If you’re a musician from time to time you’ll get approached by a company, more often than not some sort of plugging or promotions company, saying that they like one of your tracks.  In fact like it so much that they’d love to work with you to promote it and they offer their services, for a sizeable fee of course.

There are many unscrupulous characters in the music business, so today a bit of advice on how to spot them.

As a general rule of thumb, reputable companies offering services to generally don’t approach artists (it’s the other way round!). If someone contacts you offering to promote you, plug your music, get you gigs or some sort of media placement for your music then you should generally avoid them.

Any service offering a ‘submission process’ to scrutinise or evaluate your work is often a warning also. Management or agents will generally take a commission on future earnings and should never ask for money upfront.

If at any point you do feel as though you want to work with any promotions, plugging or external marketing companies look at their roster of clients on their websites and contact those artists asking them a simple question “I’m thinking of using this company…would you recommend them?”.

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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