Thursday, October 20, 2011

Dear Musicians, Agents, and Other Industry Types Who Claim To Read Our Blog:

We write pieces about whatever we feel like and we post mp3s in support of those pieces. In fact, 98% of the time, there is some connection, however tenuous, between what we have written and what music we have posted.

Right now, we are celebrating "Rocktober," keeping our focus on musical trends and acts, past and present. We understand that you are looking for exposure, for yourself, your band, your client. We are interested in people reading our blog. So, we have a common interest: your music. We would like to use it, if it is appropriate for us. But that is all.

Here's what we are not interested in:

1. Your latest video, wherever it may appear.
2. Your song, available for listening in a way that is not friendly to what I just said (Soundcloud without download and all of that) or difficult to get to. We post mp3s; if you send them to us, we assume that it is because you want us to post them.
3. Your tour dates.
4. Your contests. And please don't tell us how sexy we are in order to get us to listen to your stuff. We already know that.
5. Any other information about you are artist or you as someone who represents an artist. Ok, maybe a little bit of who you are.
6. Any spin, as in who you think you sound like or who your musical heroes are.

We have writing ideas, however feeble those might be sometimes, and we try to use songs that support, illuminate, even ironically undercut those ideas. Sometimes we (especially Billy) will post a whole bunch of the songs that you have sent us. We would not post your song if we did not like it. If we do not post your song, it does not mean that we do not like it. You may have caught us at a bad time. We are amateurs. We have jobs. However, please know that it is your song that we are interested in.

We are not interested in what you look like, though we wish you the best.

We are not interested in your promo package. We probably are not interested in where you are from. We are probably not interested in your tour, unless you are coming to our area (the Southeast) and you would like us to come see your show, preferably for free if you want us to write about it. We will make an effort to do that; Billy has done it. It was weird for him, because we are guys who like to write about everything. We tend to be more social critics than music critics.

Nevertheless, we do have strong opinions about music. We have listened to a lot of music and we continue to listen to music, so we take any "professional" critics with a grain or two of salt. Probably, we have over 70 years of listening seriously and fanatically to popular music. If you send us music (in the form of mp3s), we will do our best to judge it on its own merits. We do not have any particular bias against any particular kind of music.

Our Ipods and Iphones and our computers have a lot of memory and are loaded with many songs, the vast majority of which we have purchased. If we do work for your song, in the form of writing and/or posting, then we may keep a digital copy of your song for our own listening pleasure. That seems like a fair trade; we do not make any money maintaining this blog and it is exhausting to try to sort through all of the mail that we receive, much of it not relevant to what kind of presence we have developed over the last 3 1/2 years.

We do not like to be the victims of mass marketing or junk mail any more than you do.

If you truly are a "fan" of Bottom Of The Glass, as so many of your emails suggest, then you will send us an email with a brief introduction and an mp3 or two attached. You will have sent it because you have checked out our blog and gotten some sense of what kinds of music we like. Rocktober is an especially good time to do that.

That's it. We will do our best from here. Thank you and Happy Rocktober!

Sincerely,

Bob and Billy
@bottomoftheglass

P.S. It took sifting through well over 100 emails to find this sweet little track:

Chris Cubeta and The Liars' Club--"All We Are" (mp3)

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