I received this email from Adam Gorton today.
Andrew,
After reading your personal blog and a selection of your music articles I think you might like the sounds of Melbourne duo The Peep Tempel.
Matt Hickey briefly wrote about this act last month, however I must admit, I did not provide much information about the band when I sent him the track. http://whothehell.net/archives/6035
The Peep Tempel are working with our small label Arbitrage Records and Loud Noise Entertainment and are set to release their debut 7″.
The duo Blake (Guitars/Vocals) and Steve(Drums/Vocals) are set to drop their 7″ - Thank You Machiavelli at the North Melbourne late night institution The Public Bar on Saturday the 7th of November.
I have included a link to both tracks off the 7″ - Thank You Machiavelli & Down at the Peep Tempel, plus a copy of their current press release, for your eyes and ears.
If you like The Peep Tempel’s take on boisterous indie rock and are interested in some more details, or could recommend other music writers who may appreccaite their sounds please drop me an email.
……..enjoy the tracks.
Adam
Arbitrage Records
Adam then linked directly to mp3s, a press release, the 7″ artwork, a hi-res photo of the band, their MySpace, and a music video on Vimeo (embedded below).
Here’s what I did.
- Scanned the email. Appreciated the opening sentence about my writing.
- Noted the reference to Matt Hickey - a friend of mine - and whothehell.net, a site I read regularly.
- Ignored the mp3s, press release etc, and went to the band’s MySpace.
- Played a track Adam mentioned - ‘Thank You Machiavelli’.
- Gave them 30 seconds of my undivided attention.
Dug what I heard.- Clicked through to the Vimeo link Adam sent.
- Started downloading the mp3s while the video loaded. Transferred the files from laptop to desktop computer.
- Watched the video and listened to the tracks a couple of times.
- Wrote this blog post.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Joel Connolly 11.06.09 at 8:53 am
Oh man! For real? Let me dissect for you (because I think you’re the victim of a copy/past email
“Andrew,
After reading your personal blog and a selection of your music articles I think you might like the sounds of Melbourne duo The Peep Tempel.”
OK, so “your personal blog and a selection of your music articles” could be directed at just about anyone worth writing to on the interwebs. What he should have done was make reference to a specific piece of writing and found some way to segue in to his artist. After all, it’s about relationship building.
“Matt Hickey briefly wrote about this act last month, however I must admit, I did not provide much information about the band when I sent him the track. http://whothehell.net/archives/6035”
- Maybe I’m wrong but how does he know you are mates with Matt? If he does know that, he should have said something like “I know you’re friends with Matt and he wrote about BAND last week. Thought you might be interested too”.
The Peep Tempel are working with our small label Arbitrage Records and Loud Noise Entertainment and are set to release their debut 7″.
OK, so all of this is now just media release stuff. Sweet.
What he did do right was make the email half social media release as opposed to media release (ie made everything easy for you - embeddable, downlaodable, hosted etc).
I’d love it if you could write about some of the bad ones though. You should also check out the ‘Bad Pitch Blog’
Alright!
Andrew McMillen 11.06.09 at 10:34 am
For sure it’s a bit of a copy/paste email, Joel. But it was personal enough to get my attention, which is what counts.
However, he might have known about Matt and I being friends through these: http://whothehell.net/archives/6066 and http://www.onemovementword.com/2009/10/guest-post-matt-hickey-of-whothehellnet/
Then again, maybe not.
Joel Connolly 11.07.09 at 8:30 am
Totally! It was still a good pitch, but coming from a PR super school, I think we need to work harder on our pitches (we being chaps like myself on this end of the music industry)
Still keen to see some bad pitches though!
Kevin English 11.13.09 at 3:52 am
Hi Andrew. Great post. This was a good pitch, whether it was copy and paste job or not. The email was a tab bit text heavy for my liking. I may not have made it all the way through if it was sent to my inbox. What I liked was the customization right in the beginning to encourage further reading. If he did in fact know that you and Matt were buds, I would then classify this a great pitch. Its not easy to make a personal connection with strangers and remain unobtrusive. Good on him and cheers to you for posting.
Best,
Kevin
Philippe Perez 11.15.09 at 7:41 am
I agree with the above - I normally would be more likely to take notice of this presser if it were slightly shorter, maybe one sentence looking at it again. For me though the real clincher is the actual music! I suppose that’s all subjective between all bloggers.
Birds 03.15.10 at 1:06 pm
There is nothing outstanding about his pitch or this post. Pretty standard really.