Published: 24th October 2009

Promoting Your Band

It’s a shame when a good band sends us a promo pack that is complete crap. It happens a lot. Some bands are good at playing music but when it comes to producing printed, promotional stuff, they fail to do themselves justice.

Here are some horror stories about promotional packs received at the Get Your Band On (GYBO) office.

Blank CDs sent in without even the band name being written on the CD – so now we have a collection of blank CDs and have no idea which bands are on them.

No date on the CD to tell us when the tracks were recorded.

No song titles – so if we want to discuss a song we don’t know what it is called.

Info sheets without any contacts details on them – a two page closely typed essay about the band’s history and no contact details — not even a phone number.

Hand written letters in spidery writing which we have difficulty reading

Failure to understand the difference between a website address and an email address – email addresses beginning with www. [were not uncommon]

Band info sheets that tell us the band is based on the UK but not where exactly

Photos of the band that are so poorly reproduced you cant make out what they are

Biog sheets with masses of irrelevant information – we haven’t got time to read all these minor details and really don’t need to know all that stuff anyway.

Photos with no explanatory captions, so we can’t understand much about what the photo shows us.

Biog sheets that fail to explain what type of music the band plays – are they heavy metal, punk, pop rock or rootsy folk rock – it doesn’t say.

Sometimes we are unsure as to why this stuff has been sent in.

Large amounts of material, CDs and even DVDs but no covering letter asking us what to do with it.

What do these guys want? Show bookings? Album promotions? Management services? A review? They forgot to say.

A one-line letter or note asking “please consider this band for a show booking” or “Please write a review of our latest album” would at least tell us what they want

So if bands are sending out this stuff to venues or record labels, it is hardly surprising that they are not getting any bookings or interest back.

We now have a large collection of band press and promo packs and 100s of sampler CDs

This rather poor collection of material helps us to figure out how to make an effective pack that will actually be worth the postage and get the band results.

Useful links

Links have been removed because they are no longer valid

Band Promotion Blog – Press packs

e-How – Band Promo packs

Band Promotion Press packs

Create a promo package

Article: How to promote your band

Page last edited 3/9/23.