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Let’s dive into today’s topic:
Entertain media with creative PR
Three campaigns that pitched a story to enjoy.
Why it matters
Generating earned media matters for artists, even as power shifts toward community and niche positioning. Media remain one of music’s gatekeepers: journalists can accelerate a career and decide which artist gets associated with what.
Every week journalists open dozens of music pitches saying the same thing in different words: new single, new album, new tour, a quote about staying true to the sound.
Journalists read hundreds of stories, and they get bored exactly like everyone else because sometimes, music PR reads like a checklist rather than a story.
We forget something obvious: we work in the entertainment industry, and journalists are humans susceptible to entertainment. So, entertain them.
How it works
When strategising a PR approach, challenge yourself to pitch an out-of-the-box concept instead of a routine update. Journalists like this because the story is an instant conversation starter.
Three examples of artists who pitched the format, not the music:
A music campaign in a runners magazine. Harry Styles was interviewed by Haruki Murakami for Runner’s World. Two men from entirely different creative fields, talking about marathon running. I’ve written about this interview before for what it teaches about creative positioning. Here, the learning is the pitch itself. A running title got a music story it would never normally chase.
The venue becomes the pitch. Substack has hosted a run of literary readings in unlikely spaces, most notably a reading held inside a New York bathhouse. While the readings themselves were fairly standard, the format wasn’t. A room of writers reading in swimsuits is simply a far easier story to tell.
The interview as a power game. Back in 2017, for her album Masseduction, St. Vincent had journalists interview her mid-massage, face-down with no eye contact possible, or inside a purpose-built pink box, with pre-recorded answers ready for any cliché question. She topped it off with a parody interview series mocking the exact questions press days throw at her.
None of these three pitched the music directly. They pitched a format a journalist couldn’t ignore, or, in the case of St. Vincent, surprised the interviewers who expected a standard interview format, resulting in high-value earned media placements.
Yes, but..
These three examples work for emerging or established artists with a track record: Media only risks an unusual format when there’s already a reputation to spend. It isn’t workable for an introduction campaign with no prior coverage. A journalist has no reason yet to trust an unknown name with something this odd.
However, it still holds for introducing new artists to smaller, special-interest niche media, where the bar for newsworthy is lower and a strange, well-matched pitch is exactly the creative work that gets you noticed.
Take action now
Artists can run a Crazy Eights session to brainstorm eight strange pitch angles in eight minutes, weirder than “new single out now.”
Your thoughts
Further reading
Harry Styles Is One of Us (Runner’s World)
I went to a steamy literary reading in a New York bathhouse (Dazed)
St. Vincent Is Telling You Everything (BuzzFeed News)
Op auditie in St. Vincent’s Wonderland (3voor12)
Finding creative clarity in unlikely crossover interviews (The Fanbase Builder)
How to make your album announcement newsworthy (The Fanbase Builder)
Generate eight new content ideas in eight minutes (The Fanbase Builder)
I've been really passionate about creative PR so appreciate your post a lot. For emerging artists, it's better to think about an unusual way of releasing or promoting their music, showcasing that on their social media, and pitching it to media or hoping it will get picked up. For example, Beabadoobee recently sent some fans an unreleased track on an iPod Shuffle. That's a cool story that people want to write about thats different from just mentioning she has a new song. Dd you see some exciting examples if smaller artists recently?