Some words of advice about submitting music to AUK, or indeed anywhere else…
As you can imagine the AUK virtual postbag is always overflowing with emails from artists keen for us to review their new album or EP. Some of the material comes from established music PRs, but just as often we hear from the artist themselves.
So here are some tips based on our experience of receiving music for review, as well as talking to some other people in the “specialist” music world. Thanks to Neil King at Fatea Magazine and Dave Scott and Bruce Mee at Fireworks Rock and Metal for their time and insights.
- Read our submissions page – it’s a clearly written guide to how our review process works. Follow that and you will maximise your chances. But please note the section titled “my album hasn’t been reviewed.” We are here to help you get your music noticed, but AUK’s writers are a small band with real lives, jobs and families. We do this for love, as is common through much of the music-writing world.
- Spotify – Don’t go there, for streams please use Soundcloud or Bandcamp. The exploitative nature of Spotify when it comes to artists in our part of the musical jungle means we don’t use track features from that platform, or anywhere else that only offers 30 second snippets (although we realise it’s one of the formats we offer our monthly playlist on since it’s so widely utilised). You will get better reviews from a download as we get to listen to it in a more “natural” listening environment, but having a stream as well allows albums to be editorially assigned more easily. Now, we understand concerns about security, and for genres such as the Hard Rock that Fireworks covers there are still many sites pirating the material. We are however sent music to help it sell more, so surely it makes sense to put us in the best position to give your songs a favourable review, by letting us listen to it in the best possible environment.
Neil King over at Fatea Magazine doesn’t review recordings where only a stream has been sent and says: “With streaming there seems to be a belief that sending a link to a stream or a link tree, is somehow sending out a track or an album to review. Single tracks are the worst as they often come with no information at all, just some vague hope that you are aware of the artist, some streams and downloads just have the track title and nothing else, this is useless.”
Dave Scott from Fireworks says that “there is a very mixed view on them from both the team as a whole and the editors specifically.” One of the biggest issues for his reviews team is broken links to streams. Another reason to provide a downloadable set of files. Portals like Hightail, or Airplay Direct can be a good way to get a secure platform that can also accept marketing assets like images and text.
- Images and Videos – While we can get away with lower resolution than print magazines there is a limit to how small is usable. At AUK we try to use images at least 600 pixels wide as that gives a consistently high-quality feel to the imagery on the site. Bruce Mee Editor of Fireworks aired his personal bugbear, which is “bands that don’t understand photos MUST be in his-res for a print magazine. The number of times I’ve been sent photos that are only 25-50kb”. Images don’t need to be of a print-magazine resolution for AUK but they do need to be clear and meet our minimum size specs. As a minimum include a high-resolution image of the album cover. Another aspect of imagery that is important is copyright. Using images downloaded from the internet is out. We need to be clear that any images supplied with reviews are not going to bring angry emails from a copyright holder when they appear on AUK.
- Supporting information – At the very least tell us who you are. A one sheet is easy to put together with some of the great free templates available online. Tell us a bit about the music, your influences and how you created it. All this helps us write a review that will interest your potential listeners and persuade them to give your music a try. Avoid using hyperbole – artists being described as “the next Bob Dylan” are more likely to get a writer’s back up than not. Don’t include too much information on the other hand – writers don’t have time to read War and Peace on your entire career to date (sorry).
- Provide your lyrics on demand – you don’t have to send these with your initial pitch but do have them ready to send our writer when they contact you. It makes their job a thousand times easier if they don’t have to work out whether you’re saying “kiss this guy” or “kiss the sky” over 17 double-tracked banjos.
- Spam, Spam, Spam – Neil King of the long established Fatea looks back fondly on the days when submissions came by post on a physical format with plenty of background information. “That changed with the download, the cost of hitting a mailbox was perceived as nothing. Artists and some PR newcomers stopped researching what magazines and radio stations covered what and just sent blanket emails in the hope that something stuck. The good PRs and independent artists continued to send out biographies, release information, links to videos etc, but a lot don’t.” While there are probably AUK writers who appreciate Thrash Metal it isn’t what our readers visit us to learn about, so that, and Hip-Hop only clog up the email box. So please do some research and work out where your music will get a knowledgeable enthusiastic hearing.
The contact page here gives you all the information you need to get in touch with the right section editor. If you want to us to feature a video, then Andrew Frolish is your man. If you have a book to offer for review, then talk to me. But sending albums submissions to the whole writing team will only get a suggestion that you contact the submissions email address. Reviews are allocated randomly so just because I, or Keith or Martin gave you a great review, or indeed a bad one, last time doesn’t mean that we will be given your next one to talk about.
Many email providers, and domain hosts have started to enforce new email authentication standards to slow down the tide of spam emails. To ensure that your email gets to where it is going it is wise to authenticate your website domain, if you have an email address that uses it. Talk to your website provider or email host about this. There are also privacy issues around holding databases of email addresses, but that’s way outside our scope to advise on.
We love to hear new music; it’s why we do this, and the interaction with artists is one of the best parts of writing for AUK. We all love to talk about music and we want you and your PR or management to tell us about your new release so that we can tell the world. The quality of submissions from the professional PRs are almost without exception brilliant. And it’s not hard to offer something as good as an individual artist, which many people do. What we want from you is the material that gives us the information we need to write great reviews.
Songs about reviewing music seem to be a bit thin on the ground. So I had to settle for a song that might be about our inbox, Wilco’s ‘Box Full Of Letters‘
