Your pitch is your way of selling yourself as an artist, to an editor or owner of a hip-hop blog so they’ll post your music. The main thing I see wrong with a lot of pitches that upcoming hip-hop artists send is:

– It’s Too Long

You’re sending a whole page full of your life and what you want – that’s too long. They don’t have time to sit and go through your pitch to figure out if you’re valuable enough to post.

– It Lacks Personalization

Another thing I see is that there’s a lack of personalization in most pitches – it seems like it’s mass submitted.

There are other things I see upcoming hip-hop artists do wrong but the main focus of this post is to help you improve it. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on the mistakes, so I’ll start the improvements off with what I just mentioned.

1. Pitch With Personalization

If you’re pitching your music in an email, in person, or however – use their name, reference something they’ve previously done. You can use previous work or things they’ve said on social media, but you need to personalize it.

Show them that you did not just copy and paste your entire pitch and send it to them.

2. Build Relationships

I say this a lot. It may sound cliche or easier said than done, but it’s just simply interacting with them on social media and wherever they are on the net. That can include: promoting something they posted or re-tweeting some of their tweets.

You want to make them look good. Engage with them and by being a blogger myself, I notice the same people retweeting and liking the post make or sharing my blog articles. If they were to hit me up, I’m more than likely to respond or help them out.

So, just make sure that you’re engaging with them on social media or anywhere else that you can build a relationship.

3. Make Their Job Easier

Don’t make it difficult for editors to listen to what you’re submitting to them. You can make it easier for them by not attaching MP3s, album covers, songs, or whatever.

Instead, use something like SoundCloud, where you can mark a link as private and share it directly with them; Youtube, where you can set a video as unlisted and send it.

You have a lot of music streaming platforms that allow you to share music. Utilize those as much as possible because submitting things in an attachment is not cool.

4. Make Your Pitch Short

I don’t know why so many upcoming hip-hop artists make emails long or they feel the need to explain themselves. It’s like that in the corporate world too.

The interns will send a long wall of text in emails and then executives are just like, “Hey. Check this out. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks.”

I think it’s a sign of who’s experienced and who isn’t – always keep it short. You can get away with three to four paragraphs max and those paragraphs should only be a few sentences. You don’t want them to be the school standard of four or five sentences per paragraph. You don’t need that – just do one or two sentences per paragraph and you’ll be fine.

5. Compliment Them

Start your pitch off by complimenting them. What have they done that you liked, and can say was dope or cool? Don’t be completely fake, but I’m not going to lie to you – you might have to be a little fake. You might read something, do some research and be like, “Oh that’s cool”. Then in your email, you’re like, “Yo, that’s awesome”.

You may not feel like it’s awesome, you may think it’s cool or whatever but compliment them, because they put in a lot of work and time to make their content. It makes them more likely to continue to read your email.

6. Avoid Making A Selfish Pitch

Don’t write your email like, “Me, me, me, me, me. It’s all about me. What can you do for me?” Make it as much about them as you can.

People like to say that you’re “….riding” somebody if you’re giving them compliments in hip-hop but that’s absurd. Compliment them and make sure you make your pitch about them, not, “What can you do for me? I want you to do this. I’m the best in my city. I’m the greatest rapper.” Don’t do that.

7. Write Your Pitch Email 1 Sentence At A Time

Here’s a copywriting tip to write your emails better. When writing, write your first sentence in a way that makes them want to read your second sentence. Then, write your second sentence in a way it makes them want to read your third sentence and keep doing that to lead them down your pitch / email.

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