Every morning, I wake up and it never fails. Part of my daily routine is checking my email and sure enough, I mark most of it as spam. Who knows what it's about or who it's from because I rarely open these unsolicited emails, but as far as I'm concerned they're nothing but trash. What makes your emails any different?

The most frequent question that other artists ask me is "How did you get your music featured on that website?" and my answer is usually always the same. I find email addresses and simply send out my music. I know a lot of them probably don't believe me, but I swear it's true. That's how I initially begun: I just scoured the websites I wanted my music featured on for email addresses and wrote them. It was that simple. Well, maybe not, THAT simple.

Most people in this industry get TONS of email daily, so what makes yours stand out? I'll tell you how I approached it. In the beginning (over time this has changed), most people I wrote to didn't know me from a whole in the wall. This in itself was a challenge, not only did they not know me, but I also had to grab there attention in process. I knew I had to stand out, so I tailored made subject lines for certain people (you would be surprised how effective this is) and wrote them personally (mass email blasts are informal and can turn some people off, especially in the beginning). I learned that using clever and witty headlines really made a difference. Even if they didn't open the email, listen to the song, etc., a lot of those lines stuck out and got their attention. If not anything else, it put me on there radar.

So now I have there attention, what's next? Consistency. Once you grab there attention, you would be a fool to let it go. Now I would begin to send them messages and music periodically (that's another BIG mistake unsigned artists make, sending five of the same messages ten times a days. It's very annoying and from my understanding most people never pay attention) and start to build a repoir with them. It was slow at first, but I was very persistent and now I have pretty good relationships with people I've built strictly via email. Another helpful tip is to email people surrounding those you're trying to reach. The majority of up-and-coming artists tend to overlook this approach, but often times it's the smartest. Bottomline, people are busy. You need to work your way into someone's ear sometimes via a third party so use your common sense. Instead of writing the C.E.O., write his assistant. Send a email to the secretary, not the manager, so on and so forth. If its something worth hearing chances are it will make its way down the pipeline.

These are just a few ideas, but there are many other things you could do to increase the chances of people reading your emails. Just put yourself in that position, if you were the receiver would you read the messages you send or mark them as spam? Make sure your messages don't get deleted in the morning.

You can check me out on my Myspace page at MySpace.com/DonnyGoines.