What do I need to do to get started? (for journalists)
StoryAmp is a platform for connecting musicians and journalists. We are dedicated to creating tools that make it easier and more efficient for music journalists to discover, filter and sort, and choose music to cover.
IF YOU DON'T ALREADY HAVE AN ACCOUNT
Welcome! Thank you for finding us and wanting to know more. Please follow the Journalist Sign Up link on the upper right hand corner of our website. At launch our emphasis is on concert press, but we will be rolling out album release press services soon after. While we will probably grow to include all sorts of new media, if your outlet is lesser known it would be helpful if you let us know how many unique visitors, readers, or viewers you have. We hope we get to work with you soon!
IF YOU ALREADY HAVE AN ACCOUNT
Chances are you ended up here after starting to receive emails of music "Dispatches" (that's what we call "press releases") about upcoming concerts or releases. This StoryAmp Knowledge Base includes several articles that go into depth about the various sections and tools we built for music journalists. The goal of this article is to give you an overview of these tools.
OVERVIEW
Which do you prefer: sifting and sorting through the mountains of music pitches (some of which are irrelevant or too late), or curating discoveries and helping listeners navigate music coming your way?
Our guess is you would rather spend energy curating your vision as a critic than tripping over the noise.
We believe that music discovery will continue to get better as you — our trusted sources — develop new strategies for dealing with the increased availability of music. We believe fans like humans curating their musical landscape. With that in mind, we at StoryAmp have developed a platform we think can help you with this task, while also serving musicians.
HOW IT WORKS
What if you received no more than one music pitch email per day. What if that email included a digest of all the albums/performances you needed to know at the time the information is needed. What if that email included links to everything you need to: make a decision about coverage, contact an artist rep for whatever you need (interview, tickets, album, etc.), and write your story. What if that email only included the genres and cities you are interested in. What if you could unsubscribe from individual artists. That's what we created.
In addition to email digests, you can log into StoryAmp and see additional releases and performances that match your genres of interest and concert cities of interest. You can also give out your own personal URL link to anyone who wants to pitch you so that instead of getting more emails, you route them to your own StoryAmp “inbox” (we call that the "Submitted" section), organized by your lead time, genre, and concert city. And we have a radio player which lets you listen to music that already meets your genre, lead time, and city requirements. So instead of verifying a pitch’s relevancy, you can simply listen. Or you can queue the items that caught your eye or ear on first glance and simply listen to those.
Whether in the email digest, within the website, or using the radio player, you’ll be able to add any given release/performance to a Queue (like in Netflix) with one click, so you can easily flag music you want to listen to more deeply. And within your Queue, you can “shortlist” the stuff you really do want to cover. You can even keep notes about a particular release or performance to keep track of where you left off.
We believe that in the near future StoryAmp’s method of getting you timely, newsworthy information about releases and performances will become ubiquitous in the music industry, and, as a result, will free your inbox up significantly. We ask that you try out StoryAmp for a while and let us know what works and what doesn’t. We’ll do our best to continue making it a great tool for you. By the way it's free to use.
LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR JOURNALIST FEATURES
These articles will help you understand how each of our journalist features work:
Profile and Preferences / "My Account"