Feelin' Groover

I’ve done a "thing".

Disappointed (to seriously understate the unravelling of a 35-year-long assault on Mount “Music Career”) with the dwindling response rate of my promotion campaigns for recent Bikini Test Failure releases, I was delighted last month, (December 2022) to bring the year to a close and begin the new one, with some rare and unexpected musical “success”.

As you know, since relaunching myself after a decade-long break, just as the pandemic hit in 2020, I’ve struggled to find the best balance between promotional effort and tangible or noticeable reward as I’ve painfully extracted songs from my soul, at a rate your average racing snail or blood-donating stone would scoff at, before letting them loose on a howlingly indifferent world.

My carefully tended and constantly updated mailing list of global radio stations, DJs, shows, bloggers, magazines and playlisters numbers about 1800. And where once I’d receive near that number of replies to my personalised emails, I’m now lucky to achieve a hundred positive outcomes, hence these days I choose the easy life and just keep in touch with those hundred “friends”.

The lives of such people (as with all of us) must have changed enormously in the twenty years since an email-offer from me, to mail you a copy of my latest CD single, contained any novelty or provoked any desire.

Spotify’s 100k new uploads per day must by now have made my recipients’ inboxes unnavigable. And whilst I assume song “quality” has always varied, the redundancy of the compact disc medium removed what was for many an insurmountable hurdle to getting their music out there. Couple that with everyone’s iPhone now containing a Neve 8048-with-full-recall and every bus-stop-whistled-demo can become a Jacob Collier-esque production built by thumbs alone, by the time said whistler gets their morning cappu-frappa-cino en route to their desk at the call-centre (or wherever people work these days) and "You're just a drop in the ocean, Sunshine!" doesn't begin to cover it.

The excellent CD Baby DIY Musician podcast, usually a source of warm, communal support, and occasionally career-bending enlightenment, recently mentioned they had partnered with Paris-based promotions company, Groover and gave them a glowing review. 

Since hiring pluggers and publicists back in the late-1990s, to visit radio stations and music journalists in person, clutching a bagful of my singles (imagine that!) I’ve not spent a penny on “promo”. “Facebook ads” and “Twitter boosts” seem ridiculous by comparison with a full-page advert in the old NME.

But Groover is a cut-above, reminding me of those old-fashioned publicists, people who knew people you didn’t or couldn’t know. They have set themselves up in that most-vital of roles in such a free-for-all, vanity-, dream-, whim- and delusion-led non-business-business as today’s self-released music world: a Gatekeeper.

If I email a Midwest-living, teenaged indie playlister with half-a-million followers and ask them to consider my new track, I don’t get past their spam filter (if I can even locate their email address.) If I pay Groover a couple of Euros to contact them for me, I will get a reply (often within the hour!) And if not an offer to add my music, then at worst a very kind and detailed opinion of the song, production, emotional content, voice, lyrical humour, you-name-it, and exactly why they won’t be sharing it. How wonderful.

For an old-timer like me, used to personal, ongoing chats with similar-era radio DJs and Music Directors around the world, this resumption in communication has felt like a new lease of life. And, because I like to think my music IS worth playing to the world, lo and behold, I'm delighted to find a significant number of these new-media-folk agree! The previous release (“Nip And Tuck”) struggled to reach triple figures of streams, radioplays and playlists. The latest (“But I Still Love You”) has rocketed (by my standards) straight into four figures, back to the level at which I felt most comfortable and fulfilled ten and twenty years ago, when I’d happily spend a few thousand quid mailing my CD albums and promo sheets out to anyone who wanted one. 

What happens to my music once the few hundred approving “influencers” I’ve now contacted through Groover get hold of it, is out of my hands; they may have thousands of followers, readers or listeners, but will those people “engage” in turn? I find myself not really caring. For now, I’ve found my audience in Groover’s “curators”. And through them, both vindication and reward for continuing to produce and release music.