Singer/songwriter Chris Otepka isn’t a household name. But he’s been making a consistent living with his guitar and microphone for more than a decade. From his first band, Troubled Hubble, and now with his current band, Heligoats, the Bellingham, Wash., artist has evolved his self-marketing to consistently find an audience. Orange caught up with Chris recently on the road to find out how he’s done it.
When it comes to cultivating an audience, what’s been the biggest shift you’ve seen from when you first started to now?
The biggest shift in the touring machine itself, obviously, has been entering the digital age. Yes, I have evolved from mailing CDs to venues, following up on the phone, to sending MP3s and emails for booking consideration. The web has also collected all of the contact information for every last Book-Nook Acoustic Cafe, rock club or stadium for your band to attempt to play, and put it in one place, with links, maps, details and even a network of bands who might want to play the show with you. IndieOnTheMove.com did not exist when I booked my first tours.
I used a magazine called Book Your Own Fucking Life and it was a stapled, newsprint Punk/DIY magazine with a list of clubs and venues to mail your CD to and their phone numbers to follow up two to six weeks later. I might have used the same copy for several years, and it was outdated when I got it. Now there is DoDIYUSA.ORG, which is basically an updated version of that magazine with a much faster way to communicate with the house show or venue representative and much more efficient for booking all around. And if you need a couch to sleep on while you’re on tour, there’s a network and a website for that, too.
How has social media shifted the way you connect and grow your audience?
It has complicated the approach, for sure. You will see Heligoats Tumbling, YouTubing and Tweeting and maintaining a Facebook and a WordPress site. We have Bandcamp and LastFM and a BandPage but, being a fan of envelopes, fan club updates and stickers, I can’t deny the disconnect that social media implies, especially considering the time needed to spend in front of the computer.
I did a Kickstarter project and depended on social media to spread the word. I like how Kickstarter is a collaboration between the artist and the fan/supporter on a one-on-one level, but it definitely relies on the social media connection.
For music distribution, how do you as an independent artist view services like Pandora and Spotify?
I recently saw a comic strip on a radio station bulletin board in Tampa, Fla. The first panel is a singer excitedly telling his band that they have hit 10 million plays on Spotify. The next panel is one of the band members responding, “Great, how are we going to split the .17 cents?” Spotify and Pandora kind of frighten me, personally. They seem so huge and vast, though I do know that people have “discovered” my band through both services and have come to shows to tell me so. Though, as I mentioned above, the disconnect I feel through social media and the endless, sad, start-up “band promotion” sites and music streaming sites going in and out of business is only heightened when there is a big, strange, invisible company that possesses music and art I’ve made and share it with little discretion.