Getting in touch with labels

While most people think that at an early stage (first few months) in an artist or bands career it would be fruitless to contact the major labels, I think the opposite.

You should be contacting the big labels as soon as you have a decent product i.e a good single or recorded track. Once you have that it will open many doors for you and I'll go into detail in a later post on how to take advantage of your first single but for now I'll concentrate on the label side.

I'm a strong believer of getting yourself out there and networking and that is exactly what sending your music to labels is, networking.

While you should keep in the back of your mind that it is extremely unlikely for you to get a record deal at this early stage, you should email all the labels you can.
I have also found that when sending out loads of speculative emails (more on communication and how to email will follow too!) it is generally the bigger labels that will reply to you and not the smaller labels.
This is good, because you are getting peoples names, and peoples names in this business can get you far.
For example if you have a big show coming up in a major city and you call up the record label (For this instance let's say Universal) to see if anyone can attend your gig, this is probably how the conversation will go:
You: "Oh hi, I'm just calling up to see if anyone is available to come to our show this weekend at *name venue here*?"
Them: Ok cool, which label did you want to be put through to?
You: Universal......
Them: Yes but which sub label?

(Ahhh... yes... the big labels have loads of smaller labels under their name.)

You: Oh, Mercury records please.
Them: Sure, no problem... who did you want me to put you through to?

This is where the phone call totally deteriorates because you don't know anyone at the label and most of the time they won't put you through to A&R unless you have crazy people skills.

However, if you are emailing the labels and calling to follow up, the chances are that you are going to get an email back probably saying "no" BUT you'll have somebody's name!
This is incredibly valuable to bands starting to build a buzz and will save you so much time in the future.
 The same goes with Radio Stations (I'll do a whole article to cover radio also!).

Another benefit of doing this is that your building a relationship with the label people and say in a years time when you have a killer EP/Album and a huge following you can call up that label and say "Hi Jane, it's me from that band, would you come to our album release show, it's sold out but I've kept you a ticket?" instead of beginning to send out speculation emails at that point.

This is exactly what happened to one of the bands I managed before, they emailed record labels from a very early point and got loads of "no" emails but more importantly got loads of names.
They used those names to get through to people and to get people down to shows to watch and built a relationship with them and less than a year later they were signed to Sony after having 3 other labels interested.