The Quite Great Marketing and label services team at www.quitegreat.co.uk spend a great deal of their time promoting  unsigned urban tracks through to unsigned  folk and classical so we feel that there are common threads to help unsigned music artists really get more media coverage , we regularly put together what we like to see as best music pr tips for unsigned musicians  and developing acts to consider, so we thought we would highlight one key way to build your profile. It may seem like a dream but as an unsigned musician it is always worth introducing your music to named acts and see if they can help spread the word , now clearly this tends to be viewed now as a social networking hoping to get an act to tweet etc but there are a catalogue of examples across the past twenty years of acts who have gained a bigger media profile by hooking in with a named act , at present we are lucky enough to be working with a really talented unsigned pop  act called Skyler who has come to the attention of the legendary rap act Snoop Dogg who has subsequently guested on her track Fire , even appearing on the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn8MfeoiTKE

As mentioned although the dance and urban world is full of bigger acts introducing new names to a broader public one of my favourite guest appearances – although it must be stressed he was not an unsigned musician at the time –  was the wonderful Russell Watson working with one of the god’s of the Madchester scene, the one and only Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays and Black Grape fame on the track Barcelona which is featured on our Quite Great youtube history https://www.youtube.com/user/Quitegreattv/playlists . The song was originally a huge global hit  Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe but the spin Russell and Shaun put on this classic meant it was embraced by a huge variety of age demographic etc and even saw them appearing on the original version of TFI with Chris Evans, a very rare opportunity indeed for a classical artist but this duet underline Russell as a huge national and subsequently international star.

Now obviously we cannot always know that a named artist will help an unsigned artist in any way but especially in the indie and rock world it is always worth approaching classic acts who may feel that they have not  been in the limelight for a while or that they may just really like to appear on a new, unsigned  artist’s  unheard track or video because they feel a sense of wishing to help develop a new career in the way they may have wished someone could have helped them at some stage in their early days when as an unsigned artist they were still living the dream.

So don’t be put off by thinking your heroes will not be interested in helping yes there may be deals to be done or backs to be scratched but the results can be huge .