 One of the biggest misconceptions today is, without a publicist, you will never get anywhere in your music. After all, these people are like magicians who find some spell to cast on writers to give you press coverage. Right? Right? Right? Right? Not so much. So why would I do in this video is discuss what publicity can and can't do as someone who's been involved with hundreds of different album rollouts from a wide variety of genres. I'm gonna not only explain to you the myths of paying for publicity, but I'll also give you strategies that work whether you hire a publicist or not that will actually build your fan base. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon and this is Muse Formation. Okay, so let's get this out of the way. The beginning of this video is gonna talk a lot of shit on publicists, but it's so you understand how to work the system, since by the end I'm gonna show you how to make all this knowledge work to your advantage. First off, it's 100% a myth you need a publicist to get blogs, podcasts, YouTubers, influencers to talk about you. If you get fans excited, all those people I just listed will talk about you. So if you take the route of building yourself up on a grassroots way by working message boards, you can do this all without ever having a publicist. I know this since I've lived this and I built up fans to huge fan bases without one, but there is a key here to how to think about this. There's a 1% here. These are records that are so good they spread from word of mouth more than 99% of other people's songs. The majority of people who hear them find it great. Now, you do have to do some promo because let's remember Canon's Law that it's totally bullshit that you just need to put out good music. You still need to have good strategy and work the record and the better your strategy and marketing, the further it will go. There's tons of records that never reach their full potential that are absolutely amazing because no one ever did the work for them. Even when you make great music a lot, then able to go much further if you do great marketing. Then there's the next 14%. These are acts that have one or two great songs and a bunch of good enough songs that have a ton of potential, but it's not being totally reached yet and may never be or they'll get better and they will send to the 1%. Publicity will do them a lot of favors as they have a few songs good enough that when they are brought to the attention, they will build up a fan base for them. The majority of people who hear them will like them and it's worth it for the publicist to take the limited time they have to push them further since this is who benefits from a publicist's attention the most because we have to remember publicists can only work the artists that are giving them results otherwise they're taking their time away from things that could get them better results and grow their own careers. Then there's the next 35%. Now, this is obviously an approximation. These are groups that are good enough that if people hear them, the publicity is not going to do a ton of good. They are good at about 20% of the people who hear them will like them. So the publicity is largely a waste, but it may set them up to have more years when they improve on their next release. I like to think of that as like the groups who have an okay debut that the people who are obsessed with the genre really like but then they really explode their audience on their next release. The other 50% is this vast majority of people who make music that no matter how much it gets promoted, no one's going to care because it just isn't good enough to make anyone want to ever hear that song a second time. All the publicity dollars are wasted since it retains at best 5% of people who hear it and that can even be a stretch since some of these don't even get second listens from anybody. Nothing is going to work to get them popular since no one listens again. If you don't believe me that this is true, do this experiment which I've done countless times to prove a point. Go to any major labels roster and look at how many artists you see that have less listens than a local band despite countless dollars in promotion spent. Promoting a bad product no longer works no matter how much money you throw at and also no matter what some version says in the needle drops comments. Let's get into what is a publicist good for. A publicist is good for three things in my opinion. A publicist is largely someone with email addresses of people who have influence but these emails largely get ignored which brings me to the second thing that is actually effective that they're good for. Relationships. These are relationships with people of influence so they will listen to the publicist pitches. Third, they're good for knowledge on how to present a musician so they have a chance of getting noticed by the people they email and they could write a pitch that actually gets people's eyes on this artist and gets them excited about them. Let's focus on number one though first. So what I'm saying is this is a person with some email addresses and what I mean by that is that many times these publicists swipe an email database from their previous job at a bigger PR firm or do enough research on their own to find the people to fill up this database that have some influence. I know this is someone who's been writing about the music business and podcasting with the musicians for over a decade. I get put on so many dumb lists because these people Google the musician's name plus interview and build up a mailing list. And yes, you can easily do this too just as easily while it takes time. If you do this regularly for about one hour a week for three months, you will probably have nearly the same list that they do. There's even services that are horrible people that collect influential people's emails and will sell you the whole list. And if I find one that sells mine to musicians, mark my words. It's on site that I will, uh... Well, I'll probably give them a stern lecture on how much of my time they've wasted deleting their emails. So the problem is, though, if you don't have relationships with these people, whether you're a small band or you're a publicist, it doesn't do you a lot of good. When you or that publicist or cold-emailing people you don't know is commonly only to have a success rate of 5 to 15% of the time if you absolutely kill a pitch and have something amazing to talk about. And it's even less when you just have bullshit that is totally uneventful. But the same thing goes for these publicists. When you are a small act, no one cares about. You sending that email and the publicist sending it does the same amount of nothing. So what I'm telling you here is a small-time publicist without strong relationship is not going to get you a lot. There's certain outlets who will write about anything they are pitched in their field. And you will often find that you could have gotten that publicity yourself without a publicist. So when you're a young group that hasn't commanded a much attention, it's not going to do very much. But what about when they have strong connections and represent tons of huge artists? You're probably going to pay a lot for those relationships, so you may be able to grow a little bit from it. But I will tell you this, I rarely see that happen with many of the best publicists with small acts. There's just too many variables and how people react to your music on whether you're going to get the attention you are demanding since some of them can suck up all the attention, just like this coronavirus. The fact is a lot can go wrong hiring a publicist. And this is why they largely have bad reputations, is that one, there's a ton of variables as to when a campaign works. Two, a lot of them focus on their big clients or the ones with good responses who have good strategy. More on that later. Three, some of them are just shitty at their job because this job attracts tons of shitty lazy people. To give you an idea of how this publicity does actually work for you though, let's look at this graph. This represents the levels of building a fan base. What I like to say is a publicist working with a band with no content plan can get maybe about one notch on here. If they're making amazing content to help a publicity, you can often get them two notches, but that's about as far as it ever gets going outside of the 1% time that you have amazing music and they help you get it out there and you're in that 1% we talked about before. So this graph should make you wonder, is this the right time to work with a publicist? The answer is if you're at the bottom, it will probably net you very little for the money you pay. It's probably not worth the money for you to hire a publicist if you are at the bottom of the graph since the return on what you spend isn't going to be worth your ROI. As the saying goes, advertising a bad product is the greatest waste of money. This is exactly why I absolutely advise investing in PR to you see a good reaction of organic growth. You need to be able to see that when people hear your music they're reacting to it. That's when you should draw more attention to it and what a publicist is, is when you draw his attention to your music. But if you're drawing your attention to it and people aren't reacting to it well, a publicist doesn't solve that. Hiring a publicist is essentially advertising. While it's not as effective as Facebook ads, it is ineffective and it is advertising. But if you're in the middle of this graph and people have already responded well to your music, that's when it may be effective to hire a publicist. Anything above this point is usually a good point to hire one. But there's even more to it since this game isn't very fair for you or your publicist when you're a small act. A dichotomy most musicians don't get till they experiment is that yes, publicists with bigger artists often trade exposure for bigger artists for your exposure. They'll do a quid pro quo of saying that outlet they'll get an exclusive with their bigger artists if they just cover their smaller artists. But there is a problem with that thinking is it's kind of obsolete. Is that there's so few press outlets now and so many musicians that publicists no longer have that leverage to get you pressed most of the time. These outlets are so starved for clicks that they have to do what's best for them to cover groups they know are either gonna one give them loyalty for discovering an amazing gem and know that their readers will turn against them if they didn't tell them an act they should have known early on or two, give them eyes since they need eyes for their content to get ad revenue and can't afford to waste that unless it's worth it. So the eyes of them trading their big act for publicity for you is kind of a myth now. And while it can happen occasionally, the amount of bands who believe that is not proportional to how often it happens. Don't expect this to take you from zero to one. That is not a publicist's duty. It's to draw some eyes to you when you are doing something exceptional and you have something great to show them whether that's a great song or video or you're doing something else cool. If you haven't figured out what that exceptional thing is, publicity is not gonna work very well for you. But what about if you've amounted let's say 10,000 fans and you're looking to make a big move for your next song and it seems like you have done it all without a publicist. Let's talk the details of making working with a publicist well since I'm tired of being negative. The first kind of subject I want to talk about is small time press often trickles up. Often types all the small blogs and podcasts that you may not be psyched to do often are watched by the big time taste makers. This goes for Spotify playlists on the blogs on the getting on late night TV. I watch on Twitter constantly as smaller outlets like say my friends at the alternative fight and act early. Seven to 14 days later pitchfork is talking about them. If you look at the alternatives numbers compared to pitchfork they aren't comparable but their influence is priceless and is watched by so many of the influential people in music it shouldn't be underestimated. My message here is that yes a publicist may only mention a few smaller outlets but they're influential ones that can mean big things you need to do press with everyone when you're starting out. You aren't at the point where you should pick and choose publicity. If you are watching this video do a leap I can do that you can't next good pitches go a long way a strong subject in a pitch from a publicist can get you a lot of press but the thing is that is downstream from the publicist you yourself have to have created great content stories in imagery and that isn't a publicist job that is your team's job. So while you are making all that great content someone on your team should be thinking about how to describe it in a compelling way. Hell instead of thinking about how to describe it do what I've told you in previous videos and ask yourself what would get fans talking and then do that to design this content by writing down what they would say and then say that in your press release since one of the best tricks to press is to just say what you want writers to say about you anyway but if you don't have someone who can articulate your music and the story behind it considering hiring an out-of-work music writer to help you figure out what you do or you may just need to hire a publicist to do this. More about the dynamics of who you can get to help you pitch things in a future video. Now let's talk about premieres. Premieres on respected blogs these days often only gets you a few hundred looks at most when you are unknown. So many musicians get excited by a premiere but they don't move as many listeners as you probably think they do. While you should premiere music and I don't want to down it too much with a blog or whatever outlet will have you as often as possible don't expect this to move mountains. So many people lose their momentum because they're disappointed banking on a premiere is going to do huge things for them. It may just get you in front of a few influential eyes and open doors to other things. Now let's talk about YouTubers and podcasts. Getting interviewed especially in long form where fans hear your voice and your story is one of the most effective ways to create bonds with fans. Since so much of music discovery is someone with influence saying to their fans who listens to anything they say making them finally break down and take the chance to listen to your music is absolutely insane how much more effective a podcast could be for getting you fans than a premiere. But the bond you make with fans in a podcast where they grow to like you and like what your personality is can really get people invested in giving your music a big chance. People are often shocked by how big a difference this is when we go over the analytics of a campaign what actually moves marketing campaigns I work on. Okay, I could go on this for about five more videos so let's get into some key takeaways to wrap this video up. If you're going to hire a publicist you need to ask the publicist this question what relationships do you have at outlets that are solid that will definitely cover us? That answer should basically be the quid in a quid pro quo where you say you are happy to pay an amount for their services if they deliver on those relationships. I like to always tell any publicist that the agreement that you'd like to make depends on results and if they are just going to get you nothing you shouldn't have to pay them. As well you should ask them about the groups they worked with and make sure some of the ones were at a similar point in building their fan base as you. There's drastically different skill set for a publicist for building up an artist with 3,000 monthly listeners 30K and 300,000. I've managed groups at all of those levels and when we do with publicists can not be more different but some publicists throw the same plan at all of those levels. Also meet with more than one publicist. Everyone thinks the first publicist they meet is great since they don't know how good they are talking in a game since that's what they do for a living. You can quickly decide who seems best after you meet with three to five of them. So do your research and talk to a few. Now I'm also gonna say I've talked a lot of trash on publicists in this video. It's impossible for me to know every publicist obviously. There are some I absolutely love. I think do great work. Hashtag not all publicists. But what I can tell you is in the music business their work is so visible. Most of the time you can see if they are killing it. There I go being negative again though. So instead what do you do to make this work? I think you might have a hint of what I'm gonna say. Strategy, strategy, strategy. This last bit of advice goes for whether you're gonna do this yourself or hire a publicist. Since the publicists work harder for the people with good strategy. While it is absolutely true that all the groups you love with big fan bases have publicists, what they also have is strategy. While you can get far without a publicist, if you don't have strategy you're gonna get nowhere. And this brings me to another thing. Publicists are not strategists. One in a hundred publicists is amazing with strategy. If there's one thing I've experienced countless times is the publicists are so busy maintaining those relationships they need to get doors open that they throw the same strategy in every single release they do and it involves as few press releases as possible because if you have six singles instead of three that's double the work they have to do for their fee. Obviously if you watch this entire playlist on how to take yourself from zero to 10,000 fans you are interested in developing a smart strategy. But the main thing I will part on you is don't expect a publicist to be an expert on strategy since they are usually just an expert at buying Yeager bombs for some depressed writer that just got dumped again since that's literally part of their job. Remember all a publicist is doing is drawing more eyes to you. When these eyes get to you they need to see something exceptional. Let's also remember PR is often about setting your next release to grow. The more people watching you when you do achieve great miss means you go further. So thinking about your current campaign isn't always a good long-term vision. Let's remember how Spotify promotion works. For every file you get replace you in one more Discover Weekly playlist of someone who doesn't file you. This is much like publicity. You will be on one more person's radar the further you go setting up future releases for success. Thanks so much for watching. That's it. Am I missing anything? Is there any way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I want to answer them. So leave them in the comments. I hope you liked this video and if you did please like and subscribe and get notified for my future videos since I'm going to be breaking down the concepts in this video along with tons of others on promoting your music and how to make music you're more happy with. As well, I have a Facebook group that's linked below that has only helpful information. No one tried to sell you anything. Playlist or con artists. Only helpful information for musicians looking to be better themselves. If you want to learn more about me, make a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do. Head to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on any of the socials. Thanks for watching. One last thing, if you liked this video there's two playlists here with tons more videos that you'll probably enjoy. One's about how you promote your music and the other's about how you make songs you're happy with. Otherwise, you can hit the subscribe button here to see the rest of my videos. Thanks so much for watching.