MUSICat Promotion Roadmap

Part 1: Build your team and your brand

Start anytime after committing to your project. The earlier, the better.

Team Building

Build your library team

• Who on your library staff: is a musician? goes to shows? knows local bands? Talk to them. Explain the project and get their feedback. Who do they think would be excited about the project? What ideas do they have for events/partnerships/anything else? What questions or concerns do they have?
• Identify a project manager and a team of staff to help out during submission rounds. See ideas about how to build a library team in this document that describes work teams and processes for several different MUSICat collections.
• Let your entire library staff know that you’re working on the project and will be keeping them updated as you move forward.

Build your jury

• MUSICat jury, defined: a group of leaders in your music communities who help curate, advocate for, and promote your library’s MUSICat collection.
• Seek out leading musical voices and actors in your community. These folks can be: established working musicians, radio personalities, journalists or bloggers, business people (think record labels and record stores), activists, and non-profit leaders.
• Read more about how to build an effective jury in our guidelines here.
• When you’re just getting started, it’s important to communicate clearly:
  • What the project is
  • What your goals for the project are
  • Your desire to work with them to build a collection.

Build partnerships

Reach out to other community organizations to help with the project. Are there venues that would work with the library to host events? Local radio stations that would dedicate air time to the collection? Festivals? Museums? Universities? Podcasts? Artist collectives? Local music awards?

Meet People

If possible, hold an early in-person meeting to bring your library team, jurors, and partners together to talk about the project. We recommend:

• Feeding everyone
• Centering meetings around sharing ideas for building a vibrant collection. Ask questions like: who should be involved? What do working musicians in our community need? What should our goals be?

Create a brand & work on messaging

We recommend working on this in parallel with the team building described above, so that you can integrate feedback and ideas from the community. The essentials are:

• Collection name
• Collection logo (some collections use their library logo - that’s fine!), other images for the site, and a brand pallette all described in our designer guidelines document.
• A basic description of the project and your goals for it. This will inform copy for your site’s about page, press releases, and so on. Lots of libraries also create fun swag with their collection logos, from guitar picks to coasters to pins and more.

Part 2: Get the word out

When your teams are ready to go and your brand and basic messaging are finalized, it’s time to start spreading the word to the broader community.

Talk to people

• Share your progress (messaging, jury, teams and partnerships, brand etc.) with your entire library staff and empower them to spread the word throughout the community.
• Ask your library and curator teams to start talking up the project to folks they know, especially: musicians who might submit, library advocates, and journalists.
• Reach out to your local media contacts to let them know about the project, and that press releases and other information will be coming.

Open Submissions

Let your community know that submissions are open:

• Send a press release to local media. It’s great to incorporate quotes from your partners, librarian team members, and jurors for this.
• Announce that submissions are open on the library’s social media feeds.
• Ask your partners and jurors to signal boost your social media posts and create their own. Share messaging and social-media-friendly images with them to make it easy.
• Continue to post on social media throughout the submission round.

Launch Your Collection

• Share a social media toolkit with artists in advance of your public launch day, and encourage them to help promote the collection.
• Contact local media in advance and offer interview time and advance peeks of the site.
• On your public launch day:
  • Send a press release to local media
  • Post on social media
  • Remind artists, advocates, and team members to signal boost and create their own posts
  • Optional (but fun!): throw a launch party featuring artists in the collection either in the library or at a local venue. Pay the performing artists.

Part 3: Moving forward

Promoting your collection in the long term.

• Change your curator and library teams up over time to keep folks engaged and bring more people into the fold.
• On social media:
  • Follow local artist social media accounts.
  • Engage with local artists in ways that promote both the artist and your collection, e.g. signal boost an announcement about an upcoming show and link to that artist’s album page in your collection.
  • Watch for local music news, point out when musicians featured in the news are in your collection.
• Promoting your library’s electronic or special collections? Include your local music collection!
• Continue adding content to your collection through scheduled open submission rounds once or twice a year, or other special events. Repeat the promotional work you did for your first submission round.
• When possible, it’s great for library team members to show up at events (shows, festivals, workships, etc.) where collection artists are performing. Consider staffing a table or booth at local music events to promote the collection.
• Continue looking for new partners and special projects that can spin out from your collection.
• Consider adding additional media to your MUSICat site. Adding a poster collection, historical material, or a video series are great ways to bring more folks to your MUSICat site.

back