See – it’s not just me. Here’s Bethan Elfyn at this year’s BBC Masterclass saying exactly the same thing I keep banging on about. When you’re hassling people to come and check out your music, for God’s sake supply some kind of factual – and if possible interesting – information about yourself on your Soundcloud or Facebook page. Also, needless to say, on the BBC Introducing Uploader. From fans to festival bookers everyone is inundated with ridiculous amounts of new music every week, and if you don’t tells them what’s special/different about your band in the few seconds they’ll spend checking you out online, they’ll click away quickly to somebody else who does.
Trust us on this. It is really phenomenally, deeply, infuriatingly, stupidly, timewastingly, counterf*ckingproductively dumb for bands to mither and nag people to play their f*cking music on the radio – and then not supply us with any f*cking facts on their f*cking Facebook page that we can actually pass on to our listeners. It doesn’t need to be flowery or boastful – nothing in your biog needs to be even remotely true – but not having one is a guaranteed way to make life harder for people who are trying to support your career.
See: how to write a band biog.
I couldn’t agree more.
This is sadly the case with submissions sent to us for our website. We get the email saying “check us out”, then we check them out and they are good, but then what? Should we post the track online without any info? Or do we pick an equally good track from another act to post that has a bit of interesting info for the readers to digest.
I think we all know the answer.
I don’t actually mind a lack of biography. If a song’s really good I’ll do some digging and get to the bottom of it. If a song’s average, I probably won’t write about it anyway.
The worst thing in the world is when someone with a generic/unGoogle-able name emails without a website link of any kind. I probably turn down four to five good “check us out” emails a day because all they’ve sent is an MP3 and I can’t find them on the net for love nor money.
Oh ungoogleable names are the worst, Tiffany. People who call their band something like “Orion” or “Dream” or “May”… my favourite recent example was a brilliant band who called themselves “Shopping” and named their song after one of the world’s biggest shopping malls “Santa Monica Place”. Even if you add a keyword like “band” into your search there’s absolutely no trace of them on Google…