Music journalists and bloggers are, for the most part, a bunch of individuals with inconsistent musical tastes and attitudes. When it comes to working with the press, there's no "one size fits all" rule for us. To find out exactly what publicists need to avoid in order to build effective relationships with the music industry's #1 gatekeepers, we turned to some of your favorite writers, editors, and bloggers for The 10 PR Commandments.
1. "Thou shalt not lie."
So many times writers are given the run around about the availability of artists, correct information, press kits and other issues. If an artists doesn't want to do an interview, tell the writer. If you can't get a writer passes to a show, say so. Don't get the writer's hopes up when in the end you know it ain't gonna happen."
- Q (Qsviews)
2. "Thou shalt not send more than one follow-up email."
- Oliver Wang (Poplicks.com, Soul-Sides.com)
3. "Thou shalt not send me irrelevant material."
NEWSFLASH: I run a hip-hop blog and work at a hip-hop magazine. I have no interest in your indie rock group from Durham, North Carolina. You and your scrawny British pop singer can jump in the English Channel. What exactly are you looking to achieve anyway? Do you think I'm going to squeeze a post about your Romanian techno artist in between my Cormega retrospective and the new Redman single? Get real. Seriously, my Gmail account is 98% full as we speak. Let it go.
- Eskay (Nahright.com, XXLmag.com)
4."Keep your promises."
If you are inviting me to an event, make sure I am on the list and will get in without a problem.
Planning your afternoon around an event that you will not get into sucks, and it burns bridges. Also, always allow me to bring a "plus 1" to the event. I'll have more fun if I bring my friend.
- Hashim (Hiphop-blogs.com)
5. "Thou shalt not disregard a blogger's feedback."
One of the things I most hate is when I send feedback to a PR person explaining why a certain artist isn't likely to get shine on my site and it is then disregarded. For instance, if someone sends me a new Mike Jones stream, I am not likely to post it, since he's a clown and the new wave of Houston hip-hoppers don't really interest me. I will often let someone know so that they can tailor the pitches in the future. But then these people send me something from Mike Jones again, or something similar from Paul Wall. It just doesn't make sense to me.
- Joey (Straight Bangin')
6. "Research. Research. Research."
a) Pay attention to what kind of music the site covers.
b) Pay attention to what style of music the site "favors." Which artists or genres are more likely get positive or negative reviews? Unless you're an "all publicity is good publicity" type of person, don't send a Lil Boosie CD to a writer who just stomped all over Yung Joc's latest album.
- Rizoh (The Rap Up)
7. "Follow the media outlet's guidelines for submissions."
In ProHipHop's case, I have specific emails for press releases. When they go to the wrong email I get grouchy and sometimes don't even open them for a week or so. When they go to all my emails I get really grouchy because then I have to contact the media person and ask them to stop.
- Clyde Smith (Prohiphop.com)
8. "Send music!!!!"
Mp3s, audio streams or better yet a zshare link so I can hear your music, especially if you're a new artist whose music I may not be familiar with. I'm not downloading a zip file of a full-length by some artist I'm not familiar with just to check it out. Also, send images, website links an embed codes for videos, trailers, samplers, mixtapes etc. Blogging is more than just audio and text now. If you ain't got a visual now, you're trying to play the game with one hand tied behind your back. Almost contrary to what I just said above, if you have an embeddable music player with your album or mixtape, I might actually f-ck with that and i can also put it up on the site. I'm just not not gonna necessarily go through the trouble of downloading a file from a filesharing site if I don't know you.
- Ian (Notes from A Different Kitchen)
9. "Read the sites you reach out to."
You'd be surprised to know how many publicists email me with pitches on an album that I just reviewed two days ago. In my opinion, this only betrays a poverty of interest in the stuff you're pushing. If you're not enthusiastic about the music you're promoting, why should anyone else be?
- Rizoh
10. "Thou shall not call on the weekends or holidays."
Don't call a writers/editors' personal cellphones to pitch an artist after 7 pm, on weekends or holidays. If you don't catch me at the office, call me the next day. If it's Friday, wait until Monday. I hate getting calls late in the evening from publicists about artists. I hate it even more on the weekends when I'm out trying to have a good time. And on holidays, it's the worst. Being a writer is my job and I know the business is always open for the most part but at certain time I like to feel like I'm not working. Certain times and days people should have common sense to not be calling.
- Randy Exclusive (Writers Block)
21 comments:
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real talk.
hahaha...lol.
good stuff..keep educating the masses.
maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan. truth.
That's shit, no offence.
1) Of course people send stuff beyond the ambit of a market - they're hoping that they can maybe strike a chord and get some extra shine in an area they wouldn't normally. And if it's no good just add it to the eBay pile - mo' money, less problems.
2) No, getting sent random MP3s is a nightmare - send an email first then the music. No one wants their email clogging up with utter shite.
3) Thou Shall Not Lie - Nice in principle, but anyone who's been working with PRs for more than a hot blog second realises that their entire game's based on lying. You can't avoid it, just ignore it.
4) Follow up emails - It's a fact that persistant PRs get more coverage than random ones. Expect mroe than one follow up email - they're just doing their job. Otherwise it's way too easy to completely ignore the first one. A better entry would be 'Don't send automated emails' - tailor the response to the writer - if you can't be bothered to speak to the writer direct then why should they respond to you?
5) 5. "Thou shalt not disregard a blogger's feedback." As Curtis would say, 'Ha ha ha ha!' Please, bloggers don't mean shit - no act ever hyped by a blogger has done anything sales wise. The fact any PR's showing interest in you should be welcomed.
6) There's no such thing as bad press - that review that obliterates an album produces more sales than a middling middle of the road one. Hence albums you might not personall like.
no act ever hyped by a blogger has done anything sales wise. The fact any PR's showing interest in you should be welcomed.
------------
Maybe I should remind you that attaining ample coverage and publicity don't necessarily mean that you'll see a spike in record sales. That's not what publicity is designed for. It's mainly to get your name out there.
Anonymous, I hate to be rude but you seem rather clueless.
We as bloggers are making these comments because all sorts of people, professional type people, bug us constantly to get coverage. We're trying to tell them what works with us.
How would you know better than us what works with us?
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"For instance, if someone sends me a new Mike Jones stream, I am not likely to post it, since he's a clown and the new wave of Houston hip-hoppers don't really interest me."
Joey, dude, this doesn't make you look good as a writer. You sound like a snobby New York listener still stuck in the Golden Years of Hip Hop (read: late 80's, early 90's).
How do you know Mike Jones is a clown? Have you ever hung out with him? Interviewed him? Nope, didn't think so. You can't go by what you see in the videos or hear in the music because NO ONE PRESENTS THEIR TRUE SELF IN THEIR MUSIC. Not Nas, Hov, Redman, Meth, KRS, Chuck D, nobody. What you think is going on is probably the exact opposite of what's really going on.
Also, if that's your personal opinion of the artist, you should keep that to yourself instead of broadcasting that to the world. Heaven forbid that you should EVER need something from Mike Jones or his label, but if it happens, someone can always point them here to your comment. And should something ever happen to the blog itself, it won't because Google's got an archived copy of the post saved to one of their hundreds of thousands of servers spread across the Earth.
Please don't take this as coming from a Mike Jones fan because it doesn't. I've never been a fan of his...I just think that your comment was extremely pretentious and done with really bad taste. It's stuff like this that makes it hard for blogger's to be seen as serious, credible writer's.
While I can understand most of these "rules," I take issue with the "Thou shalt not lie" commandment. It's true that some publicists and PR types do lie, bend the truth, what have you. But a lot of times if a PR person is telling you they are trying to hook up an interview, have an interview scheduled, or have you on a guestlist, they're not lying. Ultimately though, these things fall into the hands of managers and artists who aren't always as savvy to how these things work and think nothing of constantly canceling an interview or overstretching a guestlist only to cut people off the night of the show. If the PR person is making this commitment in good faith, they can't be faulted for someone else down the chain's actions. As someone who rolls with a couple of these PR types, I know this is one of the biggest daily frustrations on THEIR end too. At the end of the day, it's the music business, and shit doesn't always go as planned.
y'all stupid. you can't really disagree with these fools, or call them out for expressing their opinions on blog-related articles. y'all stupid.
anyway, the only problem I had with this list is that I think a couple of em could probably be consolidated, I can't see it cause of this comment thing, but I remember that there were like 3 where the basic principle was "read the blog which you're e-mailing, don't send irrelevant shit"
but that would leave us with some dumb number like 7 or 8, which would ruin the surface appeal. nobody wants 8 PR commandments.
shout out to dipset
I must say Amen.
Some of the responses were a bit extreme, but for the most part they were all true.
I love that we're finally speaking up for ourselves.
man...truth. Nuff said.
Tynicka Battle from ThinkTank Marketing here. This is really good feedback for online publicists/content providers to see. We know some fine tuning could make our reach out even more effective so I read all of these points carefully. A lot of your pain is our pain too, since we serve as a liaison and are only as helpful as our clients allow us to be. Most of the clients we work with are great, and they give us all the tools and artist accessibility that is feasible, but some other times, we’re screwed too. I would hope that I am not guilty of breaking too many of these commandments but a few of them are unavoidable for the most part, namely:
#2 –Thou shalt not send more than one follow-up email: we get paid to harass publishers, and believe it or not, sometimes being a pain is what gets the job done. Most people need a lil fire set underneath them to keep it movin’. If I send a review copy out for product X, I need a review up to fill that space on my report, so you are definitely going to hear from me.
#5 – Thou shalt not disregard a bloggers feedback: Thankfully, that’s not a ThinkTank reference ;) however, we do not generally amend the reach out lists for a campaign based on feedback. We select categories to send messages to based on genre: Hip Hop, Soundtracks, R&B, Classic Soul, etc. We report back all feedback to our clients but do not remove sites based on opinion since you may decide to post an artist’s 2nd single, even though you generally disliked the 1st single. We work with several webmasters that even post music they can’t stand because they think their users may get a kick out of it.
And lastly…
#7 - Follow the media outlet's guidelines for submissions: This is a big one. We appreciate the respective processes that help publishers organize all of the pitches they receive. However, we work with over 2,000 writers and webmasters (which amounts to about 500 sites). While I can rattle off a few submission guidelines by memory, namely for the portals, it is virtually impossible to remember all the ways in which we need to submit content. Please just bear with us and remind us with a quick reply to our blasts that your site can only use mp3s, even though we routinely blast streams.
AND NOW, since we’re in the spirit of being candid. I hope you will entertain my “Pretty please, do not ever do this again” list for publishers:
“PUBLISHERS: Pretty please, do not ever do this again”
#1 – Please do not ask for several copies of a release for all your staff. Most times we only receive 30 review copies, and we receive upwards of 50 requests so we need to sort them out by need and site content relevance. Plus, it is helpful to actually support the release with a mention before you ask for a copy. We don’t have enough copies, or time to be sending out freebies.
#2 – Please do not threaten to go directly to the client with a press request because you haven’t received an interview. We just end up getting the message sent back to us and we’re back in the same predicament. If you haven’t received a reply at all, then you should definitely put an indie on blast, but if you have been told from a publicist you trust and have worked with several times before, then you should know that all will be AOK, just maybe not as soon as you’d like.
#3 – This is just a personal pet peeve. Please do not use phrases like “please advise” or use several exclamation points and question marks when asking where your review copy is. I don’t use that tone with anyone.
That was good for me. We should do this more often! Thank you for posting this guys!
Tynicka, thanks for your amazing feedback. You raised some great points, many of which will definitely end up on our 10 Writers/Publishers Commandments list.
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