Music promotion

Don't push yourself to others, just publish your own stuff, and if it's good - it will make a good buzz and people will find you.
The real problem is the "good music" part. Listening objectively to your own music and deciding whether it's good or not is an art developed over time. Be able to listen to something you spent the last 6 hours working on and saying "well this sucks" and click delete.
Once you got your own music finished (properly), the way to get the attention of promoters/labels/whatever is NOT by contacting them.
Being a label owner myself, I can testify that 0% (that's zero) of tracks I released on compilations were the result of people contacting me with their tracks.
You see, contacting a label is like hitting on a girl. The more you want us, the less we want you. Totally irrelevant to the actual music. No one would say it, but we label owners like to put on compilations tracks we found ourselves, being sort of like a prize and a showoff of "look how cool I am and what I found".
Your music has to be special of course. Let's say you're making fullon. Fullon has been around for, what? 10 years? It has its stars and celebs, and basically - you have no chance of reaching fame, no matter how good you are. You are standing on the shoulders of giants, and you are much smaller than them. No one will care about the new guy, and only the old guys will get booked (even if you are 100 times better than them).
In every genre, the "stars and celebs" are those who invented the genre. So your only chance is to invent something new, something which has no stars and celebs yet so you can take that spot.
This is of course easier said than done, and inventing something new is extremely hard. No one said being a star is easy.
Connections are also very important.
Lets say there's this artist who wants to release something on my label. He has 2 ways of getting me to hear it - one is so send a link to my email (which I may or may not ignore, and listen unwillfully) or send exactly the same track to some friend of mine, who then forwards it to me with a positive comment. It will increase your chances tenfold. Why? No reason. Just psychologically. Let's say you wanna buy a new washing machine, and when you surf some websites an ad pop ups with a great sale on some washing machines. You will probably ignore it. If you go to some appliace store looking at exactly the same model for the same price, and a friend told you "brand X" is good - you will probably get it. Same thing with music.

Play your music at parties! For starters forget the big festivals and anything abroad. Find some local parties and play. They will most probably want you to play for free. If you can afford playing for free, then ok. Otherwise give them a good reason for them paying you, and be a bit hard to get (like with the girl hitting example earlier). If your music is any good, they will be interested and you will probably be booked again. If no one contacts you, then you're not good enough yet, probably. You may never know who else is at this party, be it a label owner, some bigshot promoter or whatever.

All of this is based on a single thing - GOOD MUSIC! This has to be done. And you're probably thinking "but I hear lots of crap music being released, so what's up with that?". Well, taste is all about personal opinion and the guys releasing that music may not share the same opinion as you. Besides, those guys already have the connections. You still need to form them.

On 2011-01-30 00:59:44, Mike A wrote:
If your music is any good, they will be interested and you will probably be booked again. If no one contacts you, then you're not good enough yet, probably. You may never know who else is at this party, be it a label owner, some bigshot promoter or whatever.

On 2011-01-31 18:39, wiseNevil wrote:
...Last part- Music...

On 2011-01-31 19:21, Beat Agency wrote:
It's fun to compare today's very competitive promotion focused scene with the scene i started in as an artist.

In 1995 i released my debut album and that was basically it. The label did their work getting it out to the shops and of course important promotion (as any serious label should know how to do properly for their artists) and suddenly out of the blue (the way i felt it) I had organizers from around the world calling me (yes in those days we did not have e-mails or the internet) asking me to go and play at their parties.

Today it's a whole different game. You need to network with people, promote yourself heavily in order to be noticed. I cant help feeling that sometimes the music is no longer what's most important in order to be noticed compared to how things were back in the days.

Just an observation.

On 2011-01-31 19:34, disco hooligans wrote:
I think its mainly because music is so diverse these days. I mean listen to Protoculture's new album and the listen to Psykovski's. You'll get people claiming either of them albums is what psy-trance is all about
Actually just go to a 24+ hour party and listen to the music and how wildly it varies, and I am not talking about the BPM.

Now remember the music that was being played when Trance Africa Express was released? Remember 24+ hour parties in the mid '90s and how coherent the music was through out the duration of the party? I don't remember anyone complaining about the music getting boring.
And Trance Africa Express is a classic! It was so good it gave people religious experiences, drove them hanging up from the trees! It was THE forest track to play. Listen to what people call "forest music/trance" these days...
I remember in Varimpopi in 1996, 3000 people in the woods this tune would drop and people would go all wide eyed, like an apocalypse was taking shape behind the P.A.
Good music back then, was plain good music.
Nowdays, good music is ticking pigeonhole sub genre boxes.

Peace out.

On 2011-01-31 19:21, Beat Agency wrote:
It's fun to compare today's very competitive promotion focused scene with the scene i started in as an artist.

In 1995 i released my debut album and that was basically it. The label did their work getting it out to the shops and of course important promotion (as any serious label should know how to do properly for their artists) and suddenly out of the blue (the way i felt it) I had organizers from around the world calling me (yes in those days we did not have e-mails or the internet) asking me to go and play at their parties.

Today it's a whole different game. You the artist need to network with people 24/7 and promote yourself heavily in order to be noticed. I cant help feeling that sometimes the music is no longer what's most important in order to be noticed compared to how things were back in the days.

Just an observation.