Interview: Men I Trust share their thoughts on releasing music independently
What do you get when you take a connection between two musicians that began in high school and mix it with a female vocalist whose voice is grainy and fragile with a mysterious twist? The answer is the Montreal-based collective Men I Trust. And damn! are we glad all their paths crossed.
Their song “Lauren” is SubmitHub’s most successful campaign to date, with an approval rate of 33% and a whole bunch of blog coverage. In light of that, we thought it’d be a great opportunity to reach out and learn a bit more about what makes them tick.
1. When did you start making music with Men I Trust, and at what point did you decide it was time to start distributing it to a larger audience? Was this your first time, or did you have prior experience?
We started making music with Men I Trust in early 2014. Back then, Men I Trust was only me (Dragos) and Jessy with many guest singers before becoming an official band with Emma. Both of us had prior experiences as musicians and composers so we had an idea of how we wanted to distribute our music. It seemed logical for us to distribute our music online first in order to grow a crowd, before printing solid copies. We stated by using Bandcamp and quickly distributed everywhere else as well (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, etc. via CD Baby and other social/music networks like YouTube and SoundCloud). The process was pretty easy and straightforward.
2. What techniques have you found effective for growing your fanbase? Has your approach changed over time?
For us, streaming and distributing our music online everywhere and on Bandcamp/SoundCloud for free, seems to be the most effective way to get our music to the right people. The idea is to grow our fanbase organically, without spamming, by engaging with people that are involved enough with our band and our music to take the time to download the songs, have a look at the cover art, the lyrics and the content on our social media.
Bandcamp will add every person who downloads our music, paid or free, to a mailing list that we can use to deliver content and news about the band or new releases. On SoundCloud, we use Hypeddit, which allows us to enable free downloads in exchange for the social following of our choice. Combined with the online distribution power of the music blogs and curators on SubmitHub, we are able to reach an audience way bigger than that of our social platforms. We are extremely grateful for the latter. Long story short, we want to engage with the valuable people that take the time to check the lyrics (we put lots of efforts in them) and links in the description, because they are probably the most engaged with us and curious about our music.
I think that it’s easy to listen to lots of music without even knowing the name of the songs or the bands when shuffling through a playlist, especially when you are listening to the music on a smartphone, because the mobile platform makes it hard to squeeze lots of content on a smaller screen and bandwidth (it’s getting better though). Downloading music is now less and less necessary, with everything available on demand on the cloud, so people who download our music, even for free, ought to be mobile power users or on a computer with a bigger screen. They also ought to be generally more passionate about music and more engaged with Men I Trust than the casual one time listener that is looking for a nice musical ambiance while cooking. Thus, since day one, our music is available for free on SoundCloud and “pay what you want” on Bandcamp. Generally people will still pay for the music they download. If not, it’s still all right: we just want you to enjoy it.
3. I’ve often heard musicians remark that some of their biggest “victories” as far as growing an audience were unintentional — being listed on a big Spotify playlist or being Tweeted by a celebrity. Have you had any such pleasant surprises?
Not that we are aware of. Still waiting for a tweet from Elon Musk…
4. I see you still manage your own online presence. Have you considered signing to a label or hiring a publicist to help you with that? Why or why not?
For the moment, we are doing well managing everything ourselves using all the services mentioned above. As for hiring a publicist, it could definitely help, but we are still very content with the response we are having from our fans, the music blogs and curators, many of which are on SubmitHub (THANK YOU). We also get some help from a booker in our hometown in Canada. Overall, we aren’t closed to the idea of working with a label: at a certain point we might be overwhelmed by the administrative aspect of making music, and it would surely be motivating to work with competent and passionate people. Having a good booker in the US that is well acquainted with the work-permits needed for Canadian artists and a publisher that would place our music in some movies would be great…
5. What’s next for Men I Trust?
We are releasing a vinyl with our best music plus three exclusive tracks that we will never release online this spring and we will be playing at Osheaga this summer. These two accomplishments are definitely on the top of our bucket-list. We are also finishing three singles we will be releasing this spring-summer with new music videos for each one of them. This year will be very thrilling for us!
Find them:
SubmitHub: www.submithub.com/artist/men-i-trust
Twitter: www.twitter.com/menitrust
Facebook: www.facebook.com/menitrust
SoundCloud: www.soundcloud.com/men-i-trust
