Sometimes to get what you want in the music business, all you have to do is ask

'If you don't ask, you don't get!' That's a good old proverb. But have you asked anyone recently? This guy has...

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Here's a message from an RP reader...

Hello,

I am a young producer based in Southwest UK - Cornwall. I was wondering whether you could help me promote my work by placing a link to my new website somewhere on your page. My website can be found at www.jamesbranton.co.uk

I would really appreciate the help as I am finding it very difficult to attract web traffic.

Kind regards,

James Branton

Well, that's the job done already.

Anyone with a website will know the feeling about attracting more traffic...

It's difficult to get started, difficult to make any money to cover the costs, difficult to make it a part-time occupation, difficult to make it your living, and difficult to make a million dollars from it.

It's always difficult.

(And when I've made ten million dollars, someone else will be running RecordProducer.com!)

The point is however that getting on in the music industry (which is a lot harder than running a website) is based on several factors...

• How good you are at what you do
• How hard working you are
• Who you know (or can get to know)
• Self-promotion

If you score well on the first three, then you probably won't need to promote yourself so much. However, few people become successful without constantly stepping forward and saying, "Look at me!"

If you're not saying "Look at me!" as widely and as loudly as you can, you're not promoting yourself as well as you could.

There is a balance to be struck however.

Suppose you are in an early stage of your career and your skill set is not fully developed yet.

It's no good proving to the entire world that you're not up to the job.

No, in that case you would promote yourself among people who are on a similar level, or to a small marketplace. You would get to be a big fish in that small pond eventually, then you can promote yourself more widely when you are ready.

Also there are thousands of potential opportunities for promotion. If you slave day and night promoting yourself through as many avenues as possible, what's happening to your real work?

So it's worth giving promotion some serious thought.

• Are you promoting yourself well enough?
• What percentage of your time do you want to devote to promotion?
• What are your criteria for deciding whether a promotion opportunity is worth spending time on?

By the way, we have no connection with James other than the message he sent us and the fact we have looked at his website to make sure it exists.

Someone check him out and throw him some work please. It will prove that promoting yourself really is worth doing.

Publication date Wednesday February 10, 2010

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