Rob's Blog

Trying to get Ange heard... who's really who online?
Apr 14th 2010 23:04

We're currently trying to get Ange Hardy's finished album ('Windmills and Wishes') heard by the people who need to hear it. We've got a lot of leads. Leads are good, they're a start. Hopefully they'll lead to something else. The Internet is also good, I'm evidently quite a fan of it. But filtering out the leads it's worth persisting with and those that it's not is proving to be quite a tough job.

Real World Records (that'd be Peter Gabriel's label) told us that they didn't accept submissions on CD, they only accepted submissions online.

That led me to a dilemma:

The album is recorded, and mastered. We have the DDP files ready for pressing onto the final disks. I don't want those tracks uploaded to MySpace. They're the finished product, we have an investor who needs to see a return from them, and I hope Ange is going to sell a lot of copies of that album. I don't want us to give them away.

So, I've set up a website from which to stream the mastered CD (using secure RTMP streaming from Amazon Web Service's Cloud Front) which requires users to log in to listen to the album. We're giving those logins to the labels.

The downside is that they can't listen to a CD in the car on the way home from work, and I'm relying on them having half decent computer speakers. The upside is that it's instant, and that it appears to be the format that people want.

But there are some more significant problem that this throws up. I think I'd summarise it like this:

1. People aren't very good at reading emails.
2. When people do read emails they're even worse at following links in those emails.
3. Famous people don't like people to know their email addresses.
4. Famous people are busy people.
5. If you can't get through to someone in an email the odds of getting their phone number are slim to none.
6. If you think people are bad at following links in emails, then the odds of a famous person following a link given to them by a PR company pretending to be the famous person are probably even worse than getting hold of their phone numbers.
7. Famous people are quite often PR companies pretending to be famous people on behalf of the famous people.

The area where I find this most intriguing is on Twitter. Knowing who's a real person and who's not a real person is difficult.

Sandi Thom (of 'I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker With Flowers in My Hair' fame), or in this context @sandi_thom, is now following Ange on Twitter. She's has 9 times more followers than people she's following, so she's not just following everyone blindly. But looking at Sandi's rather large publicity and management team then whether that means that it's actually just CCW Long Play Ltd, Neil O'Brien Entertainment, Green Gab PR, Momentum PR, Neil Adams PR, Jay Cox or Chris Young... or someone hired by any one of them that's reading and posting to Twitter is a different issue.

Similarly, Rosanne Cash (who's making a big impact despite her rather famous fathers shadow), or in this context @rosannecash, said Ange's YouTube video was 'lovely'... or did someone else say so on her behalf? I certainly know which one I want to be true!

I'm hoping that Bob Harris (that'd be @whisperingbob then) is going to listen to the album sometime in the next couple of weeks. A live Radio2 session is just the kind of kick start that Ange needs to take things up to the next level :) But again - is there someone doing work experience at the BBC that's charged with replying politically to all messages sent to Bob? Or is there a real person behind the address? Again, I guess only time will tell.

Progress is progress. All in all, I'm very happy with the way things are going.