Submissions and Widgets

Hello,

As we approach the 3000 mark I thought it would be a good time to talk on the method of submitting your material.

Firstly, especially over the past two months, the quality of submissions has been excellent resulting in representatives from A&R listening to many tracks and seeing artists live as a result. We are currently looking at several artists who we feel have potential.

When creating your blog it is important to know how to best present your material. Many of you are using your blog as a promotional tool of your work and to help build your online presence. In doing this attracting the attention of the labels. When doing this, regular posts are essential with new content added all the time. Be this new tracks, rehearsal/live video or interviews etc. These create the most interesting style of blog and often build a solid subscribership quite easily which can create a 'buzz' around your work. Adding neighbours and contacting other Vox users is the easiest way to build your own community.

If you're main motivation is to access the ears of those within the labels the most important thing to consider is the quality of the material you're submitting. Don't send a message to the label asking for someone to listen, but also say "I'm still working on this" or "With real money this will sound great". Only submit what you feel is your best work that you're 100% proud of. This doesn't necessarily mean the production has to be flawless. Once you feel that your potential submission is representative of what you can achieve then upload as soon as you can.

Once uploaded, your tracks are available in the central A&R area where the new submissions are listened to. It's easy for us to listen to each track and visit the blog of those which catch our attention. This is when first impressions are important. Often we will visit a blog on the strength of a track and there is nothing there, except that track. The very minimum contents of your blog should be:

Audio - Some people don't upload before contacting us, do this first.
Info on yourself - This could be in the 'About Me' section or simply a post summing up. Give details of what you've achieved in the past. Maybe people you've worked with, radio, big gigs etc.
Pictures - It's nice to know what you look like :-)

Please don't simply register a blog and send a message along the lines of "Check out Myspace - www..." with nothing on your blog. The main reason for us using this platform is so we can quickly go through new submissions, review them internally and use the tools that are available to us. Directing to external sites wont allow us to do this. However, please do incorporate your myspace or any of your other sites into the 'My Links' section, in addition to your populated blog. That way we can access more information about you and use the platform internally.

Finally, regarding comments on material. We launched this for demo submissions through a community rather than a feedback/critique site. Take a look at the FAQ we released at the start of this project for further details which can also be accessed via RCA's and Columbia's landing pages. We can quickly access and listen to new submissions whilst having a simple way of contacting the artist. Plus we can easily forward material around internally. We do comment on where we can but currently it's impossible for us to comment on every track submission as we want to spend as much time going through the new material as we can.

Quick tip on embed's

It is now possible to add third party embeddable widgets in your sidebar aswell as your posts. So if you wish to add a hit counter to monitor traffic, slideshows, other media players etc you can do this here. This can help you monitor traffic and also encourage further interaction with your blogs.

New Additions:

A Grazr widget has been added to the sidebar so you can explore some of our other staff blogs. The additional links section also includes some of the artists we've been listening to recently.

thanks

RCAD