10 Tips For Contacting Promoters

By Kyle Marno on August 3, 2014

As a YouTube promotion channel, we receive hundreds of tracks per month, sorting through and listening to them all can add up to quite a bit of time each week, time that could be spent elsewhere and more efficiently. For this reason, we give you our ten tips that we feel are the most important subjects to highlight in submitting your music to a YouTube promotion channel.

1. Always provide streams

When sending your music to a promoter, don’t attach the file or give a download link that isn’t streamable. Promoters receive hundreds of tracks per week, so they don’t have the time to download every file just to preview it. Providing a Soundcloud or promo tool stream will ensure that they can listen as quickly as possible and feel like you haven’t wasted their time.

2. Make sure downloads are high quality

When providing a download, either via a file sharing link or Soundcloud, make sure the original file is a 320 Kbps Mp3, promoters want to give their audience the best quality possible, there’s no need to worry about high quality ripping of your audio, as Soundcloud only streams in 128kbps and YouTube in 192kbps at 720p or higher. Wav files are also considerably larger and take up a huge amount of time and disk space, avoid them if possible.

3. Don’t mention your personal life

Promoters have no interest in you being a 14 year old producer from California who made a track for his cat, leave your personal info out of the email, keep it to the point and all about the music. One of the main pet hates I have about submissions is people who use personal downfall to try and make me favour them over other submissions, it’s frustrating and unprofessional.

4. Include support info, but keep it short

It’s perfectly fine to include info about big name acts or DJs who might have supported your track, but keep it short, promoters don’t want a list of all 300 people from your mailing list that have downloaded your track.

5. Make sure you own the copyright

One of the most important things when submitting your music to a YouTube promoter is making sure you own the rights or have permission for everything in your track, from samples to vocal lines, a promoter will likely boycott your music indefinitely if you put their channels reputation on the line.

6. Only send to channels that fit your niche

It can be wise to only submit your tracks to channels that actually promote the genre you produce, at Soundspace we primarily feature deep house and house, but get a huge amount of dubstep and big room/progressive submissions, if I see the words dubstep or EDM in the email, I often delete it without listening to the track, as 95% of the time it will be a genre my audience isn’t interested in.

7. Specify upload requirements

Depending on your personal preference, you may want specific requirements for your track, you might want it uploaded after a certain date to allow for buy/download links to be included or to fit within a set campaign, another option you might want is a shortened clip of the track to be uploaded rather than the full version, things like these must be discussed with the promoter before anything else, to avoid confusion and disagreements in the long run, that will ultimately waste peoples time.

8. Ensure your grammar is on point

It’s important to come across as professional as possible when contacting someone, if I receive an email that is badly written or has extremely bad spelling mistakes, I immediately have a negative opinion of that person, which could lead to me having a sub-concious biased reaction to their music.

9. Don’t spam

Avoid repeat submissions of the same track, I often open the exact message in an email that I read on Soundcloud or Facebook five minutes before hand, promoters are busy people, give them time to view your submission and reply.

10. Be patient

It’s important to give promoters time to receive, listen to and reply to your submission. They have a lot of emails to get through and also deserve a personal life as well. Just because they don’t get back to you after 24 hours doesn’t mean they haven’t received your email.

We contacted a number of different promoters to get their thoughts on submitting your music to their networks:

Selected:

“Promoters review all their incoming submissions, don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re more likely to receive a reply if you submit your track on more than one of their social accounts.”

MrDeepSense:

“Make sure your music is your best work when sending to a promoter, don’t send something until you know it’s truly ready”

Presage:

“The music you send, should be something you feel proud of, something you feel deserves recognition, but most of all you have to stand out.”

Well done! You made it to the end. Enjoy this mix JC Williams put together for Soundspace!

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/161301706″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]