Submission Tips and Hints

We get several submissions every day, but we don’t often have an opportunity to look through the emails we get until perhaps a few days later. So, by the time we start looking through our submissions, we have a lot of bands to check out.

When you send an email submission, you should try to treat it like you’re submitting a résumé for a job opening — the big thing that we want to know is: “What makes your band/album/event/etc. different from the others?” We’re not interested in giving a straight-up bad review, we want to talk about groups and events and albums that are new, unique or creative, and point out things that appeal to us or that we think others would enjoy.

While we can’t make any guarantees that we’ll talk about your band if you follow these steps (they’re purely voluntary and informative), it’ll certainly help us notice your submission. And, the more likely we are to notice your submission, the more likely we are to talk about it. We hope that you find these tips and hints helpful:

Provide some of your hit/best/favorite songs as MP3 attachments.
Pretty much all of them have links to the submitting band’s website, and almost all of them have links to some sample songs. When every email says “Here’s our website, check it out,” with two or three links included, there’s nothing to set you apart since almost all of our emails look exactly the same. While it’s good that many of the emails we receive have links to songs hosted online, there are occasions where we have found an interesting band but the links no longer work for some reason or another. By sending copies of sample songs as attachments (1-3 songs would be best in order to provide some variety of your music), we have a copy we can refer to in the future.

Avoid sending mass-emails with BCC:’d recipients.
In order to keep things organized with our regular day-to-day email, we’ve set up filters to sort any emails for Radio KRUD into separate folders. This way, when we have a chance to check through some of our most recent submissions, we check through this folder to see what’s new. Sometimes, people send out generic, mass-emails (probably to multiple musicblogs) with everybody blind carbon-copied. The problem with this is that any emails we receive this way are a) not addressed to us, and b) have no mention of our musicblog, and so stay mixed in with our regular personal or business email. When we finally come across these messages, the first thing we expect them to be are spam messages that the spam filters didn’t catch. And, if we haven’t deleted it in the first few seconds because of that, then we’re likely to delete or ignore the email since it wasn’t sent to us specifically.