Is music PR worth it?

You are asking an agency whether you should buy what the agency sells, so treat the following with appropriate suspicion. We have tried to write it as though we were not selling anything.

When music PR is not worth it

• The recording is not finished. No campaign rescues a track that is not ready. Spend the money on the mix and the master.
• You have no assets at all. If there are no press shots, no artwork and no video, an outreach campaign will fail for reasons unrelated to the outreach.
• Your release is in three weeks. Digital campaigns need six weeks. Print needs ten to twelve. Folk and classical need longer still.
• You want streams. Press coverage correlates weakly with streaming. If streams are the goal, targeted advertising and playlist work will do more per pound.
• You are a producer or electronic artist and press is the whole plan. In electronic music, DJ servicing and specialist radio move records. Editorial rarely does on its own.
• It would consume your entire budget. A campaign with nothing left for advertising, a video or a tour is usually the wrong allocation.

When it is worth it

• You have a genuine story. Not a genre description — a story. Where the song came from, what happened, why it exists.
• You have a live reputation. Gigs, support slots, a festival billing. These give writers a reason to move now.
• You are trying to reach the industry, not just fans. Coverage in the right specialist outlet is read by bookers, A&R and promoters, and that is frequently where its real value sits.
• You are building a case over time. Coverage compounds. The specialist placement is what makes the tier above take the next pitch seriously.
• You are in a genre where press still drives sales. Rock, metal, folk and classical audiences read reviews and buy records off the back of them.

What music PR actually gets you

Not streams, mostly. What it gets you is legitimacy — a body of third-party coverage that makes every subsequent approach easier. Booking agents, festival programmers, playlist curators and journalists all use the same shortcut: has anybody else taken this seriously?

That is a slow, cumulative asset rather than a spike. Artists who expect a spike are usually disappointed even by successful campaigns.

The honest comparison

The reason our campaigns bundle press, assets and advertising together is that the first row on its own is rarely the right answer for an independent artist — and buying rows one, two and three separately costs several times more.

A test you can apply

Write down, in one sentence, why a music journalist should write about this release this month. Not why it is good — why it is newsworthy now.

If you can write that sentence, a campaign has something to work with. If you cannot, the honest answer is usually to wait, and any agency that takes your money anyway is not doing you a service.