624669 Bands Are Getting Free Promotion- Yours Should Be Too.
In the before-time, when you could step out on any evening of the week and go and take in a show, marketing a band was largely down to putting in the hours behind the instruments and playing. There were other tricks, but really, playing as often as possible and to as many people as possible was the key.
In the time of the COVID wastelands, that’s not an option for most of us. It’s hard to play shows when all the venues are closed (there’s currently less than 10% of the live music going on than there was in February and a lot of that is in restaurants) and there’s a very limited number of slots available on the livestreams.
Even in the places that have re-opened, things are eerily quiet.
Fortunately, there is something you can be doing to get ready for your triumphant return to the stage. And it’s free!
Hearby want you to sign up to their service. It’s totally free, there’s no weird catches and it doesn’t matter how ‘big’ your band is- they want to promote you. For free, gratis, nada, nowt, zilch, nothing. All it takes is 5 minutes to fill out a form and in return, you get access to a worldwide audience.
I know, I know, “no weird catches” definitely means there’s a weird catch, right? You’re thinking “No one does anything for free”? Well, let me tell you a bit about it.
Hearby is an AI driven, socially curated music discovery platform. That means they send the robots out to trawl the internet for events and then present them to their users who make recommendations to other users. To give you an idea about just how effective they are at this, they’ve discovered 624669 bands and 4885 venues so far.
Even in what has been effectively a year with no live music, they’ve managed to find and promote 92931 shows in the 20 biggest cities in the US alone.
Not a single venue, musician or music fan has paid a penny for any of this and they never will. They’ve got no interest in taking a cut from your ticket sales or from behind the bar.
The founders, Gary and Ian, along with everyone who works with them are, first and foremost, music fans. They want to get back to gigging just as much as you do and that’s the whole ethos behind Hearby.
Rather than trying to sell users a ticket or charging bands and venues for promotion, or relying on advertising to fund their efforts, Hearby sells their listings to businesses who want to be the first to tell people about what’s going on. That means local papers, travel operators, hotels- anyone with an interest in keeping music fans informed.
Think about it- which hotel are you most likely to stay at- the one that can tell you what’s going on in minute detail or the one that can’t? Which paper’s app are you going to subscribe to- the one who can tell you about literally every gig in the city or the one which can’t? There’s value in connecting people with knowledge of something as impenetrable as a music scene.
They also put all this info out for free to gig goers- the logic being the more people who’re excited about going out, the more the information about going out is worth to the people who pay.
So, what do you get for your investment of 5 minutes filling in a form?
In short- free promotion. You can link up a Spotify playlist, tell them about any shows the robots missed and tell people about your sound and let people know when you’re playing.
Everyone’s welcome; from 4 guys taking their first steps out of the garage and on to a stage to people who’ve been packing stadiums for 20 years. Your band might already have been discovered by the AI, so all you need to do is fill out a few details.
It works like a combination between an old fashioned record shop and a dedicated street team. People can scroll through carousels, check out playlists of anything they like the look of and find out when you’re playing next.
The absolute best thing about this is that the more of you who sign up, the better it works for everyone involved and the more it can help live music bounce back. Let everyone know they can find you there and they’ll help promote you and all the other local acts they love and hopefully, you’ll get a few more people right down at the front of your next show.
