Answering Your Q's
Q: Hey Dave... What is your marketing and communications experience within the music industry?
A: My music-related marketing experience started in the mid 80’s as a member of a working "Top 40" cover band, when it was easy to find gigs. This was before the Internet brought us social networking and social media platforms, and so the band members did most marketing. I have always been the guy in the band that took on the role of marketing.
This meant dividing up the task of visiting local stores and putting up posters, giving out t-shirts, distributing business cards, making phone calls, mailing out demo's, building word-of-mouth, attaining media coverage, getting radio attention... and just getting ourselves out there to establishing a presence.
By a presence I mean playing in many different cities and building a fan base by talking to people and getting to know them. It also means going to other live shows and getting to know the others working in the industry.
Early in my career I made it a point of visiting the new recording studio in town and introducing myself. I not only made a great friend of the owner, but got myself into a ton of studio work with other artists who I may not have met otherwise, ensuring even more work for myself. I also had the benefit of knowing people in the local media (radio and television) who were very supportive and helpful by getting the band some free exposure that would have otherwise been out of our budget range had we advertised within those forms of media.
As I mentioned, the world of marketing within the music industry today has immensely changed in that with a computer and the right software, the entire process of recording straight through to marketing and distribution can be done in-house by the band itself.
After this long in the business, we now have a long list of direct contacts from the Kootenay, Boundary, Okanagan areas of BC (Canada) of drummers, students, schools, organizations and retail outlets. Every so often we make an effort to reach out to this list to reconnect.
In the 90’s my wife and business partner, Lillian, and I started our writing career together and now have 6 books published that we actively promote, in fact we appear in the media 120-180 times per year. Because Brummet Media Group acts like an umbrella for everything that we do, whenever we are promoting a blog or a book, everything else gets exposure too.
We arrived in this small community knowing we would re-launch the business and therefore we revamped our sites, social media and social networking and any profiles in the groups we were a part of. Over the years we gained exposure through local magazines such as the I Love Creston and Kootenay Arts Bulletin, and reconnected with music stores within Okanagan, Boundary and Kootenay region.
We put up flyers, distributed bookmarks, did appearances across BC. We did very little advertising, but instead focused on networking. Today we mainly focus on our social networking and media outlets, online groups, networking and writers groups to spread the word internationally because, locally - we are well-known.
There are so many systems in place online to help musicians and music teachers reach out, build name recognition and network. We gained listings or mentions with numerous arts and business organizations such as BC Arts Council, BC Marketplace, Shop Local, Support Local BC. Joined 17 Facebook drum groups, 170 author, writing and blogging online groups and 15 online networking groups. We joined as many music teacher and drum teacher online lists as we could find across the US, Canada and the UK.
Over the 3 decades in business we've done email marketing, direct marketing, newsletter creation and even hosted radio shows and a podcast in the past. One thing we learned is that it is important to be flexible in business: to find something that works and use it fully until it isn't working any more, then move on to the next thing. Of course it took my partner and I a lot of work and diligence to set up and maintain the smooth system we are using today, but as a team we both use our skills to proficiently promote everything we do... and we are always willing to try something new.
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