Your Band's Best Friend

Photo by: Frank Douwes

For many questions, there are hard and fast answers.  However, the trend lately for more and more areas of the industry is to figure out what works best for you and just do it. How do you figure out what’s best? Simple: experimentation.

The release cycle (record, pre-release promotion, release, tour) is often seen as a hard and fast successful way of climbing the ladder.  However, I would suggest that even elements in this area can be altered to suit your own needs.

For example: You’ve released an EP, a second EP, and then a full-length record.  Who’s to stop you from going back to the first EP and doing a video for one of the songs?  The answer: nobody.

Labels and press will consider older releases to be ‘dead’ or ‘catalogue,’ but that doesn’t mean that you have to.  Your body of work can (and should) remain active, not only in the live performance sense but in the promotional sense too.  Asking press to cover an old release probably won’t work out for you, but you can still promote it in your own way.

Hard and fast rules do exist, but in today’s climate, where you have all of the tools at your disposal, nobody can say that doing things differently is the ‘wrong’ way to go.

So break the rules.  Be an outlaw. You may just find success as the new town Sheriff.

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This post originally appeared on MicControl.com