Here's an age old question; how do you sell your services? Do you cut a single demo song and put together a press packet or do you create a 3 minute snippet of a bunch of songs? Do you record a live gig or do it in the studio? Do you hand out cassettes or CD's? Do you includes play and songlists?

We have our own way of doing things which has worked in the past, but I'm wondering if we'd get more work if we sold ourselves better.

Regards,
Al G.

I can't think of ANY business that won't benifit from better marketing. Go after the market you feel is best suited for you and then give them the type of introduction that will stay in their minds.
Generally .....a 5 imnutes demo is more than enough to make an impression. Any more and they won't have time to listen to it.

A nice picture, a short CD and a bio, some bus cards and you're set to go !

I got ticked off at the way my promo was expensive to produce and easily discarded or abused so I searched for something better.

Lately I've been making my own business card CD's. They can be purchased from any CDR house such as http://www.cdrom2go.com/ and burned on standard CD burners. It helps if you have a printer that can print directly on the bus card CDR also such as the ones at http://www.ezcdprinter.com. Each bus card CDR holds up to 50MB - that's one five minute song at 44.1k 16-bit stereo wave file on average. I put together a montage of songs for a five minute demo, and I've created special wedding demos, jazz demos, etc for each market I'm after. They are cheap to mail also - I recently did a big hit on all the wedding coordinators in my area by sending them "invitations" that contained my wedding bus card CDR. Business card CDR's cost about 60 cents each.

If you have the tech chops then you could create your own multimedia presentation on these too but sometimes asking your employer to stick your demo CD in a computer is reaching over their heads. My bus card CDR's play on regular CD players.

If my business card CD's don't impress my prospects, they aren't the people I want to work for anyway. These look great and are a cool promo item. Easy to carry too. Once the client calls you back then you can give them the 8x10, songlist and other things they'll want.

Hi Pro. Do you actually own (or use) the EZCD printer, and if so, what are YOUR experiences with it?

I was considering purchasing this printer myself until I read this:
http://www.cds.com/printers/ezprint/support.htm

- Scott

Scott: I read the link you provided, but I would tell you if I had any problems with my EZ CD Printer and to date I have not. I hope that doesn't mean I'm due for one! Granted, this is not a heavy-duty commercial printer as the sellers at your link said - those are far more expensive - but for home use and making short runs it has worked like a champ for me on well over 200 CDR's to date. It takes a little getting used to and takes a little practice to feed the CDR in correctly, but I like it, the CDR's look terrific and it uses standard Epson inket cartridges. For an under-$400 CD printer, I know of nothing better (always open to suggestion if anyone does).