PROMOTIONS

Alright, so if you ever done promotions before either by radio or blogs or newspapers or magazines or whatever you know there's work behind it, no matter what platform it is. Here's another rant...

So i've started to talk to this dude several months before a festival. My proposal was, as an online radio streamer I wanted to do an online show, a spot constantly playing to promote the festival, an interview before the festival to the staff, interviewing the bands and another of my proposals was to do a report on video of the whole festival. We talked and all I asked for was free entrance, which honestly is the minimum you can ask to do that kind of promotion. What I mean by this is... You actually going there, paying for transportation, paying for food, drinks and everything else so the minimum is clearly a free entrance to the festival and promotion back.

Now, as soon as I asked for free entrance there was already some backing away from the staff... I thought to myself... "I'm not promoting you entirely for free" so again, free entrance would be a must! But what really bothered me was the festival releasing officially the flyer and not once asking us for our Tyrant Metal logo. So you're going to put other sh*t that probably wouldn't deserve being in there but our promotion is what, useless?! You should know there are tourists who look for places to go and we in Tyrant Metal are quite heard outside of Portugal. As a matter fact, 99.9% of our listeners are all from other countries. Would this mean a lot of people from other countries would go to their festival? I don't know! But that's a risk you have to be willing to take. Just like we took a risk of starting a Metal radio station which requires a lot of work to get out there. With this said, it entirely bothered me that these dudes didn't ask us for our logo to promote us on the flyer and even backed away from giving us free entrance. Let me tell you something, promotion takes work. Recording spots and making them good for public takes work. Making flyers takes work. Interviewing takes work. Recording takes work. Editing takes even more work! Therefore, rethink your ways. And if all the backing away was because of thoughts that people are not aware of us, research! That's all it takes. Even though a lot of people judge this online radio thing the wrong way, there is a lot of work behind it. The difference is, while FM or AM stations (let's say, frequency stations) have work to do in touching knobs and physical material, we have work with digital stuff and allow me to say that is not easier. It's pretty much the same. But judgment is constantly there... We'll keep on working and here's some very honest words from me, DMGrinder for you folks who organize festivals and such. If you're willing to provide us with promotion back in our flyer/site and such and free entrance in your festival so we can actually work motivated, we'll do our very best to promote your event and give it a good image. But if you take us as some little nerds for being on the internet playing tunes and things (which 70% are provided by bands) we'll look at you like worthless time to waste. And no one wants to waste time, there's only 1 life... We need to enjoy it. This is not a job, it's a hobbie. As i'm sure several of the festivals out there are as well so have some fuck**g respect.