We recently met up with Ira Miller, founder of Emerge Music Group, who just so happened to turn us on to Camplified 2011 act, The Empty Pockets. Through Emerge, Ira helps bring emerging, up-and-coming musicians and bands to the forefront. “Being in an independent band can be very overwhelming and disheartening,” says Josh Solomon of The Empty Pockets. “Thank goodness for people like Ira Miller of Emerge Music Group and Aimee Berger of Camplified. When I discovered people like Ira and Aimee putting so much effort into exposing completely unknown music to fans, it was both an emotional boost and an extremely helpful marketing tool. I’m so glad Ira reach out to us and eventually introduced us to the fine folks at Camplified.”
If you’re someone who is always looking for that next talented, under-the-radar band, you should definitely be following Emerge on Facebook. And if you’re looking to get discovered and build a fan following, check out Ira’s tips below in this exclusive Q&A!
How did you come up with the idea for Emerge Music Group?
For about as long as I can remember, I always enjoyed finding that great new band before anyone else. And once I had heard them, I wanted to let other people know how great they were. I’ve been doing that informally for years and years and people started to look to me to find out about good new bands. But what really got the Emerge Music Group started was a realization that there are so many great bands out there and they are eager for people to hear their music. I’ve been on street teams for a number of bands (
Guster,
Jump, Little Children and others) over the years and almost 10 years ago I started volunteering with
Aware Records‘ Rep Program which was a great experience. I got to help promote John Mayer before anyone knew who he was, sold merchandise for a wide variety of Aware-related artists and even got to spend a night helping backstage with
Mat Kearney and his crew when he was on tour with Sheryl Crow and John Mayer. Before I started Emerge, I had a small “operation” called Nonprofit Promotions, and the goal of that project was to help connect bands that were looking for exposure with nonprofit organizations that were looking for bands for events or free/promotional CDs to give out as door prizes, etc. I did that for several years and distributed over 10,000 CDs to nonprofit events all over the country. After a while it became too difficult to find appropriate CDs to send to nonprofit organizations, so I started creating and duplicating my own CDs at home (with permission from the artists). One thing led to another and ultimately I realized that with the takeover of digital music, it didn’t make any sense to focus on creating physical CDs. Ultimately I started Emerge Music Group to help the bands that were on those CDs get their name and music out to more people. That was the summer of 2007, and it’s been going strong ever since! I started with a few friends and family in the group and now at any given time we have between 750 and 800 people in
the group on Facebook!
(more…)
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