Sending demo CD's?

This is for the users on the forum who are already signed with labels, purely out of interest for future reference...
Before you guys got signed how many labels did you send your CD to? Did you just choose a few that you thought fit with your style or did you do mass mailing?!

Secondly, when you're sending demos to labels do you just export your mix and burn it straight to CD, or should you try & master it yourself?
Also, do people send individual tracks, a full albums worth of stuff, or just a disc with two or three of your best tunes on?

Would be interesting to get some tips and to see how other people go about it :cheese:

record labels are generally there to push their music in a certain direction, hence the existance of genre but there are some generic rules which you should follow when sending a demo.

Ensure your contact details are on the disc and the accompanying documentation

You should master your music but only for the following:

Normalising tracks to the same volume is a good start, jumps in volume from track to track dont sound good.

what format do you want to release on? Digital or Vinyl? Sales are not as good as they were in the past on Vinyl (someone may correct me here..)

Mastering for vinyl should really only be done by the mastering engineer for vinyl as its more specialised that standard 'at home' type of mastering such as using Izotope Ozone etc.

As a label i would like to see the following from potential artists:

Quality music, good solid production values.
Some kind of background information about the artist - have they done anything before now that can be used for promotional purposes?
Do they offer anything new or interesting or is their music a good solid example of a genre such as minimal or electro house.

Are you sending the music to a 'Vanity Label' i.e a label setup to serve only the label owners desire for self promotion or has the label got a track record of signing artists because they make good music?

Ideally your would need to include a good spread of your own music with perhaps remixes as well. Name remixers can often mean the difference between signing music and not. Named remixers sell music far more easily than no-name no-history artists.

Can you get in touch with the label owner easily and are they sympathetic to your music desires? are they prepared to negotiate on contract? What are the potential terms of the contract - copyright retention by the artists and effectively licensing the tracks for a specified period of time. A common term is 5 years although some labels may want to sign for life. Are they prepared to help you succeed, rather than dismissing offhand anything you send?

Advances are not easily gained and usually only appear after it is obvious that the artists output is selling well enough to take a hit on future tracks.

There are a million and one digital labels out there (r3tox digital being one of them) and you are going to have to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff in this respect. Look at who the label distributes through.

Im not brilliantly clued up on vinyl labels but one of the common models in the recent past has been Publishing and Distribution deals through the distributors , these have had a bad name mainly due to the rip-off merchants that were taking all they could get from artists in terms of percentages. BUT - they had a defined pathway to the retailers and an existing promotional structure which meant more rapid sales.

there's a lot digging to do!

I bet people want to add to this.. i hope so anyway!

probably an obvious one

have a chat with the label before you send them anything, you'll find there usually helpful. and can answer any queries you've got.

in my experience there's not many labels who like cold calling, especially if the label is looking to build up a good relationship with its artists.

Im just about to pop out so i dont have time to type out a lengthy reply but there have been some great topics about this on here where a few of us who have been signed have all put our top tips as it where, have a search on here and it should throw up some even more top advice like Chris's