OneTrackMind promotes up and coming artists
By Troy Hasselman, March 2 2020 —
OneTrackMind, a Canadian-based promotional platform for up-and-coming musicians, has been growing steadily since it first began promoting artists on its Facebook page in 2018. The platform aims to give publicity to rising, independent artists in Canada, with a focus on hip-hop and R&B, and began after its founder noticed the lack of infrastructure for promoting artists in this country.
“Essentially what we do is we try and put underground artists forward and give them a little bit more of an advantage,” OneTrackMind founder and CEO Joshua Bruder-Wexler says. “Because a lot of the time Canadian artists are very slept on and not really noticed by mainstream media because of how little of a position we’re perceived to have in this industry. The way we started is, basically, I was involved in the music industry representing one artist independently a couple years back and he wasn’t really getting anywhere and I noticed it was because of a lack of proper Canadian representation in terms of promotion and things like that and I thought ‘Hey, if there’s nobody out there that’s willing to help him out I guess I’m going to have to do it on my own.’ So I decided to start the company, establish some new connections and get people to help promote underground Canadian artists.”
The submission process to get promoted by OneTrackMind involves a team of judges who look at different aspects of the music and decide what kind of promotion to give it based off that.
“Typically we get submissions and sometimes we go out and find people on our own and we have a panel of judges who go through and listen to all the music and judge based on certain categories including lyricism, flows, replay value, music video quality and recording quality,” Bruder-Wexler explains. “That’s the first step of everything and then once we determine who gets what day and what post and what kind of promotion we go on to the next step which is actually testing how well it will do.”
Once an artist has been heard by the judges and they decide to promote them, there will be posts created around the artists music through the OneTrackMind Facebook and Instagram pages. The platform is also starting a YouTube channel where established artists react to up-and-coming artists featured on OneTrackMind’s social media pages.
“We started by posting to Facebook because that was initially our biggest social media platform,” Bruder-Wexler says. “In recent months Facebook has fallen off a little bit and because of that we use it as a tester and get some feedback on there and if it passes the test and we get a lot of positive feedback and what not we bring it over to Instagram where we promote it. We’ll use hashtagging formulas in order to get as many views and likes and shares as possible. We’re starting a new thing off called “Rappers React” which is a YouTube channel where we get well established rappers from the industry to react and rate some of the best posts on our Instagram and Facebook of underground Canadian artists.”
Artists promoted through OneTrackMind have gone on to open up for big name artists like Rich the Kid and Dax during Canadian tours for those artists.
“Once we started getting our foot in the door, we started getting into contact with a lot of local promoters,” Bruder-Wexler says. “I booked my artist that I mentioned earlier to open for an artist named Chris Webby. At that show we ended up making a really good connection with our promoter and kept in good contact. We spoke a bit later and I told him I would help him out with whatever he needed in exchange for being able to book artists for opening slots and to give artists an opportunity. He announced Rich The Kid for a Canadian tour and a couple of the dates got cancelled so some people didn’t get put onto the show as promoted, but others did. I put on an artist by the name of YSN Fab in Winnipeg and he announced a Dax show so I put on an artist here and one in Toronto and we’ve just kind of grown from there. We make connections with promoters and bring out networking opportunities and provide underground artists with a stage.”
OneTrackMind has been growing steadily over its existence and is gaining increased amounts of traction with its social media follower counts growing and getting involved with more established artists as well. Bruder-Wexler hopes for 2020 to be a breakout year for OneTrackMind.
“It’s been pretty steady so far,” Bruder-Wexler says. “We started off as just a Facebook page with no traction whatsoever and a year-and-a-half, two years later we ended up with 7,000 likes on the Facebook page and within six months of making the Instagram page we’re now at 4,600 followers. We’re growing steadily, we’re lining up a bunch of good interviews with bigger, better established artists for 2020. I think 2020 might be a breakout year for us. I think eventually we’ll be at a point where we have really well established artists or the industry in general noticing the underground artists or the Canadian ones on our platform.”