Marketing our music
When compiling presentations at 3am for the Scots Trad Music Awards you become very aware of the parallels between media no-how and successful genres within trad music. The likes of Gaelic song and folk bands have in the main a very good web presence and it is easy to get info (pictures, audio files) of artists when you need it. This is a great resource for newspapers, promotors etc and enables these entities to promote and engage with these scenes.
The reason I am writing this blog is more about the genres that are not doing this and the parallels with their lack of publicity/success. The areas that jumped out at me were Scots Song, Scottish Dance Bands and to a lesser extent Strathspey and Reel Societies. In my opinion these 3 genres are struggling to make any headway in encouraging folks to come out and listen, join in, buy CDs etc and while the web is not the be and end all, it is definitely a very good start to raising public profile.
It seems to me that hardly anyone is bothering to sort this side of operations out. It is very important that the scenes survive in Scottish music as they have so much to offer our culture. In my opinion we are now at the emergency stage of saving these genres and it has to come down to individuals wanting it. We need to see band leaders, singers, organisations all creating proper websites for themselves, using the likes of myspace, YouTube to get the word out. It is so easy nowadays to do this with not a lot of knowledge. I suppose though even if it did take a lot of learning we need people to get off their backsides and read a manual on how to upload to the web. There should be a whole network of Scots songs websites which possibly could be coordinated through the Traditional Music and Song Association, a network of Scottish Dance Band coordinated through the National Association of Accordion and Fiddle Clubs/ Royal Scottish Country Dance Society) sites all with photos, audio files, biogs. Lets promote these guys or they're going to disappear.
Strathspey and Reel Societies don't even have a national association which shares news between them. They have a few websites but no real unity.
In the end it has to come to down to the community - can they be bothered or are they happy for it to die out. I hope that there are folks out there that don't feel out and will embrace the opportunities that are in front of them.
I've started a discussion about this on Foot Stompin'
