Getting Music Reviews

Organize Your Review Campaign
I’m not going to talk about actual print reviews, but you can pretty much follow a similar idea. Find out where your favorite indie bands were reviewed and consider carefully whether it may be worth it to send them a package by reading the actual magazine or zine.

Now that you’ve gotten your list of music review places to send to, you want to organize your review campaign. There are a couple of really important things to keep in mind when sending out CDs for review. Most important is that the “lead time”, or the time between you sending out your CD and a review appearing, can be enormous for music. Many review sites will actually state the approximate amount of time it will take. Add about 1 month or so at least to that. Much of it can also depend on luck.

In any case, you need to time your reviews so that they hopefully coincide with your actual “public” release date, radio airplay push, and promotional campaigns. Don’t expect a review site to turn around and hand in a review in a week. That’s rarely going to happen. I’ve found that in many cases it is a good idea to send out a CD THREE or FOUR months in advance of your push date. Hopefully, you will get some of the reviews back a little early. But many sites, especially the smaller ones who concentrate on unsigned bands, will have a longer lead time.

I had said that you might want to have a spreadsheet with all your reviewing information in it. Well, you can also add a couple of things to that when you are sending out packages: Date Sent, Date Checked, and Date Reviewed. The first and third are obvious and useful to have. It is good to keep track of when every package was sent so that you can see how much time has elapsed. This will also tell you when it might be time to send a friendly “just checking the status of” email out. Remember to note which sites actually allow you to send them emails of this nature because many don’t want to be bothered with that!

So “Date Checked” is sort of an optional thing I came up with… the problem is that not every website will contact you when a review has gone up. You could easily just Google your band name and the word “review” to try and find them all, but this doesn’t always work and plus Google Search has a lag that is different for every site. So, if the list of review sites is “manageable”, you may want to actually visit every review site once a week or so to see if you’ve been reviewed. “Date Checked” can be your reminder that it’s time to visit a particular site again.

Why would you want to know the instant a music review of yours has gone up? Well, review sites are constantly changing as new reviews are put up and old ones move toward the bottom of the list. It can be pretty nice to “screenshot” a picture of the review site with the picture of your own CD featured on it! You can put the screenshot on your own site, or print it out. But to catch your CD on the site, you may have to know the exact day or week when it is featured. Hence, you’ll have to check the site frequently.

Hopefully, these tips for getting online reviews will help you out the next time you’re sending out your CD to different places. Good luck!

Please note that all of the articles on this site are © Shoe-n-Tell.com - All Rights Reserved.

You may not reprint any of these articles or any significant portion of them unless previously given permission by Palebear.com. However, you may quote and cite the article just as you would for a normal publication, in accordance with the provisions of Fair Use. If you do quote the article, you must include a direct link (no redirects) back to the palebear.com site along with your quote or citation.