HOW TO PITCH YOUR MUSIC

There are a lot of people approaching me or respond to my approach for either publishing their music or using their demos for pitching to the bigger names in the industry. I can say about 40% of the demos are receive are okay in sense of professionalism but the other 60% usually have some sort of issue which makes the project to don't move forward. Here I list down some of the common issues and the solutions for them. 

Decide what you want. Before sending your track or your demos to a publisher or a producer, make sure at least you know what you want, and it would be even much better if also be open for their suggestions too. When you are sending them a demo, do you something in mind? If you had the power to get the song in whatever direction that you wanted, what would you do with it? All these and things like these are what you need to prepare before sending your demos out. Don't be confusing and don't make people confused. At the end of the day, this is your project and you want it to move forward, right?

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Decide what you want. Before sending your track or your demos to a publisher or a producer, make sure at least you know what you want, and it would be even much better if also be open for their suggestions too. When you are sending them a demo, do you something in mind? If you had the power to get the song in whatever direction that you wanted, what would you do with it? All these and things like these are what you need to prepare before sending your demos out. Don't be confusing and don't make people confused. At the end of the day, this is your project and you want it to move forward, right?

Explain properly. When the producer or the label manager opens your email and sees a demo with no or so little explanation, it just makes them confused, and in some cases makes them offended! Basically, you are pitching to these guys to spend years of their life on you and pushing your career to grow but it really doesn’t worth for you to spend a few minutes and send them a proper email?
It’s best for the body of the email to include certain information such as a small introduction about yourself or your band, your music history and career, all in short version. Maybe one or two paragraphs. Also, to explain for them what is your purpose of sending your demos to them and what are you expecting or hoping to get from their label? If it’s a specific demo with a back story (which I strongly recommend doing so and choose a demo with story in it) explain the overall story of the song and mention about your motivations of writing that song.

Tracks formats and quality. Remember one thing, when you are sending out your demos to whoever you’re sending, you want them to listen to it. People don’t have much patience to listen to someone they don’t know so, it’s your job to make it possible. If you are sending the demos as files attached to your email, make sure it’s not any sort of big formats to take so long to download. Make it MP3, but not very low quality that it doesn’t be clear! Or if you are sending it via links, send them the links that doesn’t need them to download it. Reduce the steps as much as possible. You can use Dropbox or OneDrive which allow them to stream without downloading the file or YouTube and SoundCloud allow you to upload it privately and just give them the link.

Be consistent, but not too much. It happens very often that when send an email to someone, they might miss it. Wait for a week or two and if they still hadn’t responded just give them a friendly gentle reminder. Like this they will probably see your email and it also shows them that you are committed and serious about showing your demo. On the other hand, don’t push them. If you send them the email and they don’t respond, don’t follow up the next day. It will give them the impression that you are not the right person to work with!

If you got rejected, work on your craft and try again. Rejection is part of entertainment industry. Never take it personal. If you got rejected, just simply ask for the reason. In most cases the producers and labels will give you logical reasons which can be helpful for you. Take what they say and work on it. When you feel the improvement, pitch again. No door is ever closed for good.

Author

Hangi Tavakoli is our in-house established and professional music producer with more than 14 years of experience in music production, mix and mastering, recording engineering, live sound designing/engineering, lyrics writing and music arrangement. He has produced more than 800 and written more than 2000 published songs to-date, including some major hits in international scale.Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.