Free Game: Approaching A&Rs as an Independent Artist or Producer
4 min readOct 25, 2021
On a daily basis, I get a lot of emails/DMs from artists and producers with an audio track or a link to one that says “hey you should check me out” or “yo listen to my shit”.
- I’m not an A&R (well I am when it comes to beats for Izzy and occasionally I pitch for producers), this is not my department most of the time, I currently have very very limited ability to do anything with your music.
- I don’t want to listen to anything with this wack ass approach and I know actual A&Rs don’t either, especially when they probably get 100s of emails every day.
Advice
- BE PROFESSIONAL AND SHOW YOUR TALENT. If the track is “not your best” do not share it. These A&Rs get 1000s of tracks, if your shit is ass they will never open another email from you again
- DON’T SEND AN EMAIL TO 100 PEOPLE, SEND THEM INDIVIDUALLY AND PERSONALIZED. I regularly laugh when someone sends me an email and I can see every single person it was sent to. That automatically makes me uninterested and uncomfortable because you just shared other peoples contact information.
- DO YOUR RESEARCH. Search the A&Rs that you want to reach out to, figure out where they work, who they work with, what genres they handle, what projects they were involved in, etc…