Caught In The Net: DIY Hard

A doff of the Caught In The Net mouse goes to Seneca and The Dudley Corporation who have some excellent advice – including website addresses – in Sounding Off about touring America, which can save you time, money and having to spend a 46th consecutive night sleeping in the back of your van.

Something else you’ll need to verse yourself in if you’re heading across the Atlantic is the vagaries of American radio.
While the chances of an unsigned Irish band getting played on 99.9% of US stations is – a moment please while we do the calculation – zero, almost every decent-sized town or city has its own college or NPR (National Public Radio) station that, not being reliant on advertising, won’t implode if they don’t play Beyoncé at least once an hour.
The King of all these is KCRW, an old CIN favourite who have hundreds of video sessions from the likes of Passion Pit, The Virgins, The Decembrists and Loney, Dear archived at www.kcrw.com. Also on the highly recommended list are WXPN Pennsylvania (www.xpn.org); WMFO Boston (www.wmfo); and KEXP Seattle (www.kexp.org) who also make for extremely good listening if you want a break from the rock radio norm.
If you want to do some serious homework, Indie Artists’ Greatest Guide To Getting College Radio Play is available from www.indieartistsalliance.com/college-radio.htm for $9 plus P&P and is worth its weight in showbiz sherbet. Another excellent – and free – source of information is quadphonic.com, which has state-by-state listings of all the college radio DJs you should be stalking.
Heading back home, and www.drop-d.ie has had a Gok Wan-style makeover and got extremely good quote out of Dan Deacon, who it seems spends his entire off-stage life doing email interviews.
Blog-wise, five excellent places that bands looking for coverage here should head to are www.amuze.me; www.raggedwords.com; guesslist.ie; thetorturegarden.blogspot.com; and kilkennymusic.com, which is your only man if you’re heading to the sunny South East.
Caught In The Net has also been spending more time than is possibly healthy for it exploring useyourears.co.uk, a labyrinthine resource, which has an extremely annoying pixilated host but tells you everything you want to know – and quite a bit you don’t – about the UK music biz.
In the absence of an official CIN Band Website of The Year, we’d like to lavish loads of gushing praise on batstheband.com, which shows what can be done with a bit of wit, imagination and a nifty dagger cursor. It also helps that the Dubliners are blessed with a hatful of in-your-face progressive/post-punk/metal piledrivers that can also be listened to at myspace.com/leatherbeatsfeather