Promotion

I suck at promoting my own music. Always have. In fact, sometimes I think I have a self-sabotage thing going on.

Way back in college, me and some friends had a band called "Fits of Rage." We did not suck. In fact, given the mid-eighties college scene, we were pretty good. And with a little ambition, we might have done a thing or two. We kicked around and shared stages with kids who went on to play in very successful bands. And our drummer, Rob, was always sitting in with the best musicians and toured with some top acts after the F.O.R days. There were always some small-time industry people around, and folks would approach us after shows to talk about recording and that sort of thing. But we never even made a demo. We didn't return phone calls; we didn't re-print t-shirts when ours sold out; eventually, we petered out and went our separate ways.

In the mid-nineties, my folky acoustic group made a lo-fi recording in my apartment and got it on the air at the local college station. We gigged regularly in Athens and Atlanta, and we even got some decent press. The Atlanta Journal did a feature on open mike shows one night when we happened to play. The writer raved that we "gripped the audience with [our] tight . . . set"; while an Athens paper did an interview feature on the band, complete with photo layout and song (mis-)quotes. We drew crowds at the likes of Decatur's Eddie's Attic and Atlanta's Red Light Cafe, and people we didn't know knew who we were. So how did we capitalize on this momentum? We stopped playing in Athens altogether, cut back on the number of dates we played generally, and changed our name. How's that for guerilla marketing!?

So it should come as no surprise that in the age of the Interwebs, I have MyBook, SpaceFace, LiveBlogz, Twiggles, and all the rest, but I don't use these technologies for anything like a coordinated "promotional strategy." I have, however, started using a single tool to coordinate mailing list, press kit stuff, music downloads, and those sorts of things. It's called Reverb Nation, and it integrates with this page, with Facebook, and other services. I've had the account for some time, but they've been improving the service over the last year, and I've come to believe that the convenience of the thing outweighs my instinct to try to make everything "do it yourself" (an instinct that results in half-completed and abandoned projects).

So drop by the "Patrick and Shelle Bryant" profile on Reverb Nation and check out the downloads and the "be a fan" widget and whatever else is there. I'll be glad you did!