LOCAL up-and-coming bands could be in for the ride of their life, as a competition has just been launched giving them an opportunity to travel to the USA to get their music noticed.
Part-time singer songwriter Julia Jones, who hails from Narberth, has been running a major tour with her band across America for the last three years promoting major UK music using their pimped-out double-decker bus.
Thirty-four-year-old Julia, who still has family in Narberth, launched the scheme to promote unknown British bands in the US through the touring Brit Bus three years ago.
The idea of the tour was born after Julia read an industry report into the plummet in UK record sales in the US.
So far, the concept has worked rather well. In the scheme's first year, Julia could not persuade any signed acts to get involved, and so went on the bus tour solo with her own band to prove a point. The tour attracted a lot of media attention and was covered by Fox TV, CBS and NBC, plus a mass of local channels, newspapers, and radio stations that followed the bus's steady progress along the way. Brit Bus relies on grassroots promotion of several bands at once.
Each year, 10 UK acts are picked and their music promoted on the bus as it travels from state to state. The Magic Numbers and DJ Paul Oakenfold met up with the tour last year, posing for photos, giving away CDs, talking to fans and the media, recording video diaries for the tour website, and giving signed guitars to lucky competition winners.
In April, Julia will set off from Los Angeles in the double-decker London bus with a dozen colleagues on a three-month, 4,000-mile tour of the US to promote British music.
Her latest strategy is an unsigned band competition judged by New York University students as part of their music business degree. The winners of the competition will join parts of the tour and get Gibson guitars, Premier drum kits and Ashdown amplifiers.
Entries for the competition close on March 31. Last year's winning band, 'Proxy', were featured with Brit Bus in a Fuse TV interview in New York, took part in a photo shoot on the balcony of the Hard Rock Café in Times Square, and then got a record deal, with a new single due to be released next month.
For further information, check out the website at http://www.thebritbustour.com">www.thebritbustour.com