The key to a successful tour, radio, or blog run starts with an attractive, to-the-point press kit. Major labels can still run very productive snail-mail campaigns (for example, most of the new music played at KVDU was received via mail). However, for smaller and mid-sized acts, such an endeavor is too costly and rarely yields results. Increasingly, the name of the game is blogs which, more often than not, only accept submissions via e-mail. In an inbox full of thousands of other submissions, it’s important to follow etiquette, stay brief, and stand out.
I built a “Blog Blaster” for Denver band Achille Lauro, who will be touring in August in support of their record “Indiscretions.” The blaster features a set of customizable fields laid out in a multi-column HTML e-mail. Links to album and single downloads are prominently featured, and hits are tracked via a unique code tied to each e-mail.
Coding for inboxes rather than browsers is an interesting challenge because, with some exceptions, their rendering engines are extremely outdated; thus, to ensure the widest compatibility, layouts have to be rendered in tables, CSS support is extremely limited and inconsistent, and all declarations are best made via style attributes in the tags themselves rather than including a separate stylesheet.
