Roman’s Rap Up

What do you look for in an artist when they reach out to your blog? Why do you post them and what kind of approach actually helps them get posted?

I get many emails everyday from artists and publicists, asking for me to feature their music on our site. We actually never used to accept unsolicited submissions from artists, however, we recently did start as there was a big demand, hence the creation of our “Queued Up” section, a collection of carefully curated and selected artists to introduce our readers. The way we’ve started to accept submissions is through a brand new website, SubmitHub, which allows us to efficiently review every single track people send to us, and is the only way we accept music from artists directly.

That being said, we have always accepted music from publicists and management, reason being, when an artist has decided to enlist the help of a well known publicity firm or management team, they have taken the next step in their career.

Now it’s gone from, “I’m a rapper in my basement” to “I’m a rapper that really wants a chance at success.” Big piece of advice though, regardless of whether you have management or not, you NEED a press kit, consisting of a professionally written bio and professional photographs. The amount of selfies I get is unreal, and I rarely review work that comes in like that.

As for music criteria, we really want “radio quality” hits. Doesn’t necessarily have to be what you would hear on the radio, but in terms of production, vocals, engineering, everything has to be up to standard. By posting someone else’s work, we are putting our reputation on the line. If we feature garbage, people will see us as so. We also look for people trying to change the game, with a different sound.

In terms of why artists should care about press – it’s how you really get big, especially if you are an independent artist. If you look at artists right now, pop. hip-hop, any genre really, what you see is really hundreds of thousands of dollars being paid out by the record companies for advertisements, feature placements, etc.

So for an independent artist just starting out, there is a huge chance you don’t have that kind of money (if you do, you’re a step ahead, congratulations. I mean, imagine if your new song was placed on every indie blog, and because of that, gets picked up by bigger websites like Buzzfeed, MTV, etc., all because of that one blog placement. From personal experience working at Sony Music Entertainment, and managing artists myself, I know labels also look on blogs to discover artists.

Benjamin Esakof, Romans Rap Up Hip-Hop Blog