As an artist, your digital presence is both a practical marketing tool and an opportunity for storytelling. When curated intentionally and mindfully, digital assets like websites, bios, photos, recordings, liner notes, and social media all come together to help shape the narrative around your work – and they are essential resources for members of the media.
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with three of my industry colleagues to pull back the curtain on what we wish artists knew about our work – particularly how we engage with an artist’s digital footprint. Radio host John Schaefer has spent the past four decades introducing listeners to contemporary artists through his WNYC show “New Sounds.” Musician and producer Loki Karuna is on a mission to decolonize classical music through his podcast, TRILLOQUOY. And Hannah Edgar is a culture writer and radio producer covering the Chicago arts beat for The Chicago Tribune, WBEZ, and the Chicago Reader.
The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Amanda Cook: To start our conversation: when you go to an artist’s website, what’s helpful in order for you to feel confident that you’re representing them the way that they want to be seen?
Loki Karuna: I’m really looking for as much of the human being as possible because the managers or the PR firms have already sent me everything I need to know about upcoming projects and new releases.
John Schaefer: If I’m unsure of where someone is from or what scene they’ve come out of, I always like to go back to the source. The press release, to me, is the calling card – if I’m genuinely interested, I want [the] primary source: I want to hear the record, I want to see whatever the artist has written about it.
On the other hand, I am also perfectly happy to get it wrong if it gets me a good moment with someone – a fun story, an unexpected detail – because what we all have in common in our different platforms is we are storytellers. Radio is a storytelling medium. I don’t need to have all the answers if only I have the right questions, even if the answer is something totally unexpected to me.
Amanda Cook: Being an online publication, we have the luxury of being able to go back and edit; nothing is literally in physical-copy print. But I never want an artist to reach out to me to say, “Hey, you got my pronouns wrong,” or “I prefer to go by my artist name instead of my legal name,” or “I don’t like being boxed in by this particular label that you chose for me.” My hope is that people never have to correct me on information that I can find myself.
But I’d love for us to take a step back and consider that there are a lot of folks who are DIYing it and don’t have a manager or a publicist. Those are the folks I wish I heard more from, personally. So can we consider this conversation from that perspective?
Loki Karuna: I’m surprised at how common it’s becoming for me to find artists who don’t have websites. They operate completely out of their Instagram. For me, that’s always, always, always what I’m looking for – and not only for me to get information. I like my listeners to be able to go learn more, to do more listening. If artists don’t have that digital infrastructure, I find it difficult to know how to support them beyond just a single feature, a one-and-done.
The other thing I would add is for artists to understand the goal of the media that they’re engaging. For me, it’s not centered around the artist’s music – it’s about the audience really understanding more about the human: the human beliefs, the human politics, the opinions they may not want printed in The New York Times but are comfortable talking about with me. I like my listeners to be able to engage the artist digitally beyond pressing play on a recording.
Loki Karuna — Photo by Devon Fails
John Schaefer: And to pick up on a thread that you’re beginning to tug there a little bit, I think a key thing to tell any artist is know who you’re pitching. Know what they’re looking for, know what they’ve done, and know what their proclivities are. Getting in over the transom is really hard, and if you’re doing a kind of blunderbuss, scatter shot, wide-angle approach, you’re wasting your time and you’re wasting the time of 99% of the people you’re reaching out to.
Amanda Cook: On the topic of pitching, there’s such an art to writing an effective pitch email. For me, such a huge component of that is brevity and having your assets stored somewhere else. Take three to four sentences to hook me, then point me in the direction of where I can go discover on my own. I want to be able to see the full scope of your work. I want to hear how you talk about your own work.
John Schaefer: It basically comes down to convenience. I literally get like 300 emails on an average day. Most of them will be unopened. It’s the great kind of frustration of my job: I take a flyer on something that turns out to be great and I think, “Well, there were probably nine or ten other emails that would have also been great.” You’re pitching someone whose inbox looks like a jungle, and it’s not just brevity. There’s got to be links that work. They have to link to things that are not going to require me to go hunting through layers of your web architecture to get to what I need. You want to make it as easy as possible for the person to be on your side.
Hannah Edgar: I think this would be helpful for artists to know: just the raw numbers like what John is sharing. I don’t get quite that many emails, but I do get in the range of 50 to 100 a day, and I consider myself very Chicago-based. So even with that parameter, I’m still kind of drowning all the time. Then add in the fact that we actually have to write, we have to produce the audio… the numbers John is describing are a work day in and of itself, but John is not monitoring his email – he’s putting out his show. If we haven’t answered your email, it’s truly not personal.
Another thing, too, is in this economy and in this time of extreme economic duress, I personally weigh artists who reach out to me on their own even higher than folks who have a press representative. Making sure you get folks to the front who might not have those resources is really important. They’re also usually describing their own artwork in a way that’s more engaging than marketing speak.
And last, the delivery method for those audio files is really starting to matter to me. If you send me a Dropbox, I’m so sorry, I’m probably not listening to your album because Dropbox doesn’t automatically play [the next track]. Something as simple as the fact that you sent me a Dropbox as opposed to a DISCO or SoundCloud link could actually be the difference between whether I listen to your release or not. If I downloaded every Dropbox link, I would have to buy like, 12 more hard drives. So, streaming for me is essential, even if some audio fidelity is lost, just to get a feel for it and then download it later if it’s something I’m going to cover.
Hannah Edgar — Photo by Micah Gleason
John Schaefer: Again, convenience. You click and there’s the music. And you know, I don’t mind a follow-up email if I have to say, “Hey, this is really interesting. Send me a download.”
Loki Karuna: For me, unfortunately, I’m just never going to get to that step of the follow-up email. I have to have what I need in that original pitch because there’s always so much going on… If I sit down and listen to a whole album, someone has really captivated me. That’s extremely, extremely unusual, and I hope the artists understand that we’re not sitting all day listening to everyone’s 40-, 50-, 60-minute albums – that’s just impossible.
I also wonder how useful it is to help artists understand that they aren’t always going to be in control of how they are depicted or platformed. Again, it’s not a personal or pernicious thing, but there are times when people write about me and I wish they had said something differently or picked a different photo, but I’ve grown to just accept that there are going to be people that focus on aspects of my life and my career that I wouldn’t necessarily focus on.
Hannah Edgar: I’m so glad you mentioned that, Loki. Art is about varying interpretation. You can’t dictate someone’s interpretation of your art or you… And of course, that’s not to say use whatever pronouns you want for an artist – that is one way to absolutely alienate artists and not be a trustworthy, caring, empathetic journalist.
But even in so far as, does this person consider themselves a composer or interdisciplinary artist… at the end of the day, I work for mostly general readership publications. I am trying to get this person’s work in front of as many people as possible and use words that are going to hopefully bring people in, and sometimes that means maybe making a comparison to another artist. Something like, “I really think if you like Bartok, you should give this living composer a chance.” I’m also sympathetic to why artists would resist that, but I’m also equally if not more resistant to the idea of basically being an extension of their PR – we play a very different function as journalists and as the media.
Loki Karuna: I appreciate your sharing that, Hannah, because not only do I come from a family and a general community that didn’t come up in classical music, but in many ways, they were conditioned to oppose it based on who’s in the room. So what I try to pull from artists every time I’m interviewing someone, again, it’s just that human piece.
So, I would say to artists: what are you bringing to the world? Show my aunt who has never been to a classical concert – and has no interest – that there are people in that world that even she finds interesting, that even she has some connection to, and oftentimes it has nothing to do with their music.
Amanda Cook: Loki, I want to stay with that for a minute. What are you all drawn to when you’re encountering an artist for the first time?
Loki Karuna: What excites me is an actual opinion or something, if I can see that this is a person who isn’t afraid to take a stand on something or have some real opinion that some people may disagree with.
Hannah Edgar: I’m also looking for a story, a narrative, you know? What brought me to classical music was realizing that it was music by real people. That’s what made it click, rather the marble bust sitting on the piano and the stereotype of pretentiousness.
John Schaefer: Everyone has a story, but not everyone knows how to tell theirs. If I’m intrigued by the music, I’ll try and see if there’s any hint in what the person has written about their music on their Bandcamp page that suggests there’s more than just the notes on the page or the sounds on the tape – especially if it’s a story that hasn’t been told yet.
John Schaefer — Photo by Daniel Randall
Amanda Cook: I’m going to weigh in here, too, because of course I love the music – we’re all here because we love the music – but the thing that just keeps me coming back to this work is the people. Content creation is hard – it never stops, and you are always looking for the next thing. I don’t think people really understand how much stamina that takes. But those human moments and stories keep me coming back. Do we have any advice to help artists tell their stories?
Loki Karuna: Be prepared to add a little seasoning to what may be simple questions, like where you’re from. Be prepared to really sell yourself or advocate for your art beyond just relying on the interviewer’s questions to be how your story is told.
John Schaefer: And also to not be surprised when you do get questions that are not specifically about the thing you think you are there to talk about.
Hannah Edgar: I would encourage artists – given that they’re essentially endeavoring to become a public figure – to spend some serious time thinking about what’s for the public and what’s for themselves. I think young artists have this moment of friction with the press where you’re learning how to represent yourself and what you want to have out there. Having a gameplan about that is helpful to protect your own privacy and the privacy of the people in your lives who maybe didn’t consent to being part of that conversation.
Amanda Cook: I think that’s a great place for us to end: encouraging artists to be intentional about what they’re putting forward, and making sure that the stories that are being pitched are stories that they’re actually comfortable telling. But I think what we’re all touching on here is that we just want to get to that genuine core – we want to get to that honesty and that humanity.
This article is part of ACF’s digital media expansion to empower artists, made possible by funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Learn more at kf.org and follow @knightfdn on social media.
I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, and is made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF.
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