Recording - October 2010 - 55

folks, unfortunately. If you’re committed, you’re gonna have to walk the walk. Ariel: Really good points, you guys. At my company we do two things. We are a PR firm, and we do place our musicians online, on blogs and podcasts, and radio stations. I read thousands of blogs so you don’t have to, and I can cut through the noise and help you get placed. But the only type of client we will take on is a type of client who is willing to understand that when I go away and I’m no longer your publicist for the three or four months that you’ve retained me, the Internet goes on. So this goes back to that conversation of like, “I just hate this so much, I want someone else

Continued from page 52 their clients. Most of my clients who have testimonials on my website also link to their website, and you can contact them and ask them how they liked working with me. A lot of my clients have done that in the past and have talked to future clients and given them feedback. So interview them and do your research. Do your due-diligence. Bob: To be honest, my primary role is as an author, a speaker, a teacher and a book publisher. I feel that that’s how I best serve the musician and the artist community, so I don’t do a whole lot of service work. When I do, it’s usually short-term stuff where I’m brainstorming with people, helping them clarify their identity and who their ideal fans are, and how to

to do it.” I can read all the blogs for you, I can get you some very important placements online, but the truth is, what feeds all of online publicity is social media. So if you flatout refuse to participate on Facebook or on Twitter, if you refuse to update your website so that it works in a way that’s having a twoway conversation with your audience, you are a terrible client for me. We have plenty of artists that hire me to do that stuff, and we’ll do it well for three months, and you’ll end up dying in obscurity as everyone else catches on to how to use these things. So my ideal client—and we work with every genre, every level, independent, signed, small, big, everything—is the type of client who says, “OK, I don’t understand exactly how to use all these things, but I’m willing to learn.”

“Become a consumer of the technology before you use it as a promotional tool.” –Bob Baker
communicate that. I do some of that on a limited basis, but what I would recommend, since I know a lot of people are all confused by this whole marketing thing—particularly Internet marketing. Everybody just wants to delegate it and just want to find someone to do all that stuff for them. What I would recommend is, the earlier on you are in your career—and I’ve been preaching this do-it-yourself, kind of selfempowerment message for many years—I think you should try to do as much of it as you can as early on as possible, if, for no other reason, to become—in the same way you become a consumer before you’re a user of a technology—you also want to become an educated entrepreneur and understand what the person you’re going to be delegating it to, what they go through, what’s involved in those things. So I really recommend that you try to do as much as you can yourself. And your reason for delegating shouldn’t be because you’re tired of this—the same reason you wouldn’t pursue a manager because you’re wallowing in obscurity—you pursue those things because you can no longer handle the workload. You’re having success on your own; it’s time to delegate, and those are the best reasons for it. You’ve been doing it yourself, you understand the ropes, you know the qualifications of the person, and then you can hand it off to somebody. That’s my two cents. Tony: Great point, Bob. So many artists want a manager just because they don’t want to make the calls. And nobody is as vested in your career as you are. And if you’re not interested enough to do this as a second fulltime job after your day job is done, the odds are going to be really long,
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Recording - October 2010

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