Featured Presskit: Emilie Chick (Montpellier, France)

We’re psyched to announce that our featured Presskits are now supported by Audio Cotton. Need tees? Audio Cotton will make it happen and has some really affordable options, including one off prints. 

Check them out at http://audiocotton.com, and be on the lookout for their new website launching soon.

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We talk to Emily Gonneau of Unicum Music and manager of French-American bad girl crooner Emilie Chick, about the evolution of Emilie’s press kit from a good old word doc to a Presskit.to ‘kit, how she came up with Emilie’s awesome tag line, crowdfunding strategy, and Emilie Chick’s plans for the future! 

Presskit.to: How have you used Presskit.to to showcase Emilie’s career thus far?

Emily Gonneau: When we discovered Presskit.to, we immediately realized the potential for Emilie’s career. Up until then we had been updating a good old word document for her press kit and saving it as a pdf with hypertext links which was okay but not as practical as having her Presskit.to profile. And since Emilie is French-American and Presskit.to is only available in English for the moment, we still use a pdf presskit for the French contacts but send out the Presskit.to profile to all English speaking contacts in the business. As we develop her more in English speaking countries, Presskit.to will prove a really valuable, time-saving and slick professional tool to develop her and help focus on all the other aspects of her career.

Pk: Emilie’s tagline is great. “Alternative bad-girl, crooner, spoken word and jazz diva. Groovy Soul spiced up with Hip-Hop, Jazz, Electro & explosive live performances.” Could you give a few words of advice on creating that kind of intense tagline?

EG: Glad you like her tagline! Creating a tag-line is never easy, especially when your artist does such a blend of original music infused with many styles. So we wanted to reflect that but not just only from the purely musical point of view. We wanted and needed her tagline to showcase Emilie as an artist who’s music completely reflects who she is as a person. Hence the tagline we eventually came up with.

Pk: I noticed she just completed a crowd funding project for her new EP. How did your team get the word out?  Anything you might do differently in future crowd funding campaigns? 

EG: There are many great crowd funding startups out there so it was hard to choose, but we decided to go with a young one called Oocto because they were really hungry, helpful and efficient and them being French also made complete sense because that is where Emilie’s fans are majoritarily based for the time being. Emilie was the mastermind of the campaign, she knew exactly what she wanted to do and we just budgeted how much we need to raise to get that done. Then she thought long and hard at all the goodies / counterparts she was ready to give back to fans according to the amount they would donate to her project.

To be honest, Oocto informed us she was more generous than other artists and was she sure she wanted to keep such a high level but that is just who Emilie is, so we didn’t dilute them! As to getting the word out, Emilie and her band rounded up their contacts, reached out to family and friends first and just kept reminding people the campaign was there until its end date. As a result, not only did she raise the full amount, but 2 days before the end, a mystery fan donated the maximum amount - it turned out he had discovered her at one the gigs she played and was so awed, he just went for it. So if there are 2 pieces of advice we would give about doing these campaigns, they would be: 1/ know your fans and caliber the different levels of donations according to them, 2/ any artist milestone or activity are extra helpful for artists to remind their fans of their campaign as touring and gigs especially are personal, timely and all in real life.

Pk: What’s in store for Emilie Chick in the near future?

EG: LOADS! Er- where to start? Emilie is currently putting the finishing touches to her new EP : new songs, new image, new style, much more in synch with her current live shows than her first album that came out 2 years ago now. Depending on when all is ready, it should be released beginning of 2013. Emilie recently signed to a French indie booking agency so she will also continue playing many gigs, essentially in France for the moment, except for some in European countries for a beautiful jazz side project she has been working on with the Webster-Wraight Ensemble. It is due out in the next 6 months - date and label still tbc yet but Jamie Cullum premiered a first track on his BBC 2 radio show last Friday. She also has collaborations in store with a fresh up and coming French rap & hip-hop collective called La Fronce and loads of other collaborations we unfortunately cannot mention yet…