Who can you trust? The PR firm that f**ks up your track.

I can get annoyed that artists are going through processes and not trusting anything. They act like they live in former eastern Europe and a spooked by everything.

Last week I spoke to a friend that was hiring two PR firms. These PR firms are one of the more famous ones and have a long row of famous artists that use them. My friend had been in long discussions with them and they had made a plan for his new release.

I meet him at a convention and he asked what I thought about these two PR agencies. I told him that they are famous ones and seems to do a good job. My friend then explained their PR plan and each step they will do, and it was full of mistakes. Not just mistakes, rookie mistakes that a PR company should guide their artist not to do.

First, they released the track in the middle of the week, saying it was less competition? Yes, it's a reason for that. Friday is the official day in the world to release music. Most lists, programs, and other things updates on Friday. To release on another day then that is getting a guarantee that the track doesn't get any attention at the streaming services like Spotify, Deezer or Apple. Have less chance to get rotation on radio and less chance to be written about on blogs. Simply since you mess up the process of publishing things for these tastemakers

I asked if they were not doing any PR against the streaming services. The answer he got was that Spotify is not that important. If the track goes well somewhere else it will gain traction.
That is just bullshit! You get a much tougher job if you don't present the music to them. And most sources like press and radio usually don't affect the listeners on Spotify. So it's a must that you do these steps to even have the slightest chance to get anything out of this single. I guess they tell stuff like that since they don't know how to market to these sites.

I asked if he had gotten the codes from the distributor to send to the streaming services? The PR agencies had never asked for any codes, which means they couldn't have been promoting him to the most important streaming services. In reality, they haven't even tried.

Not just that they asked him to release in the middle of the week. They asked him to release it and then they would send out to radio and media since they needed the Spotify link and could only get that after a release.

I was baffled, you can get that link beforehand. More baffled that they were totally crashing my friend's release. Not even a rookie trying to do PR would have done a worse job, and these claimed to be top of the line. Working with the biggest stars in Sweden and all, still, they had very little knowledge how to make PR in the new digital landscape.

I'm not that surprised though. I got an artist I work with myself, hiring a famous PR firm that claimed to be the best. They were expensive and got a few things for him. In a test, I told the artist that if he gave me half of the budget I will try to get a better result. He did and my in-house PR team with minimal effort got three times more result then this PR firm. Especially on streaming services, but also much more on international blogs.

So I apologize all artists, you have all rights to be suspicious. When the most renowned firms fuck things up like this, who can you really trust?