Week 2 with Ariel Hyatt’s “Music Success in Nine Weeks”
After getting myself mentally prepared for this nine week journey, I am ready to tackle week two of Ariel Hyatt’s “Music Success in Nine Weeks” blogging challenge. This week in Ariel’s book discusses a topic that anybody, in any industry, really, should be aware of. No matter what you do, or who you work for, it is incredibly important that you are able to quickly and effectively describe what it is you do best, and what makes you awesome and different from everybody else.
Week Two: Your Perfect Pitch
One of the biggest problems artists have is describing their music. Every artist loves to think that their music is completely unique, and something totally different and new that nobody has every heard before. I’ll admit, my bandmates and I had that very same mindset a few years back. We were afraid that by labeling ourselves as sounding like so-and-so band, and playing this-or-that genre of music, we would be severely limiting ourselves as musicians. We couldn’t be more wrong. Instead, we were limiting the career opportunities for our music, because we couldn’t accurately describe ourselves to others. People would get confused, and just become disinterested.
People love categorizing EVERYTHING. It makes everything make sense to us brains, and a bit simpler to manage in a world of total information overload.
Ariel suggested that we write down the following…
After writing that down, and some brainstorming, here is a short, 15 second pitch that we came up with to quickly and accurately describe what we do:
The Formatters creatively fuse poetic, hip-hop style lyrics with powerful, live jam rock instrumentals.
I personally am not a fan of the silly descriptions like “Jet made sweet love with Jimi Hendrix, and out popped [insert generic band]!” They really don’t say much about the music.
Place Your Pitch Everywhere
After we decided that we liked this short description, we posted it (and slight variations) to ALL of our websites and social networking profiles. It’s important to keep the message consistent so people don’t get confused.
We have not created any physical promo materials yet, but when we do, we will be sure to include the words “poetry,” “hip-hop,” and “jam rock” on everything we create.
