PR is a trade.

I should learn some PR you can hear artists say time to time. I guess that is kind of stupid. Sure you should know the basics so you know what kind of PR you are buying and what to expect from it. But the PR job itself an artist can never learn. Yes, they can but then they are not artists they work as PR agents. To be both I have a hard time to see, usually the people that say they usually suck on one of the two.

To be a PR agent is a trade. You pay for the knowledge or contacts. The contacts you can never pick up as an artist. To keep the network alive you need to send stuff all the time. As an artist you can't release a new thing a week to keep the network up so it doesn't matter that you have the addresses, you still have to work the network.
Another disadvantage is that if you send as the artist people doesn't really want to tell you the truth. To the PR person, you can actually say that you didn't like this song. That is much harder to tell an artist so they tend to tell some small white lies and that is very frustrating.
Another thing is that you also send the same stuff. If you went into a shop that just sells cookies you can be happy, but if you look to buy fruit you are not that excited. same here the people want different things to be excited about your send outs if you just do your own stuff it's like selling the same thing all the time.

Then the knowledge. I guess that comes with the send outs, You learn from each send out. You also are updated with the receiver and knows what they like and what they need. Same here you can learn it but then you are more a PR agent than an artist. In the end, you will do more PR jobs for other people than yourself and you are just doing music as a  hobby.

PR is a thing that cost money, yes. Even fro the PR person they have to invest in systems to push things and small as and so on. I think that many think that if you learn PR you get it all for free, that you only pay for the time.
That is NOT true. PR will cost however you do it and here the saying "you got what you pay for" is really true. You probably need to spend money in the PR game in different ways. Paying that radio person to push the song, at the same time buy some stuff from Submission Hub at the same time do that free show in the capital city to get some press. In the end, if you try to get all your PR free you are just using the same channels as many other people it becomes impossible to get through the noise.

In the end, no you can't really learn PR better to let the PRO:s do it but have a piece of knowledge what PRo:s to put it on.

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