1,000 WORDS PUBLISHED

So the idea behind this experiment was to write my own press release about the 10,000 project, hopefully make it interesting and convince journalists to write about it over the 12 week period! All the experiments in the project are based on aspects of the music industry, so this one was all about PR skills and the task that is learning what to target, who to target and how to target them.

I hadn't used a PR company for any of my releases so I took the risk of doing this launch again myself plus the budget wasn't there anyways so I had to make the best with my own literacy skills. I had written press releases for the first three singles and 'Dance With Me' managed to get on 'TV3' and 'RTE Radio 1' so I knew I obviously wasn't that bad at writing my own! My leaving cert English teacher Mr.Murray would be proud. Although, don't ask me anything about Shakespeare. 'King Lear' tortured me for my leaving cert. My answer to that part of the leaving cert paper was 'nothing can come of nothing!!'

I scheduled a few different press releases over the course of the project. However, the great news was that the first press release I sent out managed to find it's way onto a few newspapers including The Argus, The Newry Reporter, The Drogheda Independent, The Wexford people among more and the 1,000 words published experiment was met within the first two weeks of the project going live! I didn't continue to add up the words once I went over the 1,000 marks, which I probably should have done but as soon as I had that experiment in the bag, I just left it and moved on..

This was actually the easiest experiment overall. 1,000 words is actually a small amount of words in terms of newspaper articles but in saying that, it was the concept of the experiment that made journalists interested and one thing I always bleat on about is the 'thinking outside the box' side of the industry. So many bands and artists are out there doing pretty much the same thing, hoping to get picked up by management or a label so the problem is trying to stand out. I come up with ideas all the time. Some are crazy, some are great. I get dissappointed when the ideas I get that I think are great, don't come to be because I am not physcially able to manage the project on my own or the financial costs of it are too much. So you have to decide what's 'do-able'. At times, this whole project got too big for me but in saying that, a lot of it was achieved and it was a lot of fun.

Special thanks to Margaret Roddy, Martin Hearty and Jim Hayes who were the first journalists to get straight in there and write about the project.

1,000 FACEBOOK LIKES

 

Ok so this would seem relatively easy too to achieve. I made a decision when I set this target to try and get the 'likes' in a genuine way, as in not paying FB for ads etc. Apparently the correct term for that I have learned is 'organic' likes.

I have an official singer/songwriter page as well as a personal account on FB. So my challenge was to build 1,000 new FB page likes and use the page more than I use my personal account. When I set the challenge I had 840 likes on my page. It currently stands at 899 which is a fairly miserable increase of 59. Long way off 1,000.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting the result to be so poor. The week that I started the experiments was the first week that I noticed people posting about changes to FB pages and that in order for you to be successful with your page, you had to pay for ads. Well, I'd agree to some extent, I probably could have popped a few quid in the FB advertising accounts and bought myself some extra likes. But I also know that I didn't spend enough time myself. I mean, you really need to be on your page everyday posting events, links, videos, sharing the page on all the other sites you have.. twitter, reverbnation, bandcamp, soundcloud and really focussing your attention on increasing that number.

So this experiment, out did me. I wasn't expecting to have to put much time and effort into it and definitely underestimated how difficult it would be! I have learned through this experiment that the social media end of promoting your acts requires a plan of action, a disciplined routine and perhaps a person to actually work on this on your behalf.

Chat soon xx

1,000 YOU TUBE SUBSCRIPTIONS

I might as well have been looking into a ditch

Result: Fail

Grade: Disastrously

What I learned: I am useless at utilising YouTube..

1,000 BROADCAST MINUTES

This was a risky one by all means. 1,000 minutes of broadcast time is the equivilent of 16.66' hours. I had also given myself the added challenge of setting a timeline of 12 weeks. Basically I was relying on any kind of radio or tv plays of my music and included any live interviews/performances too.

So how did I do????? Well I have to be honest and say that although I knew it was going to be tough, I had a really good feeling and yes I met the challenge. It's mid October now and whilst it doesn't count anymore, I have over 1,500 minutes of airplay accumulated. I had just over 1,000 at the end of the 12th week.

So how did I monitor it? Well the lovely people at Nielsen music were very helpful in getting me set up with them so that any plays of my music on regional or national radio are automatically registered. So each day I was able to go into my account and check if my songs had been played, where they had been played and I rounded each play off at 3 minutes although all of my songs actually last around 3'20 or 3'30. NIELSEN MUSIC

The long and short of it is that there are some seriously supportive radio stations in Ireland, who are only too happy to play unsigned acts and will do their upmost to get them heard. I have to say a very special thank in particular to the following stations. There were many stations involved but the following few had an enormous impact:
C103 www.c103.ie
LMFM www.lmfm.ie
SOUTH EAST RADIO www.southeastradio.ie
DUNDALK FM www.dundalkfm.com
NORTHERN SOUND/SHANNONSIDE www.northernsound.ie
GALWAY BAY FM http://www.galwaynews.ie/galwaybayfm

There is an ongoing argument about the lack of support on Irish radio for Irish acts. I don't want to go too heavily into it here, other than to say that I of course agree there are many stations who could be doing a lot more than they are. However, I also believe that you shouldn't focus on what's not being done, but rather what is being done and who is doing it. Get to know the radio stations, get to know the dj's and you will find that they usually want to help out. Sometimes, the powers that be don't give individial dj's a chance to play what they want so get to know those who can play what they want and take it from there!

Before I go, I just want to mention IASCA www.iasca.ie  who have a PLAY IRISH initiative that is really worth checking out if you are an Irish singer/songwriter or band.

Chat soon xx

1,000 KILOMETRES

So one of my experiments was to travel 1,000 kilometres promoting the release of the EP. This was a relatively simple experiment and we had it covered within days rather than weeks. I didn't include my trip to London, thought that would be cheating but great too that I did get to the UK as part of the promoting tour.

It really isn't all that hard to cover 1,000 kilometres. I travelled mostly by van to places including Dublin, Cork, Wexford, Tipperary, Athlone, Monaghan, Cavan, Meath, Westmeath among more. Being on the road is great in so many ways. The opportunity to meet and perform for people and to just to get out of the house and away from behind the computer. The downside of it of course is the expense. It cost hundreds of euro to visit those towns and the sales of CD's never quite cover the long journey expenses. There were also nights that we had to stay over so we had to fund accommodation ourselves too. One trip in particular saw us travel from Dublin to Cork then on to Wexford and back to Dundalk in the SAME day!! Most venues don't pay original artists to play, which is without question a bone of contention with me now considering the fact that so many people have told me that in other European countries, they are very good at looking after the artists financially.

Anyways, I did enjoy my 1,000 kilometres experiment despite the cost of it! I enjoyed passing through the counties and seeing a bit of Ireland and saying things like, "well at least we got the good roads of the the celtic tiger". My highlight of being on the road was finding myself doing my make up in some stop off garage on the way, grabbing a wee roll and a cuppa to keep you going on the next leg and tuning into all the different radio stations passing through the counties. It's probably those times that will mean a lot in the future.. good times indeed!

And we smashed the experiment with over 2,000 kilometres travelled in the end..