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Eddy Says
Eddy Says: Eddy’s top tips
By Eddy Temple-Morris | Published on Monday 25 January 2010
It seems Eddy eventually managed to relax into his holiday, and so hasn’t written an original ‘Eddy Says’ for this week. Which is good, because that was how things were supposed to be. He’ll be back and fully refreshed again next week. But for now, let’s have a second look at his top tips for submitting demos to DJs, solid gold advice whatever the year.
1. Don’t inundate
I know you’ve spent your entire life getting your first album together and you want it to be heard by the world, starting with me and a bunch of people like me who can help spread the word… But please, just put your best song, or pair of songs, or at most three on that CD. If I want more, I’ll ask for more. It’s just simple mathematics. If everybody sends me an hour of music, that’s about 100 hours of music per week I’d have to listen to and there aren’t enough free hours in the week to do that. Huge bodies of songs tend to get skimmed through, not doing them justice. If you choose two or three songs, make sure they show your depth. It’s simple. A fast one and a slow one, a catchy single and an interesting album track, basically a balance, because one may be great for me but the other perfect for, say, Rob Da Bank.
2. Biogs
Again brevity is the key to a good one, certainly don’t write more than a page. Preferably it will be a paragraph and a pic. Try to make yours stand out from the crowd by avoiding the phrases everybody uses: eagerly anticipated/world domination etc. Try to be original. My favourite blurb sheet of recent times was for ‘Sponsored By Destiny’ by the marvellous Slagsmalsklubben. None of the bog standard DJ and journo quotes, they simply used a quote “from a random member of the audience at their first London gig”. It said something like “my girlfriend dragged me here tonight so I had no idea who was playing. I’ve just had the best night I’ve ever had in my life in a club. Fuck. I think I broke my leg but I don’t give a shit. I’m going back in now…” I laughed and really wanted to check them out, and the rest is history.
3. DJ Mix Demos
When I started DJing, mixes were done and recorded live, and were a real test of how a DJ sounded and mixed tunes. Those days are largely over now. Fact: because of technology, a well trained chimpanzee could mix together sixteen records perfectly on Ableton. ALL mixes sound faultless now, so it’s the tracklist that’s key, and that’s what you should be sending out (if you’re sending a CD, make sure the tracklist is on it).
I can look at a list of tunes and imagine the set, I already know it’ll sound good and, again, few of us have the time to go through and listen to all the DJ mixes we’re sent. Just consider the mathematics again, even a modest ten mixes in a week adds up to ten hours or more. Where am I going to find another ten hours?!
Best thing is to accompany your tracklist with a track you’ve made, or a remix, or a mash-up, or battle-weapon. These reveal much more. Sure, send a full mix CD or a link to a mix with the tracklist if you insist, but it’s that list that’ll tell me, at least, what kind of ‘selector’ you are and what vibe you’re going for. And that will tell me whether I should be investigating your stuff any more.
4. Packaging demos
I touched on this in my ‘Top 20 Pet Hates’ earlier in the year. When you send a demo to someone who gets two heaving santa-sacks of blisterpacks each week, resist the temptation to wrap miles of parcel tape (or sometimes even Gaffa tape – for fuck’s sake! GAFFA TAPE?!) around them. It takes about four hours just to open the normal envelopes, before I’ve started listening, so a mummified envelope isn’t going to make me want to play you, it’s going to make me want to KILL you.
5. Check
It’s such a no brainer this, but I have to bring it up because EVERY week, without fail, I’ll get at least two or three CDs that are either unburned, unverified or just a period of recorded silence. CHECK your CDs before they go out.
6. Labelling Stuff
Of course, more and more bands and DJs are choosing the internet as a way of distributing music to radio DJs and the like, and that’s fine. The equivalent of the mummified envelope in this scenario is the poorly labelled MP3. When I have a download spurt, picture this: I’ve got ten downloads happening simultaneously. Each one eventually pops up as an icon on my desktop. If that icon says, simply, ’01.Master’ then how the fuck am I supposed to know who it’s by and what it is?
Even the track name is barely enough – ie put your name and the track name in the file name, make sure you include as much meta-data as you can when you create the MP3, and, if it’s on CD, make sure you put a copy in iTunes and enter all the artist and track info, that way it might reach my iTunes via the wonder of the net.
If you don’t? Well, OK, I can weed through everything in my inbox again, and track down the info you put in the body of the email, if I have TIME. But when do I have time? I remember once getting a file called ’03SexBomb’. I liked it. But I didn’t play it because I hadn’t a clue who it was by. I found out, weeks or months after the fact, that it was my pal Adam Freeland who had sent it, and it was his mix of Spinerette. It happens to the best of us. But don’t let it happen to your demo track!
7. Listen link
We’re getting so many downloads now and the law of averages ensure that most of them are unsupported and a waste of hard-disc space. It is SO USEFUL having the ability to LISTEN rather than DOWNLOAD a tune first. FatDrop and Share are great services for that, if you’re a label. Soundcloud if you’re on more of a budget.
8. And finally
Don’t worry too much about the packaging, the pic, the bio, that really expensive CD housing and colour co-ordinated press release: in my experience they are the sign of desperation. 99 times out of 100 the really well packaged demo CDs I get are from well meaning managers or, more usually, nice people in country cottages masquerading as band management and wanting to break into the industry as much as the band. Cream does rise to the top and the bottle it comes in is no reflection of it’s quality.
Dan Le Sac gave me a CD-R and handwritten letter, on literally, a dog eared scrap of notepad. So did Hadouken. I loved and played them both at the time. Kasabian’s now legendary demo came as a blank CD-R with one word – Kasabian – handwritten on the top, in between two square pieces of white card, held together by an elastic band. One song. One fucking brilliant song, as it happened. Scissor Sisters: Handwritten CD-R, three tracks, all really different. None of the above had PR blurb, bios, pics, nothing. If it’s that good, it doesn’t need ANYTHING (except the tracklists and artist names, remember!). It is what it is. A brilliant demo CD. That’s the starting point, and the finish line.
In an industry full of snakes, sharks, users and fiends, there are big hearted people like Marsha, easily contactable, easily approachable, to help with feedback, pointers and constructive criticism. Just please consider the above and be considerate. Good luck and I sincerely hope that somebody reading this will send me an easily openable, shit-looking CD, with a nice little human note and it turns out to be the work of a (YET ANOTHER) band that go on to headline festivals. Over to you…
eddy X
Eddy Says from this edition of the CMU Remix Update.
