You’re ready to start booking gigs right? As an artist, you want to be able to present your brand to venues and promoters showing them all of the important info about yourself in one place. EPK’s have in reality taken the place of the physical press kit – printed materials once packaged together and mailed.

“But, my band has a Facebook Music page. Isn’t that the same?”

While your Facebook page does include relative information about your band, an EPK is more official and shows you’ve taken the time to gather together all of the high points of your career.

A good artist EPK should include the following:

A short bio
Band Member names and roles
Music Genre
Professional Photos
Up-to-date calendar of tour dates
Press Quotes
Discography
Audio Samples
Videos
Link to Your Website
Links to your Social Media
Contact Info

There are also multiple platforms that offer to host your EPK – two of which being SonicBids and ReverbNation who also provide ways to connect to gigs or festivals through submitting your EPK. Sites like OneSheet offer a platform for most of the information minus the ability to do submit for shows.

At My New Release, we happen to have some great writers and folks who can provide such content needed for an EPK. We then, compile it all and make sure it’s complete and ready to submit for the world to see. Let us know if we can help – we’d love to! Just shoot us an email and we’ll let you know what all we can do.

We wanted you all to get to know our team a little better, so we’ve put together this Spotify playlist for the fall season that includes tunes we’ve been enjoying. At My New Release, we love music – I mean, REALLY love it!  Sharing what we love is a gift – so we hope you resonate with some of these tunes as much as we do. And please do share your own lists with us.

“And while they’re expert pencil pushers (a plus!!!), the staff of My New Release are also passionate music fans and excited about the opportunity to help an artist coordinate the details of a successful album launch. If you can’t spend another minute on paperwork, check ‘em out!”

They offer so many services, look them up here if you haven’t ever visited their site. You’ll learn a lot!

We tell artists often that what comes after the recording process is JUST as important as what you put into the album. Those things are not as immediately rewarding or as fun to do as recording, BUT they’re essential. Registering your music with various databases is one of the many not-as-fun-but-super-important things to do.

So, to start off, what is SoundScan, BDS, MediaBase & Gracenote? Well, I’m going to copy the definitions from Wikipedia so you know the technical answers to that ☺

SoundScan is the official method of tracking sales of music and music video products throughout the United States and Canada. Data is collected weekly and made available every Wednesday to subscribers, which include executives from all facets of record companies, publishing firms, music retailers, independent promoters, film and TV, and artist management. SoundScan is the sales source for the Billboard music charts, making it the official source of sales records in the music industry. [Reference]  However, not all stations are BDS registered or certified, so that is why we also value registration with Mediabase.

Mediabase is a music industry service that monitors radio station airplay in 180 US and Canadian markets. Mediabase publishes music charts and data based on the most played songs on terrestrial and satellite radio, and provides in-depth analytical tools for radio and record industry professionals. [Reference]

Gracenote formerly called CDDB (Compact Disc Data Base), is a company that maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio compact discs and vinyl records. It provides software and metadata to businesses that enable their customers to manage and search digital media. [Reference]. This is all fancy speak for: when you put your CD in a computer, if it’s registered on Gracenote, all the information will automatically show up in iTunes rather than just be “Track 1”, etc.

Again, why is all this important? Well, we live in a world of convenience. It’s extremely frustrating when I go back to look at some music an artist gave me, and I can’t find them on my computer because things weren’t labeled correctly. And knowing your sales numbers is ALWAYS an important thing. Those numbers will allow you the knowledge to sell yourself to a record label, management company, booking agency, etc. That’s why My New Release values submitting that information for you – we want your album and your work to be known in the right places.

“My New Release has been wonderful guiding me through the process of registering my publishing.  For starters, they are friendly but very professional.  It’s hard to maintain that line and they do it well.  I had complete confidence in their work because of how knowledgeable they are.  I’ll admit, I was very intimidated with the publishing process when we first started but they quickly soothed those worries.  Any questions/concerns I had, they answered thoroughly.  It’s clear they’ve spent time and effort on mastering the nuts and bolts of the registration process.  This expertise really makes for a professional experience.  Thank you!  My experience with My New Release has been nothing put positive.  The team is not only excellent at their jobs, they’re actually passionate about the music.  Their energy is inspiring to be around.  I see much success in My New Release’s future.” -Jamie

These cultures of folks sitting in this school cafeteria are different. They shop at different places, listen to different music, drive different cars, etc. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s great to polarize into stereotyped groups, but I am saying we are more or less comfortable interacting in certain places and with certain products. This is America [‘Merica!]. We like options.

With that being said [and you’re probably wondering how in the world I got away including a clip from Mean Girls], it’s no different with social media and music. There are certain folks who still love MySpace and go there to listen to music. There are others who swear they’ll only get music on Bandcamp. Many others will scour SoundCloud to find new music before it ever approaches a website. Still others go through YouTube to find their favorite artists’ covers and can discover bands that way.

As an independent artist when you are releasing your album, you need all the help you can get to expose your music to different crowds of people. This is why we believe it’s important to have a unified and strong presence on each of these sites so you can connect as much as possible. Now, we all know that there are only 24 hours in a day, so you have to be wise on how you manage these accounts going forward or else you’ll spend ALL your time [and I mean all of it] hunched over a computer. But we at My New Release can set up and sync all these accounts so you’re able to interact simply and efficiently with your fans. And you never know – some guy from Warner Brothers may have a niece who is always on PureVolume and hears one of your songs, raves about it to her uncle who then contacts you, offering a great contract. OR those very platforms can help you fill a room in a city 300 miles from home because they’ve heard you on MySpace and told their friends. The possibilities are there. So let’s get started.