Too Many Downloads? How To Get Noticed

Writing on Twitter this week, progressive house pioneer Dave Seaman highlighted the problem of information overload, forwarding a revealing complaint from superstar house DJ Funkagenda.

“I remember when I used to get maybe 10 promos a week. I'd play maybe 2 of them,” Funkagenda recalled, “Now I get 700 promos a week and I play maybe 1.”

Getting noticed, let alone even listened to, has never been trickier, with literally thousands of tracks being released each week.

“It’s great that so many people are making music but the flipside is that there is so much more bad stuff around,” Birmingham techno star Chris Finke notes, “Everybody used to be a "DJ" and now everyone is a "producer".

DJ Fergie admits he’s selective about which of the hundreds he receives every week he even listens to though admits he more amazed at how few producers target him personally when he’s out and about.

“I meet people in clubs who say they want to give me tracks and I always ask them to go to my Facebook and contact me from there,” he explains, “What surprises me the amount of people who don't follow these things up.”

Dave Clarke’s also a fan of the personal touch though insists when he’s checking out the vast bulk of music he receives each week (‘1.5-2 GB of tracks’) he makes a point of ignoring press releases and texts.

“Don't be personal with long (and lovely) emails from the heart on the first correspondence to the DJ, time is so short so it’s far better to say something like ‘I really understand your style and I honestly think this track fits well in your kind of set’,” he recommends.

“Don't do a blanket email to 400 people if you care about your music unless it is trance/minimal/pop music. If it is music made from the heart, treat it like that and aim it at the right people succinctly,” he urges.

US progressive star Chris Fortier does his best to listen to all the promos he’s sent (‘it’s vital and important if you want to discover new music and find something special for your sets’ he insists) though even he says delivery is more important than ever,

“Sending only download links these days can reduce your chances of connecting to DJs especially if there are no recognizable artists and/or remixers as part of the release,” he says.

“Try to use players like Soundcloud which is great to send this to DJs so they can quickly and easily listen without having to download a file.”

“I recommend including nice visuals and please make the tracks streamable, if I have to download it first, it's really boring,” Arnaud ‘Blackstrobe’ Rebotini agrees.

“I receive around 40 promos a week and normally spend around two hours a week listening to them. There's some I don't need to listen to because I just know they’re not for me, but I always try to check most of them, even if it's just two or three seconds,” he chuckles.

Judge Jules said he receives around 500 new tracks each week which are filtered down to 100 by another person ‘best suited to my taste’ from which he typically selects 20 for his CD wallet/ USB.

While that’s certainly more than the '1' suggested in the quote per week, the ratio of unsuitable to suitable is still very high,” says Jules.

Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff