Making a Great Demo...................................................................................
You are going to need to put together a demonstration recording of your work.
There are still a few places where sheet music scores may be enough to get you
in the door, but the music world has gotten used to the idea that your calling
card should be in an easily-accessible audio format. If you are a songwriter,
your demo should include a few songs in their entirety, but to get into the
custom music composition world, you are going to have to do some cutting
and pasting (or have it done for you) to create a short recording compiling
excerpts of a variety of your works.Keep it short .......................................................................................
Most people in the music business in the position to hire you or pay for your
music aren’t going to give you much time to make an impression. If you are
fortunate enough to arrange an interview or submit a demo, you will be
expected to deliver a brief but complete musical picture of yourself in about
ten minutes. Maybe three of these will be taken up by listening to your demo.Because most compositions follow structural forms such as AABA and so on,
it is not uncommon for people to just listen to your music through the first B
section and then skip ahead to the next piece. Don’t be offended by this. In228 Part IV: Orchestration and Arrangement
Selling yourself
Composing music is an art. If you want to make
any money at it, however, it’s also a business.
Unfortunately, most creative types are not nec-
essarily very good at selling themselves in a
persistent and organized way. For some reason,
the idea of sales and marketing seems to strike
fear and loathing in the hearts of many. The fact
is that the only people in the world who can
claim to have only one job are salespeople.
Everyone else has to be a bit of a salesperson
from time to time along with whatever else they
think of as their career.
When you consider it, you are selling every time
you try to persuade anyone to do anything.
Everything from convincing your kids that they
should eat their greens to suggesting a good
book to a friend involves the very skills that youneed to promote your music. One reason that
it seems harder to sell a song to a publisher
than it is to sell beans to your 4-year-old is
because it is hard to draw the line between
enthusiasm and boastfulness. It always seems
more appropriate for someone else to say great
things about you than to say them yourself.
Along with this, you might not be so confident
that your work is really any good to start with.
In fact, if you like your own work too much you
run the risk of getting stuck at your current level,
because you aren’t seeing the areas that need
improvement. Because of this, it is often a good
idea to find an agent or manager to help get
your stuff out there. Still there are a lot of things
you can do for yourself, and some composers
are very good at promoting themselves.