We obviously have our favourites here at Londonist, but we're an open bunch and we do genuinely love discovering new bands and sharing them with our readers. Here are a ten tips on how to draw our attention to your music so that it gets featured.
1. Write to us at [email protected] with a biog and why we should feature you. Ideally you ought to have some sort of 'news' to report, be it a gig, a single/album being released, &c.
2. Email us MP3s or AACs of your stuff (go on, our Gmail account can take it). Windows Media files are incredibly temperamental though, so don't send those as they don't normally play on our lovely Macs and definitely don't play on our iPods. Generally we don't like to write about bands until we've heard the music. You can understand our position, we hope.
3. Send us review CDs, preferably of CDs that haven't been released yet or are very recently released. That way it doesn't look stupid if we put up a review of a CD that's ancient. Get in touch with us by e-mail first and we'll give you the postal address.
4. Send us links where we can send our readers so they can also hear your stuff. Either that or give us permission to stream an MP3 file.
5. Email us photos (jpg format, large as possible). The photos should preferably be of your band, but if you want to send us saucy snaps instead, we'll cope with that.
6. Try not to do the 'everything you need's on our website' thing. We're busy and, more importantly, extremely lazy, so anything you can do to help us write about you is good. Having said that, if you have an official website, make sure you tell us where it is! Google is not quite perfect yet.
7. Invite us to your gigs in London and keep telling us about any exciting news or your gigs in London.
8. Remind us about your gig in London if you told us about it two months before it was due to happen. Sometimes our memory and to-do lists fail...
9. Give our readers something to make them get a warm fuzzy feeling for you, e.g. cheap/discounted entry to a gig, competition prizes like a copy of your single/album, a cuddly toy. Bribes to Londonist writers are welcome but we absolutely will not feature you just because you've given us a freebie. It's all about the music, man.
10. Be patient, keep writing to us and stay friendly! We can't promise we'll get to see absolutely everyone but if we can, we will. We do have a backlog of bands we want to feature so it may take us a while to get to you, but we normally respond pretty quickly to initial contact. And please don't be shy. As you may have noticed, we don't necessarily expect bands to be signed or played on the radio to feature them.
Sometimes you might follow all the above and still not get featured on Londonist. For the newer and unsigned bands certainly, if we don't like your stuff we won't normally post a bad review, we just won't review it at all. Or we might even try and find someone on the staff who does 'get' what you're doing so that they can write it up.
We think this is the fairest policy but if you're happy for a review to go up regardless of whether it's good or bad, do let us know when you send in your stuff.
The 'Empty Stage' photo used with this post was taken from Macwagen's Flickr feed and is used under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons licence.
