Don’t Be Taken In by a Scam

One of the side effects of having a broad web presence for your band is the inevitable e-mails you will get from people offering to “help” promote your band. These e-mails often mention that they found your band on some website, liked your music, and want to help you in some way – promotions, agents, even indie record labels. While these are not always an outright scam, most of these are at their best trying to prey on your hopes of hitting it big.

These offers usually want for you to pay them something in return for helping promote your band. Some might be legitimate – you pay them a fee, and they will help you build a web site, write promotional material for you, send your music to radio stations, and so on. The big question with these kind of offers is will they really be able to help your band. Can you use the money for better purposes on other things?

But mostly likely, these offers are more about collecting money from you than about actually helping your band. An example of an offer Ivory Drive just received today is a good example of the sort of things you may encounter. Here’s the text of the e-mail (I’m not going to use the real name they used):

Hello, I am an A&R rep for DXXX Records. My Name is Joe. We are indie label based in Anytown. I would be interested in releasing your music on our label. Are you the person I should contact? My assistant Angela found you on unsigned.com. We currently have a roster of all styles of music. Artist XXX on of our top artist is currently charting, you can see her on our website www.example.com.  Our other top sellers are Artist YYY, Artist ZZZ, Artist ABC.

I would like to email you a contract for your review. Please email me back with all of the info, and I will get it forwarded shortly after I receive the info. I look forward to hearing from you!

Thank you,

Joe XXXXX
DXXX Records
A&R Executive
123 Anystreet
Anytown, AZ

Wow, sounds promising. A real record company. They have an artist on the charts. They found you on unsigned.com – where you actually have something posted.

Well, the first thing in this e-mail is the unsigned.com reference. Sure Ivory Drive has a page there, but it hasn’t been updated for well over a year – it doesn’t even have the latest songs posted there. Hmmm… If these guys were the real thing, wouldn’t they have checked out the band more thoroughly – like the band’s own official site? Pretty feeble start – wanting to sign based solely on an outdated artist page.

When you get an offer like this, the first thing to do is some homework. Start out on their own website. In this case, there was a nice looking website, and the artist they claimed to be currently charting seems real. But by continuing to look at the rest of their site, it was not very encouraging. There were a lot of artists in their roster, but none one had heard of at all. There were no indications that this label had the artist support one would expect from a real label – like promotions, tours, album production, mastering. At best, it looked like they were a small consolidator for iTunes and Amazon.

They also relied heavily on their own web presence – MySpace, Twitter, and the like. And then the big one – the Google search. Sometimes a Google search will turn up discussions about a specific scam ahead of the actual site. But most often, the first several Google hits are links back to the site itself or posts the site has made about itself on blogs and the like – self promotion, in other words. This is usually a bad sign. Truly legitimate business will get plenty of Google hits from references found on other sites.

Another good thing to do is search for “DXXXRecords Scam” – often you will turn up plenty of hits. That does not automatically mean you’ve encountered a scam – but it is not a good sign. Read a few of the links.

In this example case, we found the following entry on a forum at a guitar oriented site:

I’m looking for some advice on a record label called DXXX Records. My band and I were approached by this label via email and they said they found us on unsigned.com. They soon sent a preliminary contract to us and seem very eager to work with us. However a few things are pretty sketchy.

They need a 1000 dollar co-investment to start off. Their biggest artist,  (a country act) only has about 2000 plays on myspace for their biggest hit. DXXX also will not pay for us to record the album and will only put 9000 dollars towards promotions. After the album is done they will only put it out digitally at first until we sell a certain amount. However they do promise a tour if we sell a certain amount of albums, but this has to be within the year that we sign. And they wont put the album out for a few months after we sign, so we would have only a few months to finish the album and plan a tour. Also his initial email wasn’t very personal, it kind of seemed like an automated message.

Ah – so that’s the story – the co-investment with minimal promises of promotion on their part.

Another writer responded the discussion with this:

You’ve already figured it out. e-mail is what it is. Someone that really wants to sign you, and thinks they can market you, will send a rep to see you. If they think you are worth it, they will let you know, and it won’t be by e-mail. The real deal isn’t that simple. If it sounds to good to be true, 99.94% chance it is, so be careful.

This last response pretty much summarizes the whole band promotional deals you’re likely to encounter. The artist who posted about this specific offer decided to pass it up – probably the wise move.

But not all e-mails you get will be scams. Legitimate contacts are likely to be more personalized, but still may result from your presence on the web.  While Ivory Drive has received many of these scam or near scam contacts, they also received one that was the real thing – from a legitimate Hollywood production company affiliated with some major television shows. It was crystal clear from the start that the e-mail was legitimate – their website listed TV shows that were well-known. The Google search had more references to the production company than hits to the company’s own site. And further contact led to a licensing agreement that may lead to exposure on national TV. And they didn’t ask for money.

Ivory Drive was also contacted by a small, but legitimate, promotion company, also from California. This was a case of a very small company which was indeed selective in who they wanted to represent. They were upfront about the fees they would charge (it seems that unless you are signed, you might have to pay for promotion). The band decided to pass on this offer because of the monthly expense.

In summary, you are very likely to get some offers to help your band make it big. Some of the offers are outright scams. Others, while not exactly a scam, will make a lot more money for the promoter/label/whatever than for your band. And if you are lucky, you might even get a real legitimate opportunity. But be cautious! If they want to take money from you, it is likely to be a bad deal for you, although there are legitimate promoters that offer services that may or may not help your band.