you keep all the money from the first 10 people there to see each band
any more than 10 people for each band and the band gets 100 percent of the money
you promote the event via facebookSo that means if the place is full, each band has brought 16 people (this adds up to 100, roughly) so each band can make a maximum of 30 pounds for the extra 6 they bring, yet you earn 300 pounds. You told me that you keep the money to cover your expenses.
Following our discussion I called the venue and asked how much to hire it. They told me 65 pounds.
We’d all like a job where you earn 235 pounds to make a facebook event and a few phone calls and to have people working for you for a tiny amount of money. Dress it up as you want but it’s clearly an attempt by a chancer to make a few bucks off of other people’s art. Bit of an awful thing to do. Why don’t you get a real job?
Thanks for the offer, but I’m gonna say no.
The Geffen-signed Brother, previously emo pop band Kill The Arcade, now styling themselves on Oasis and renamed Viva Brother, a band we’re not sure actually exists outside the NME, played some festival or other called Glastonbury a few days ago on the ‘Other’ stage and dropped this quote. “‘We had an ace night, last night. Now we are having a come down, we’re coming down faster than the Twin Towers.” Just in time for their US tour as well!
We got ‘tweeted’ at by @team_kropp to check out this ‘hottt’ band. “Any questions, ask me,” she helpfully added. I do have a question. WHY? WHY HAVE YOU SENT THIS TO US?
Man, those fans of The Blackout are angry, angry people.
Shut up, fans.
We’ve nothing against Pledge Music when it’s used in good ways, but ‘offering’ fans to pay to be their roadie for a day does raise a few eyebrows over here. Maybe this is a brand new internship model we hadn’t thought of before.
Thrash Hits blog has more to say on the matter.
Sorry if this is a bit ‘You’ve Been Framed’. But still.
Really?
“Yeah guys, THAT’S the album cover!”
This prick will not stop emailling us.
Watch one of his many covers bands ram Stanford Music Festival.
Christ.
Last weekend, Shut Up Bands went on holiday by mistake.
A rapper has made thousands of nuisance 999 calls to police over the past 18 months.
Since January 2009, the man has plagued Greater Manchester Police by making thousands of calls where he chants, sings, raps, preaches and plays loud music to call handlers.
Thom Yorke says “don’t sign to a major label – they’re dying”. The Radiohead singer, who wouldn’t be in a position to sell albums on a ‘pay what you want’ basis and make huge wonga out of it had his band not had the support of Parlophone for the course of six albums, has been advising young musicians that it is “only a matter of time – months rather than years – before the music business establishment completely folds.”
Yeah, that’ll happen. In months. No more music biz for you. Hurrah!
Meanwhile, EMI chief Charles Allen says the company is in “really good shape” and that the first part of their new investment will buy EMI “at least a year”. SEE, THOM? YOU’RE WRONG. EMI has a debt of £3bn. That’s three billion. Good luck with that.
Source: loads of websites. Can’t be arsed linking. Go Google it or something.
If you were involved with this activity then you are a fucking moron.
Susan Boyle = David Lynch? My my Guardian website, you’re going to be getting a lot of hits today.
Gigwise reports on RATM and Susan Boyle.
“Frontman Zac De La Rocha said the group wanted Boyle to perform their chart-topper ‘Killing In The Name’ with them as a peace offering to Simon Cowell, who signed both artists.”
Since when did Simon Cowell sign RATM? Let us Google that for you, Gigwise.
A major label A&R writes: “Here’s my personal best so far. This was sent to me (just a letter) a couple of months ago: (ALL typos and spelling are replicated exactly as in the letter) check the myspace as you read this. It’s mind blowing.”
Yes, make sure you do have a look all over his Myspace page.
“St Jack and john sully”
[Hand written in the top right hand corner – “Song 8 on the website is my ‘teen spirit’]
St.jack are a band from Islington north London and are doing urban indie rough-edged rock, it counteracts all that student crap of coldplay etc etc, we are like “the doors”, “the jam” and “nirvana”, if you look at the website the girls really like this band and the music and we already have a great british and worldwide following. “oasis” are finished and the public like the time before “nirvana” are dying for this great new rock, and it is coming out of London like punk in the late 70’s.we have over 100 songs and this could easily become a movement if you have the vision, john sully the singer and writer is goodlooking and could be the ultimate frontman and he writes songs like no other.our web address is www.myspace.com/xx66 and the phone is 0207 XXX XXXX, try e-mail at johnsully@xxx.xxx , hip hop and shiity r+b is a sick evil beast that needs to be put out of it’s misery. Just like nirvana shit on micheal Jackson in’91.wesetrn youth are literally dying for the new wine and I hope you have the vision to see this, you must ask yourself why all the girls across Europe are digging this band and site, some on and lets start the revolution that has been missing all this century, they reject the violent thugs of hip hop and the little schoolboys of boybanderry,
Stables full of shite mean nothing to British youth, they know a wrongen and they know the real thing.
John Sully
[then scrawled in ink at the bottom of the page]
1. Teardrop Explodes
2. The jam
3. Nirvana
4. The doors
5. More beautiful + more numbers of girls on my website than ‘Take That’s’ website
“A quick glance at the myspace easily answers the main question John seems to be posing. The “girls” who are so clearly “digging this band and site” are the sort of Tila Tequila wannabees that would add any and everyone. If that’s the future of Rock n Roll, well, I guess I’m done.”
UPDATE: MAR 5TH, 6.45pm. THE WEBSITE IS CURRENTLY OFFLINE.
UPDATE: Mar 8th. THE WEBSITE IS BACK WITH A NEW SUBSCRIPTION PACKAGE AND THE ‘JOURNO’S AND PUB’S’ (SIC) PAGE REMOVED FROM THE MENU OPTIONS (ACTUALLY IT’S STILL THERE JUST THE NAME ‘SUBMISSION COSTS’). THE LINK POSTED BELOW, HOWEVER, STILL WORKS AND THEY’VE REMOVED THE JOURNALIST NAMES AND UPPED SOME OF THE PRICES. HOW VERY INTERESTING!
UPDATE: MAR 24TH. IN RECORD TIME, THE COMPANY HAS GONE UNDER. WE’LL KEEP THIS STORY UP FOR HISTORICAL REASONS THOUGH. ER, ENJOY?
There seems to be some confusion as to what this website actually does. Styling itself as an ‘alternative’ music PR site and using an excessive amount of exclamation marks on its “about us” page (which is the same as its “how it works” page), it describes itself as a “very low cost, modern and eco friendly, fully automated ‘one stop shop’ putting you in complete control of your releases and campaigns. You write your own press releases, you invite journalists to gigs, you can send a journalist one or multiple tracks in the same submission and for the same cost!!! Its very quick and easy to do…. All our journalists are well known and respected and write for all the top music publications as well as national papers and numerous other glossy magazines.”
Indeed, the rotating banners at the top of the page boast of a list of clients (or are they targets?) from NME to Loaded to Time Out to, uh, The London Paper (which went under last year).
Like using any PR company, a band is not guaranteed of receiving a review in any specific publication. What happens is that a journalist will receive payment from Men From The Press for giving a band feedback on their music. It’s up to the journo (well, let’s face it, in most cases it’s actually up to the journo’s editor) whether or not they’ll do anything more about it. Like giving them some press.
But what’s causing a ruckus is the newly introduced and irritatingly apostrophed “Journo’s And Pub’s” page, which lists journos and how much you, as a band, need to pay Men From The Music Press for their ‘feedback’, described by the site as “the submission fee we charge to cover admin and Journalist expenses.” We won’t be surprised if the journos start contacting them to take down their names, but at time of writing there’s an NME journo whose opinion is worth £15, an Observer journo who’s worth £8… and a writer for The Fly who is worth 10p. Indeed, the journo from Blowback magazine is worth more, at £6.50. Blowback went under in 2007.
Well, you have hand it to them for trying something new… haven’t you?
For the same reasons it’s not a good idea to lay into your current employer in a job interview, it’s best not to shit on members of your ‘team’ when looking for other people to join that same ‘team’. Here is one band’s attempt at gaining a booking agent.
Greetings
I am the singer of [Some Band].
Our manager is incapable of attaining a decent booking agent for us here in England
So here I am emailing you. We have booking agents in Switzerland, Holland, Germany, Spain and Texas. Chile and Brazil are pending.
We have pending negotiations with agents in Boston and other parts of America and Europe.
We are in the finals of the people’s music awards for best rock/indie song of 2009 with our hit [Some Song Or Other]
We are off to Boston in 2 weeks to perform a presentation for the NACA, to climb upon the university circuit in America,
So as you can see we are a hard working band with potential, being suffocated by our managerThis problem is getting solved, but here’s my quarrel.
Because he’s executed such an asinine job of managing [the band], the gigs we are doing in England are dyer [I think he means "dire"].
We can get them easily, but they’re no good. We want some decent gigs to show people our music
Could you email me if there is even a chance of you working with us please?
Our songs, I’m sure you will agree, stand up to any band. We record in Germany where we have a recording deal with a big producer.
And a publishing deal with [someone that, when Googled, appears to be a video director and not actually a publisher. How queer].
I don’t know much about this business to be honest, but maybe we could latch onto one of your touring bands as support??
Hey, you don’t get if you don’t ask right??
Please email me back either way
Thank you for you time
That was sent to 15 people at the same company. Fair dos for them doing the research. It was at least a better attempt than this, which contains far too much comedy gold…