So, time has come to put my metaphorical money where my keyboard is, so to speak. Having spent a lot of time complaining about the iniquities of the music biz and its treatment of artists I’ve found something practical to do to fight back.
I’ve been talking to Chris Sharpe, founder of Musosoup this week. His plan is to level the playing field for artists, and in a new twist in the plot for those who for the most part write and promote them for free. The truth is that most music writing is done without payment, including magazines you can buy on the shelves at W.H. Smiths. I’ve talked about Fireworks Magazine in the past, all volunteer run. It’s main competitor, Powerplay – the work of Mark Hoaksey. If you look at the bottom of Americana UK website you will find a button asking for support, that pays for the hosting costs, our editor, Mark Whitfield, works at a University in the daytime and commits huge amounts of time to making a success of the website. Most bloggers, including me, spend their lives with nose applied to grindstone in other parts of the forest. Chris Sharpe was a PR and ran a music venue before the C***d, and like all of us had to find a way to keep the lights on.
What is Musosoup? It’s a portal that aims to connect artists with those who canget their music noticed without being taken to the cleaners. £3 for a 48-hour window for bloggers, radio, podcasts to find you is not huge, Submithub. Musosoup’s about page says: “Unlike other submission platforms that ask for a payment per submission to each individual curator, we ask for a one-off payment, and just one submission will put your music in front of the right people. No more spending hours researching who to submit to, our curators will come to you if your music suits.” What’s more the Curator, which is how they are describing the content providers, radio, writing, podcasting, can ask for a little towards the cost of marketing and their time. £5 or so is the average. This is not going to make us give up the day jobs, but it does make it possible to broadcast the world of independent artists to a much bigger audience.
The independent PR stands to gain from this as well. I will certainly be steering the artists I work with at Marketing4Music towards it. There are some committed people, like Katie at From The White House PR, and Continental Record Services in Holland who are not making vast sums of money off the back of their artists and doing great work for them, but if we can slow down the rise of Submithub leaching off the hopes and dreams of singers and bands then so much the better.
Learn about Musosoup HERE, and after a little rejigging of the blog pages there will be an affiliate link that artists can use up by the weekend. My first playlist of new music I’ve heard will be up at the weekend. yes, it will be on Spotify for all the same reasons I use a Google driven platform for this blog and Facebook for My Musix, everyone else is there and this is about the oxygen of publicity. Don’t worry I will be posting links for the places where you can support the artist in a more practical fashion.
