Artist access to the Avalanche website

As many of you will know we don’t accept money to promote artists on the website and I’ve refused all offers of links as well. However it has been put to me that the Avalanche site which is already a focus for Scottish music in particular as well as being known for promoting new music in general could be the gateway artists need to reach an audience who might be interested in their music. 

Each artist would be allocated a page only they could access and would be free to promote themselves any way they wished providing links for their own sales and highlighting gigs etc. In return Avalanche would receive a small fixed fee each week small enough that artists would only need a sale or two each week to cover it. Obviously if enough artists signed up this would still provide a reasonable income for the shop while giving artists a far greater chance of having their music heard. 

Though artist led there would be scope to deal with labels too and given our worldwide connections all bands would be welcome. Customers would really like a one stop Scottish website where they can buy everything but that just isn’t possible so a site that they can come to and check out a wide range of Scottish artists is a more realistic option. We will add sections for bands from other countries as Avalanche has always been a Scottish shop with a worldwide reach. Avalanche won’t actively promote the bands beyond saying when they join but we will give our full social media backing to getting people to visit the site and check out what is on offer.

We will also link to other sites we feel an affinity with such as the guys who do the Pine Vinyl cartoons or the Jersey Milk Cow drawings. This will be free and we won’t accept submissions for people wanting links. Having talked this over with only a few people other ideas have also been put forward to utilise our unique social media presence without compromising what we do. For now this seems a good start and while I was not prepared to overly subsidise a shop with online sales if our online presence can make a shop more viable with a decent income I’m very happy to take that route. 

Bands continually come to me feeling they are “lost” online so being part of the Avalanche site will immediately give them a profile way beyond what a small band can expect. They will then be able to link to the sites they are using for sales, downloads, merch etc with far greater hope people will “find” them. 

So briefly that is it. By coincidence I had somebody contact me from a website design background with an idea not far from this with Avalanche as a hub so hopefully giving each band unique access will not be hard to realise. For now bands should register an interest just so we can gauge at what level we launch the idea and use the shop email [email protected] with the heading Avalanche Artist Website. I can’t see us needing to limit places but we may need to roll it out in stages so we will contact those who register an interest first. 

There has been an enormously positive response so far given the frustration bands feel so hopefully this will provide an outlet not just for new bands but for others trying to reach a wider audience. More soon !