Okay… a few bits and bobs have happened in the past while, with a bit of a scare of She Spits Macabre breaking up, they now have a new bassist and minus one singer, but they’re developing a new set and stuff so it’s all ‘phew’!

Otherwise, I’ve got somewhat of an ‘office’ for Pith. It’s the ex-dining room of our new house, and I have a desk with a few other bits and bobs like my puter, a printer, etc… it looks like this:

Neat, tidy and highly professional wouldn’t you say?
Now, I decided to finally get off my arse with promo stuff. I’m wasn’t really sure how to go about doing so I talked to a few other radio / label / promo type people and came up with what seems would work best.

First off, I burnt a whole bunch of CDs with 2/3 tracks from each band, and went and bought one of these things that lets you put labels on CDs. It was a goddamn ripoff, they charged me 30 bucks for a few shitty labels and a smaller versino of the spindle you get in 50/100 packs of blank CDs. You just print out whatever you want onto the label and stick it onto your blank CDs, using the centre thingy on the spindle to align it up.
(So, if you want to do this yourself, just buy some labels and use the centre spindle thingy of your 50 pack of blank CDs to stick em on the blanks!)
They ended up looking like this:

I then made up a quick little info-mashunal thingy, double sided A5 and printed that off (2 per A4 page), like so:

http://www.pithtro.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/thea5sheets.jpg

This was then folded up and stuck in with the CD into a little case like so:

Ta daa!

On the info sheet I put:
- Some basic info about the bands
- The tracklisting of the CD
- Contact details (phone, email + postal)
- Website addys for all the bands.

On the CD itself I put the tracklisting again, and my contact details once again, along with the websites for the label and the bands again.

One thing I forgot to put on the CD/infosheet was TRACK TIMES. I realised this after I gave it to a radio guy and he said “any of these around 2 mins long?”… dumb dumb Will… next time track times’ll be on there!

So the above process was repeated times more than I care to think about and all those little promo pack thingies are going to be sent off to masses of people on the huge big fuckoff list I made a week or so ago (click here for a picture of it).

The cost of this all ended up kinda like so:

- New printer cartridge: $25
- Stupid labeller thingy: $30
- Pack of 100 labels: $20
- Big big pack of envelope labels: $28
- Envelopes: $8

Grand total: $88.

Realistically stuff like the envelope labels, printer cartridge etc can be used for other stuff, but hey, all in all this ended up pretty cheapie.
If you don’t count the time taken to do it all, all we need is for all this to end up with like, 7-8 more CD sales than we would’ve got without doing it, which isn’t hard, so it’ll’ve paid for itself many times over if it goes well.

In other news, bands have been gigging which is good, not enough, but hey… I’m hopin this promo stuff will help somewhat to get more gigs, interviews, reviews etc… We’re really not getting enough street press attention.
I got a PO Box, it was really cheap, like 50 bucks a year or suchlike… now people can send us mail! Yay.

That’s it for another ‘how to start an independent record label’ diary entry, I’ll letcha know how all this promo stuff worked out next entry…

This entry was posted by Will Dayble on Thursday, November 25th, 2004 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Start an Independent Record Label. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.