SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

The best way to get your music on to Mad Mackerel…

Unfortunately, like most music blogs, Mad Mackerel is a labour of love squeezed in between work and family commitments so our time is limited. In the early days we could pretty much listen to everything we were sent, but as we’ve grown we have got on more circulation lists and mailouts and now the basic volume of material we get is pretty overwhelming. We do post as often as we can, but it is hard to keep up with and listen to every single thing we’re sent. If a Soundcloud link is Private we don’t usually listen until it is made public – again just due to time constraints.

So here are some ways you can help us, and which will give you or your band a much better chance of being heard and posted on the blog.

GENRES

Read our blog – see what kind of stuff we post. We mostly do Americana, Country, Folk, Garage Rock, Indie, Psychedelia, Punk, Rockabilly and variations thereof.

WE DON’T POST…

We don’t do house, dubstep, mash-ups, bangers, trance, dance, hip-hop, rap and variations thereof. We very rarely do post-rock or metal and even more rarely do electronica and pure pop or any combination of the two. We don’t bother listening to remixes and we don’t post them. All this just isn’t our thing. Nowadays anything we get that is labelled in this way just gets deleted without being listened to so it is a waste of time even mailing it to us.

CLEAR AUTHORISATION

We do our best to only post what is authorised. To help us please tell us clearly if something is OK to post and if so whether we should offer it as a download or a stream.

We always respect your wishes about how to offer up any song(s) either as a stream or as a download and we always endeavour to only post what has been authorised. You need not worry about us sharing an mp3 rather than a stream as long as you have been clear.

If you don’t tell us up front we are unlikely to be able to come back to you to ask what the score is due to volumes and time restrictions. It means without this information, more often than not, we will simply move on to something else.

STREAMS & DOWNLOADS

Providing digital links are fine, Soundcloud links are great, Dropbox links are fine and Bandcamp links are fine – if you have a Bandcamp download code can we have it please.

We often download a lot of tracks in one go from various sources and add it to our iTunes library. However, if the song is not labelled properly and appears as “track 2 master” with no artist name it is not likely to get listened to very quickly (if at all) compared with something labelled properly. Nor do AIFF and WAV files help much as they are so large and need to be converted into an mp3 before we can do anything with them.

CDs / VINYL

We do love getting CDs and records in the mail and always listen to the former relatively quickly. If sending vinyl including a digital download link as well is very helpful and makes it much quicker for us to listen to your stuff.

VIDEO

We much prefer Youtube links to any other as they are the easiest and most robust to embed.

EMBEDDING LINKS

Currently Mad Mackerel is hosted on WordPress.com and while this may change in the future it means currently that we can be a little restricted over what we can and can’t embed as widgets from other sources. We can do Soundcloud and Bandcamp and Youtube easily, but anything with java script won’t work and we cannot currently manage these on the blog.

SUPPORTING INFORMATION

Without sending overwhelming amounts of information, some context and background to the track or album is helpful as is comparisons with other bands or artists (e.g. RIYL suggestions) and influences. We are much more likely to listen to something quickly if you capture our interest or imagination than if you just send an e-mail saying nothing more than “please listen to my music it is great indie rock”.

Pictures of the record sleeve or digital cover are always helpful too in any image format except tiff and of a reasonable resolution.

NEWS & TOURS

We don’t generally post general news and only intermittently tour details. If there is a song download or stream to accompany the news we are more likely to mention it.

FLATTER US

CONTACT US

E-mail:
madmackerel@me.com

Snail mail:
Send CDs, vinyl, T-shirts, cash and other bribes to Mad Mackerel, Con Brio, Crawborough Road, Charlbury, Oxon, OX7 3TX