who we are
a record label + music blog, since 2012
EveryDejaVu started as a blog in 2012. It was a small passion project mainly as a way to have a platform to talk about our favorite music and artists.
After building relationships with artists and being presented the chance to premiere music, we began curating our own projects. The pre-label releases were a success in our eyes. We were able to bring together friends of the blog for free digital compilations and cassettes that we could sell to fans of us or the artists.
We took this foundation and started to invest more in our relationships with artists and learn more about what we could do to support their releases. This included investing in physical and unique releases, press, marketing, music videos, photoshoots, and more.
Since 2014, we have released over 60 projects from around 40 artists, spanning many genres, and plan to continue to expand what we do and what we can provide to artists.
- 61releases since 2014
- 41artists we've worked with
- 284posts on the blog
what we do
everything that goes into an EveryDejaVu release
physical media/merch + artistic directions
This is our bread and butter and what we have always wanted to focus most on.
Every release we do comes with some sort of physical release and an additional ‘goodie,’ which can be a guitar pick, a holographic sticker, or whatever we can think up.
We’d love to consider vinyl for every release, but due to the current turnaround for vinyl being close to a year and being as expensive as ever, we currently are only considering providing full budget for vinyl for few releases. Typically we will look to see how cassettes or CDs sell and then consider vinyl as a follow up a year or two later.
We pride ourselves in being able to come up with the physical art layouts based on the project art, but only if the artist is comfortable with us taking that on. Let us be the ones who handle the J-card templates and add an additional flare to make the physical copy stand out.
budget
Everything in music involves some sort of budget. The items that follow this will explain further what goes into a budget, but the amount spent is based on mutual agreements between us and the artist.
Budgets for our projects have historically been anywhere between $1,000 to $10,000. We use this to pay for anything related to the release such as, but not limited to, studio sessions, mixing, mastering, artwork, photoshoots, music videos, physical media, marketing, music features, production, and more.
We hesitate to give a concrete number of budget even for individual items due to understanding that things always change throughout the release process and rates vary so much. Our focus is to try to spend within reason, but also not to pile up on expenses that makes it feel like full recoupment is unattainable.
All expenses incurred towards the release are to be recouped by the artist, so we focus on mutual agreement with the artist on any spend related to the release to ensure the total of the expenses doesn’t become overwhelming or uncomfortable for the artist.
We strategize with the artist on what can be done in-house vs outsourcing, but try our best not to be cheap and sacrifice quality.
general release strategy + asset building
We've been a label for over ten years now and have learned a lot of what we do by trial and error and word of mouth, as most do in this industry. Our expertise doesn't mean we know everything and we know the absolute way to release an artist's project, but we are happy to work with the artist and figure out what works best based on our experience. Whether it's choosing a certain amount of singles or releasing a music video, we'll be discussing every point and all the pros and cons with the artist before moving forward.
An important strategy of a release will always be organization as well. We work alongside the artists we work with to make sure they have all their assets in a row, such as press photos, live performance videos, cover art(s), metadata, relevant marketing drivers, WAVs and MP3s of their project, artist bio, and more. Collecting these assets early on help us know what to focus on and begin to create the marketing plan for each release.
contacts for additional help (music + art)
As mentioned before, we've been doing this for over a decade. With over 60 releases, we've worked with several different talented people to bring these projects to life and we're not just talking about the music artists themselves. Depending on the artist needs, we've worked with mixing engineers, mastering engineers, graphic artists, videographers, photographers, biography writers, local screen print shops, studio musicians, and more to bring these projects to the finish line.
marketing + press help
We work closely with the artist to figure out what the marketing behind the project will look like. We check in with the artist to see what story they want us to tell about them and the project.
The music discovery climate is forever changing. Blogs come and go, Spotify playlists seem so ever elusive, and the value of radio can vary. Our goal with our artists is to ensure that we are continuing to build relationships with all curators, tastemakers, publications, and whoever or whatever else is out there sharing music. We have in-house help that does press for each project, curated to each artist and release.
distribution via IDOL
Our digital distribution is powered by IDOL who assists us with DSP pitching, release rollout planning, official artist channel management, YouTube content ID, and more. We have a dedicated account manager who keeps us up to date on best practices for distributing our music. Having this sort of relationship with our distributor makes it feel like an extension of our label, more so than just a service.
always being around to help
A lot of the artists we work with are working on releasing their first project or are at an early part of their career. Some don't have a manager, some have a whole team, some are trying to find a team. We are happy to help with however we can to make the artists we work with successful. We sometimes put a manager hat on, a booking agent hat on, etc. Our artists are a part of what makes our label successful, so their success is a shared goal for us. We try to make ourselves readily available to help with whatever they may need, and that's not limited by just a release date. We're here to push our projects for as long as we can!
the blog
interviews, reviews, random lists about artists that deserve more love
We started as a music blog to follow the footsteps of 2DopeBoyz, Potholes in My Blog, NahRight, Pigeons & Planes, and all the other buzzing blogs at the time. The blog just started off with two writers: Ryan (me, the founder of EveryDejaVu and the guy still running this ship) and Patrick (who went on to write for 2DopeBoyz, DJBooth, Bandcamp Daily, and now a New York Mets online publication called Metsmerized). Our mission was to spotlight the music we thought wasn't being written about at other blogs and ensure we spent some time talking about the music and the artist, even if it was just a quick 300 words about a single. Over time, we added a handful of contributing writers and were able to get daily posts up covering whatever we could. Eventually, this became unsustainable for all of us involved as it was just a passion project and didn't bring in any revenue. At the time, we didn't have the support of any other revenue streams to keep writers around or reward ourselves for any work we were doing. The blog closed up officially in the summer of 2016, so we could focus on becoming a record label after releasing a few compilations with artists we'd become friends with through our blogging.
But the idea of being a blog never faded. Even though the music industry was changing at an even quicker pace and the publications that formed our taste in music were fading away or pivoting to mainstream or video content, the music that we always enjoyed writing about was still there and being written about even less. We relaunched the blog as a newsletter in 2020 as a way to see if we could still do this thing, and after a few interviews and reviews, it was time to bring back the blog in full form.
In 2022, thanks to additional revenue from our record label side, we were able to allocate funds to pay writers and bring Patrick back to do some editing. We post whenever we have something we’re excited to share. Madison Bulnes also joined as our editor, managing our content calendar, editing articles and reviewing pitches.
write for us
what we cover, how to pitch us + our rates
what we cover
The best way to understand what we cover is to read our blog! We hope to become a place where people come to find rising artists making weird, interesting, innovative sounds—with an emphasis on projects created by underrepresented people. If they’re covered in Pitchfork (RIP) we don’t want them! Usually, we focus on artists with less than 100,000 listeners on Spotify—and the smaller, the better.
what we're looking for
- Reviews on albums/EPs out within the last 4 months.
- More than just a song-to-song breakdown, but an analysis of the project as a whole: what it’s saying, what it offers to music as a whole, why it stands out, why we should care, etc
- Reviews on concerts
- Mainly looking to report on shows in Boston and New York, but we’re open to other cities, too 😉
- Q&As
- Narrative interviews
- a more in-depth look into the artist with quotes intertwined
how to pitch us
- Email madison [at] everydejavu [dot] com
- Give a brief bio of who you are
- Include sample writings (doesn’t have to be published officially anywhere)
- Link the artist
- A paragraph or two with a description of the sound the artist is making, the angle you plan on taking, and an explanation of why you think they’re special.
rates
We’re a small, DIY blog with little staff working after our day jobs, so we don’t have the highest rates in the market, BUT this is what we can offer at the moment:
- $30 for a 600+ word review
- $40 for a Q&A with at least a 300-word intro
- $50 for an artist/band profile of about 800-1000 words
- $60 for coverage on a niche subculture with quotes from at least two participants of that scene. For example, covering the Boston hip-hop beat scene and the community surrounding it.
- $60 for an interesting listicle: deep dive into a discography of a lesser known artist or prolific artist who has many gems to uncover, a list of best songs within a niche subculture or geographical scene. For example, covering the top 15 out of 250+ guitar albums by Buckethead.
- Boston/NYC/Orlando only (or special events): $40 + up to $20 ticket compensation for coverage of a live show that includes quotes from at least one artist or band performing and context of the scene surrounding the show, at least 800 words.
There is also a $5 per piece bonus for our "Senior Writers." Senior Writer status is achieved after a writer has written 5 or more posts within the last year.
send us your music
for artists + bands who want a review or interview
The best way to understand what we cover is to read our blog! We hope to become a place where people come to find rising artists making weird, interesting, innovative sounds—with an emphasis on projects created by underrepresented people. If you fit this description, please send your music our way! We can’t listen to everything that’s sent our way, and a submission doesn’t guarantee a review or interview. With that being said, follow the bullet points below to submit your music to us for your best chance to have your music written about:
- Send all submissions to madison [at] everydejavu [dot] com or use the contact form at the bottom of this page (pick “Blog Coverage Request”).
- Include streamable links. If it's released already, we prefer Bandcamp, SoundCloud or Spotify. If it's not released, we prefer private Bandcamp or SoundCloud. Please do not send us files!
- Press kits, EPKs, links to your website and socials are all helpful, but most importantly just tell us about yourself: where you're from, what type of music you make, what music you've released/are releasing, pictures of you
- We focus on music released within the last 4 months. Ideally, the more recent, the better.
contact
artists, writers, venues, anyone!
Who We Are
EveryDejaVu started as a blog in 2012. It was a small passion project mainly as a way to have a platform to talk about our favorite music and artists.
After building relationships with artists and being presented the chance to premiere music, we began curating our own projects. The pre-label releases were a success in our eyes. We were able to bring together friends of the blog for free digital compilations and cassettes that we could sell to fans of us or the artists.
We took this foundation and started to invest more in our relationships with artists and learn more about what we could do to support their releases. This included investing in physical and unique releases, press, marketing, music videos, photoshoots, and more.
Since 2014, we have released over 60 projects from around 40 artists, spanning many genres, and plan to continue to expand what we do and what we can provide to artists.
What We Do
This is our bread and butter and what we have always wanted to focus most on.
Every release we do comes with some sort of physical release and an additional ‘goodie,’ which can be a guitar pick, a holographic sticker, or whatever we can think up.
We’d love to consider vinyl for every release, but due to the current turnaround for vinyl being close to a year and being as expensive as ever, we currently are only considering providing full budget for vinyl for few releases. Typically we will look to see how cassettes or CDs sell and then consider vinyl as a follow up a year or two later.
We pride ourselves in being able to come up with the physical art layouts based on the project art, but only if the artist is comfortable with us taking that on. Let us be the ones who handle the J-card templates and add an additional flare to make the physical copy stand out.
Everything in music involves some sort of budget. The items that follow this will explain further what goes into a budget, but the amount spent is based on mutual agreements between us and the artist.
Budgets for our projects have historically been anywhere between $1,000 to $10,000. We use this to pay for anything related to the release such as, but not limited to, studio sessions, mixing, mastering, artwork, photoshoots, music videos, physical media, marketing, music features, production, and more.
We hesitate to give a concrete number of budget even for individual items due to understanding that things always change throughout the release process and rates vary so much. Our focus is to try to spend within reason, but also not to pile up on expenses that makes it feel like full recoupment is unattainable.
All expenses incurred towards the release are to be recouped by the artist, so we focus on mutual agreement with the artist on any spend related to the release to ensure the total of the expenses doesn’t become overwhelming or uncomfortable for the artist.
We strategize with the artist on what can be done in-house vs outsourcing, but try our best not to be cheap and sacrifice quality.
We’ve been a label for over ten years now and have learned a lot of what we do by trial and error and word of mouth, as most do in this industry. Our expertise doesn’t mean we know everything and we know the absolute way to release an artist’s project, but we are happy to work with the artist and figure out what works best based on our experience. Whether it’s choosing a certain amount of singles or releasing a music video, we’ll be discussing every point and all the pros and cons with the artist before moving forward.
An important strategy of a release will always be organization as well. We work alongside the artists we work with to make sure they have all their assets in a row, such as press photos, live performance videos, cover art(s), metadata, relevant marketing drivers, WAVs and MP3s of their project, artist bio, and more. Collecting these assets early on help us know what to focus on and begin to create the marketing plan for each release.
As mentioned before, we’ve been doing this for over a decade. With over 60 releases, we’ve worked with several different talented people to bring these projects to life and we’re not just talking about the music artists themselves. Depending on the artist needs, we’ve worked with mixing engineers, mastering engineers, graphic artists, videographers, photographers, biography writers, local screen print shops, studio musicians, and more to bring these projects to the finish line.
We work closely with the artist to figure out what the marketing behind the project will look like. We check in with the artist to see what story they want us to tell about them and the project.
The music discovery climate is forever changing. Blogs come and go, Spotify playlists seem so ever elusive, and the value of radio can vary. Our goal with our artists is to ensure that we are continuing to build relationships with all curators, tastemakers, publications, and whoever or whatever else is out there sharing music. We have in-house help that does press for each project, curated to each artist and release.
Our digital distribution is powered by IDOL who assists us with DSP pitching, release rollout planning, official artist channel management, YouTube content ID, and more. We have a dedicated account manager who keeps us up to date on best practices for distributing our music. Having this sort of relationship with our distributor makes it feel like an extension of our label, more so than just a service.
A lot of the artists we work with are working on releasing their first project or are at an early part of their career. Some don’t have a manager, some have a whole team, some are trying to find a team. We are happy to help with however we can to make the artists we work with successful. We sometimes put a manager hat on, a booking agent hat on, etc. Our artists are a part of what makes our label successful, so their success is a shared goal for us. We try to make ourselves readily available to help with whatever they may need, and that’s not limited by just a release date. We’re here to push our projects for as long as we can!
Contact
We started as a music blog to follow the footsteps of 2DopeBoyz, Potholes in My Blog, NahRight, Pigeons & Planes, and all the other buzzing blogs at the time. The blog just started off with two writers: Ryan (me, the founder of EveryDejaVu and the guy still running this ship) and Patrick (who went on to write for 2DopeBoyz, DJBooth, Bandcamp Daily, and now a New York Mets online publication called Metsmerized). Our mission was to spotlight the music we thought wasn’t being written about at other blogs and ensure we spent some time talking about the music and the artist, even if it was just a quick 300 words about a single. Over time, we added a handful of contributing writers and were able to get daily posts up covering whatever we could. Eventually, this became unsustainable for all of us involved as it was just a passion project and didn’t bring in any revenue. At the time, we didn’t have the support of any other revenue streams to keep writers around or reward ourselves for any work we were doing. The blog closed up officially in the summer of 2016, so we could focus on becoming a record label after releasing a few compilations with artists we’d become friends with through our blogging.
But the idea of being a blog never faded. Even though the music industry was changing at an even quicker pace and the publications that formed our taste in music were fading away or pivoting to mainstream or video content, the music that we always enjoyed writing about was still there and being written about even less. We relaunched the blog as a newsletter in 2020 as a way to see if we could still do this thing, and after a few interviews and reviews, it was time to bring back the blog in full form.
In 2022, thanks to additional revenue from our record label side, we were able to allocate funds to pay writers and bring Patrick back to do some editing. We post whenever we have something we’re excited to share. Madison Bulnes also joined as our editor, managing our content calendar, editing articles and reviewing pitches.
The best way to understand what we cover is to read our blog! We hope to become a place where people come to find rising artists making weird, interesting, innovative sounds—with an emphasis on projects created by underrepresented people. If they’re covered in Pitchfork (RIP) we don’t want them! Usually, we focus on artists with less than 100,000 listeners on Spotify—and the smaller, the better.
- Reviews on albums/EPs out within the last 4 months.
- More than just a song-to-song breakdown, but an analysis of the project as a whole: what it’s saying, what it offers to music as a whole, why it stands out, why we should care, etc
- Reviews on concerts
- Mainly looking to report on shows in Boston and New York, but we’re open to other cities, too 😉
- Q&As
- Narrative interviews
- a more in-depth look into the artist with quotes intertwined
- Email madison [at] everydejavu [dot] com
- Give a brief bio of who you are
- Include sample writings (doesn’t have to be published officially anywhere)
- Link the artist
- A paragraph or two with a description of the sound the artist is making, the angle you plan on taking, and an explanation of why you think they’re special.
We’re a small, DIY blog with little staff working after our day jobs, so we don’t have the highest rates in the market, BUT this is what we can offer at the moment:
- $30 for a 600+ word review
- $40 for a Q&A with at least a 300-word intro
- $50 for an artist/band profile of about 800-1000 words
- $60 for coverage on a niche subculture with quotes from at least two participants of that scene. For example, covering the Boston hip-hop beat scene and the community surrounding it.
- $60 for an interesting listicle: deep dive into a discography of a lesser known artist or prolific artist who has many gems to uncover, a list of best songs within a niche subculture or geographical scene. For example, covering the top 15 out of 250+ guitar albums by Buckethead.
- Boston/NYC/Orlando only (or special events): $40 + up to $20 ticket compensation for coverage of a live show that includes quotes from at least one artist or band performing and context of the scene surrounding the show, at least 800 words.
There is also a $5 per piece bonus for our “Senior Writers.” Senior Writer status is achieved after a writer has written 5 or more posts within the last year.
The best way to understand what we cover is to read our blog! We hope to become a place where people come to find rising artists making weird, interesting, innovative sounds—with an emphasis on projects created by underrepresented people. If you fit this description, please send your music our way! We can’t listen to everything that’s sent our way, and a submission doesn’t guarantee a review or interview. With that being said, follow the bullet points below to submit your music to us for your best chance to have your music written about:
- Send all submissions to madison [at] everydejavu [dot] com or use the contact form at the bottom of this page (pick “Blog Coverage Request”).
- Include streamable links. If it’s released already, we prefer Bandcamp, SoundCloud or Spotify. If it’s not released, we prefer private Bandcamp or SoundCloud. Please do not send us files!
- Press kits, EPKs, links to your website and socials are all helpful, but most importantly just tell us about yourself: where you’re from, what type of music you make, what music you’ve released/are releasing, pictures of you
- We focus on music released within the last 4 months. Ideally, the more recent, the better.