Blogger Spotlight: Stefan Toren , A&R Factory

A&R Factory was created in 2012 and has now grown into one of the most respected music industry related blogs. Taking form as a platform for new talent, A&R Factory focuses on providing its extensive readership with news on emerging musicians and bands. In this spotlight, Stefan Toren, one of the A&R Factory writers chats to us about why their blog is about engaging the music industry community, how they have built an audience online, how PRs approach them and discuss their future goal of growing into a full music publishing company.

What inspired you to start blogging? We started blogging back in 2012, and were determined to set up a blog directly as an A&R site that the music industry could use. Crazed Hits initially inspired us to directly make a blog aimed for the music industry. I was really upset when it shut down.

What type of music motivates you to create content for your blog? Artists who have worked hard to write and produce great music that is clean, mix, and mastered. You will be surprised how many people send in demos of unfinished raw tracks, the internet has opened up the opportunity to create quality recordings at low costs, and for us having that hit track is essential, everything else is a bonus.

What makes your blog different to other music blogs? Our blog directly engages the A&R and music industry community. Our readership includes independent and major labels, publishers, management companies, radio stations, PR and sync companies from across the world who use our website as a resource to discover and sign acts.

How have you built your relationship with your audience? We directly work with people in the music industry, we call them, e-mail them and make them aware of our blog. Managers and PR agency’s come to us to pitch bands for placements and record label and publishers are coming to us to get our opinion on the next big hits. We owe a lot to networking and social media, I think we owe the LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter founders a big beer!

What are the main challenges that you face as a music blogger? Managing the content, we have thousands of submissions a day, keeping on track of it with a small team can be overwhelming but when you find that hit song, you get a good feeling and then you watch it blow up it’s worth it!

How can PRs improve their approach when building relationships with you? Do not spam, give us a call, tell us who you are, how we can work together, gin bribes and vinyl go down well!

Which artist do you think will make a big impact in 2017? Tough question, we post various genres I would suggest checking out all our posts on the A&R Factory website, there are some gems on there!

Will you be working on any exciting projects this year? We are in the final stages or starting up our music licensing company, our aim is to grow this into a full music publishing company. Artists will be able to join our roster and be submitted for TV / Game / Film licensing opportunities that we are pitching for.

Do you have any advice that you would like to share with aspiring bloggers? Just do it! Stick to a niche, or if you want, come and talk about writing for us!