Communication equipment, necessary allies for musicians?

Since the creation of the Gutenberg printing press - and with it the possibility that a score would cease to be a unique work, to become something reproducible - a network of support and amplification of music was built.

This network grew and grew (made up of music publishers, radio stations, record companies and managers, music producers, distributors and music stores, schools, copyright management entities, booking agents, venues, festivals and events in which music plays a main role, journalists and critics, specialized magazines and, more recently, digital distribution channels, streaming or online listening platforms, and a long etcetera) until become what we understand today as the music industry.

There are musicians who never experience great distances —or conscientiously shorten them— between their work and their audiences: those who play in bars and restaurants, those you can find in big cities at the exit of the subway or in the trains themselves, encouraging the passage of passers-by with better or worse performances and generally counting on a minimum of basic tools to make the music.

There are also many musicians who greatly enjoy doing their work collectively, not deciding for themselves what they play, but following a score and a program created by others, under the direction of a conductor, sometimes with a fixed salary. Of these, some complete their income by teaching or doing other tasks.

But if your idea is to try a successful solo career or lead a musical group that conquers crowds, you have a lot of challenges to deal with, but also tools that you can count on in that endeavor. In other words: unfortunately, it is most likely not enough that you are a tremendous musician for your work to find its way and find its natural audience.

If all that potential audience you think you have doesn't know you exist, if they don't have a way to listen to you, if they've never heard of your music, how is it supposed to find you? Not even the Internet with its almost universal reach and the enormous possibilities of dissemination that it makes possible, guarantees that you will safely reach all your potential listeners. On the contrary, in the era of unlimited availability, the great challenge is to get hold of a part of the possible audience, that will choose and prefer you among so many and so diverse musical offerings.

And it is here that can be very useful a figure from the industry or the music ecosystem that —although emerged in the 20th century— has acquired enormous potential in the last 20 years: the agent or the agencies of communication (or public relations, or digital marketing, depending on the degree of specialization, the type of services they provide and the name, in short, they decide to use).

These people or organizations - which may be tiny or huge - are dedicated to enhancing the career of artists by providing a series of services associated with communication. The moment of your musical career when you are in relation to the goals that you set, how happy or frustrated you are with what you have achieved, the observation of the careers of your colleagues or idols and your own intuition, should be the basic points to make a decision about the best time to ask for help to take your career to a higher level from a communicational point of view. It will also depend, logically, that you find knowledgeable professionals in your work environment and that the prices they charge for their services are within your reach.

There is a whole specialization in communication and marketing of artists; since the late nineties of the twentieth century they have been growing in number and importance and today it is frankly accepted that this activity is part of the sine qua non work of the team that accompanies the career of a "successful" artist ".

In Cuba they began to emerge timidly; first —as usual— as activities carried out by a person on behalf of an artist, in coordination with the communication departments of cultural institutions and the media. But to the extent that musicians have become aware that the diversity of communication channels (all those provided by the Internet have been added to the traditional press media, plus alternatives such as the Weekly Package and local networks) and the number of broadcasters of musical messages, only makes their lives grow and complicate their lives, and in recent years some creative projects have been taking shape that try to carry out a more professional, systematic and sustained work in the context of communication services for artists.

With totally Cuban talent and effort, that I know of, several have appeared (and in some cases disappeared).

El Megáfono, a small group that came out of the extinct cultural newspaper La Calle del Medio, was one of the pioneers and described itself as a communication team for musical events. He played a rather interesting role in promoting and broadcasting the musical program La Banda Gigante beyond television itself, which was the natural setting for this project. After the end of the event something has broken up, but it is likely that it is only hibernating to reactivate at the right time.

D´Boutic Music (specialized in reggaeton and urban music) is the result of the efforts of Michel D´Boutic, a young man with natural abilities for the organization who, when he realized that he was a better promoter than a singer, put his batteries to create a basic infrastructure that would serve the emerging talents of urban music. D´Boutic launched from El Cerro towards the Malecón of Havana dozens of teenagers —wireless speakers in hand— to put the popular songs of his “clients”. He learned to use social networks and he identifies itself as an advertising and marketing service that encompasses promotion in the Weekly Package, on radio, social networks and web pages.

Not especially focus into musicians, but with the capacity to have them as clients, as demonstrated its work with Rodrigo Sosa for the La Quenística project, there is JYD Solutions, a digital marketing agency specialized in advertising campaigns and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), image design, as well as the development of digital platforms. They have a fairly large work team made up of designers, programmers, journalists and communicators.

In May 2019, MSK was launched as a project, a platform for the promotion of Cuban musicians in the new settings of the Internet and social networks. According to its founders, it would manage "a set of tools to make the work of Cuban artists visible", which would allow it to "bring them closer to their audiences through the new canons of communication and digital marketing." In principle, they began to work with a group of artists such as Manolito Simonet, Alejandro Falcón and Golpe Seko. They announced their basic rates and a website that has not been activated today yet. The talented team of people that formed its nucleus made us predict an interesting future that we hope to see come true very soon.

With a sustained work in the last three years and that only seems to improve, there is Bonus Track collective. Although he has clients from other areas of culture, he specializes in various aspects of communication for musicians and musical events. Her work team, made up of producers, journalists, computer scientists and social communicators, is almost entirely made up of super creative women who are responsible for the communication of artists such as Daymé Arocena and Yissy García and campaigns such as that associated with the album Inside, for the Cuban musician X Alfonso.

In general, a person or group or communication agency or PR, as they are also known, can be an excellent ally to perform many tasks that artists are not always willing to carry out on their own. Depending on your budget and what you really need at any given time, they can help you to:

-profile or define your potential audience;

-Create or manage campaigns for specific events (music releases, concerts or others) or campaigns on certain phases of your career, which will probably include commissioning and producing the conceptual and graphic design of each action;

-design your visuality, which can range from creating a logo, to coordinating and producing photo sessions;

-writing press releases, preparing media lists, organizing direct mailings, preparing press conferences, organizing interviews, creating an EPK, dossiers and press kits;

-design appropriate content strategies and eventually create them;

-build, improve or refocus your narrative as an artist, as well as the message to the audience;

-Create, optimize or manage your social networks, defining which ones, creating groups or proposing to participate in others already created, inventing raffles or contests, defining the labels to use;

-Create, design, program and manage an artist or project web page;

- periodically evaluate the success of your offline and / or social media campaigns actions and give detailed reports;

Nothing replaces the talent of an artist. And, of course, the better your musical proposal and the clearer and more sincere your message, the more chances you have to reach your audience and for it to grow naturally. However, in today's hyperconnected world, with an almost infinite availability of content, tools and communication windows, the collaboration of competent communication and public relations professionals is a plus that can amplify and shorten the path to your audiences.