Today, we’re going to get into this bit of not-so great advice:
Paying for PR doesn’t work, and it’s a waste of money.
You hear some wildly contradictory POVs about music PR, depending on who you ask. Some people will tell you hiring a PR rep unlocks all kinds of doors and fast-tracks your music career (that’s the topic of a different post in this series). Some people will tell you the whole prospect of paying a professional publicist is an elaborate scam, that it doesn’t do anything for your act’s profile, and that it’s a total waste of money. Some people fall somewhere in the middle, but they often get talked over at parties by people who have more extreme takes.
In my experience, most of the people who have insisted to me that hiring a publicist doesn’t work are musicians who have hired a publicist who ultimately didn’t perform to expectations. And these have been musicians I’ve known — I know where they play, I know what their music sounds like, we’ve been in the same social circles. So with those publicist-haters I know personally, I can kind of see into at least a little bit of their own blind spots.
In particular, you know who really gets bent out of shape about underperforming PR campaigns? People who are accustomed to solving problems by paying someone to fix the problem.
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