Thursday, May 30, 2013

The Good News from the Indie Bible


The folks over at The Indie Bible contacted us recently and asked if we would take some time to look at their resource guides for independent artists and share our thoughts. After thumbing through the four guides in their collection, all I can say is, Wow! I wish we would have known about this before we released our first album! The four guides (Indie Bible, Indie Bible Online, Venue Guide [divided into six geographical regions] and Media Guide) give valuable and detailed, genre specific contacts to help promote your band and music. The Indie Bible features sixteen sections from "Music Reviewers" to "Radio Stations That Play Independent Music" to "Online Music Vendors" and more. Each section is divided by genre so you can quickly locate the specific leads you need. Each listing features at least a current website address and most also include a current email address and contact.
The Indie Bible Online offers the same features with a searchable database and features automatic updates throughout the year. The Venue Guide is an incredible resource if your band is starting to branch out beyond your hometown. If you're booking gigs out of town or out of state, you can easily find bars, clubs, coffeehouses, theatres, etc. that book your style of music, making it easier to fund your road trip with more paying gigs. The Media Guide lists magazines, radio stations, professional and nonprofit organizations, etc. broken down by state (and Canada too.) In addition, the Indie Bible also features 66 topic specific articles to guide you through the process of approaching and submitting to their resources. The only shortcoming we can think of for this series is that they don't have any listings for awards and contests, but we'll share that feedback with them!
The Indie Bible promotes itself as a great monetary value for bands (they're currently offering their entire bundle of resources for $60,) but the thing we like best about this service is its value in TIME. To be honest, most of the contacts in these four resources can be found for free online or in area phone directories. However, the time it takes to weed through hundreds of sites to get one good lead is absurd. Once you find a good site, it can still take you ten to fifteen minutes just to find the contact information for it. To give a personal example, we spent weeks trying to find 20 solid leads for possible review sites for our album. In less than two minutes we were able to find 37 leads using the Indie Bible. If you'd rather spend your time making music than searching for ways to promote it, we wholeheartedly recommend Indie Bible.

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