From efM fearless leader Chris Frank, on the road...

My band, the Red Clay Ramblers performed at LEAF, a mighty-fine festival in Black Mountain, NC, earlier this summer, and I want to pass on to you what I gleaned from the weekend, marketing-wise, if you are interested.

They had a little CD store at the fest, the common mode at most such gatherings. Performers don't sell off the stages, you send folks to the store. The one at LEAF is called "TuneTown"; they have a modest selection of CDs from artists not at the fest in addition to festival artist wares. The store was run by one Michael Ginsburg, who has a distribution company out of Seymour, TN.

Michael is a really nice guy, and we got to talking about how hard it was to make an impression with all the various modern marketing avenues that people are exposed to, especially with an extreme "niche" like our own. People are bombarded by requests for their attention, from all sides and around the clock. He postulated that you practically have to slap people in the face to get their attention -- and that keeping that attention was next to impossible.

Dr. Donald DePoy, the Executive Director of the Shenandoah Valley Mountain Music Makers Association, is actively seeking musicians and bands to perform along the Mountain Music Makers Trail. The Trail covers the 14 Counties, 12 Cities from Winchester to Roanoke. Mountain Music includes: bluegrass, old-time string band, American fiddle/banjo traditions, Appalachian folk songs, shape-note and gospel, and traditional country music. SVMMMA seeks to identify performers and bands along the Trail and selected bands/individuals will be compensation (pay4play) for performances at SVMMMT venues. To promote music excellence and refine the art and craft of music making, individuals and bands will have an opportunity to work with "performance specialist". For an audition please contact Martha Hills @ 540-209-3540 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

I recently asked a forward-thinking indie media company friend of mine what artists needed to do to get noticed.  He said it's not enough to have a website and a myspace page and music available on iTunes, that you need to shoot for content and links on hundreds of pages.  Marketers talk about "impressions"; think about it - when you play live you make an "impression" on a potential fan, it's your best shot - if it's strong enough it will stick with them for a while.  Internet "impressions" are less strong, even with "mixed media" (video,audio, etc), so you need multiple impressions to make and keep fans - the more, the better; your "public" has a short attention span and a shorter memory.

Most of us don't have a marketing department and a publicist sending out press releases and working the phones and the links, so how to you accomplish this?  

Broadcasting an event over the Internet (so-called "webcasting") used to be a huge deal. Getting live video and audio distributed to a larger audience required the ‘caster to have a big “pipe” to serve many streams at once. Now days anyone with a decent high speed connection can get it out to any and all with one of the new services like ustream.tv.

This is a pretty revolutionary tool, a great example of how you can leverage the infrastructure of the internet, meaning somebody else built it, but you can use it for free, practically.  We first heard about it from singer/songwriter+ Erin McKeown who did a series of house /yard concerts this past summer. She charged admission, maybe even made money without leaving the house. efolkMusic wants to help artists and producers get the word out when a concertcast of interest to our users is happening, so please write us and we’ll let our 9,000+ newsletter subscribers know: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it