So Many Releases, So Few Reviews
a.k.a. With more new music being released than ever before, publications have cut back on not just reviews, but entry-level coverage of all kinds. How are new artists supposed to get noticed?
During the past few months, I’ve been wrestling with an unexpected realization:
I feel bad for electronic music publicists.
Historically, that’s not been a common sentiment in music circles, where PR reps are often viewed as a necessary evil at best—and bloodsucking middlemen at worst. Regardless of whether those characterizations are fair, it’s not hard to see where the animosity comes from. In an industry where artists and fans alike continue to put a premium on notions of “authenticity,” even when the music in question is highly manufactured, the mere existence of publicists—whose enthusiasm is frequently perceived as being wholly for hire, and therefore insincere—leaves many people feeling a bit queasy. It also doesn’t help that their services don’t come cheap. Even a limited publicity campaign will cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars, and in a time when most artists aren’t earning much from record sales or streaming, labels struggle to break even on the majority of their releases and the journalists tasked with covering said artists and releases are paid a pittance, it sometimes seems like publicists are some of the only people actually making money whenever a new album or EP finds its way into the world.
And for what? Sending out mass email blasts with a few promo links inside? Sending a few targeted pitches to specific journalists and publications? That’s an overly harsh assessment—a more complete overview of the job was provided by electronic music publicist Chanel Kadir when I interviewed her back in 2023 (and for what it’s worth, she’s since been hired as the Head of Press at Boiler Room). But even if you have a more charitable view of publicists, there’s no denying that working in PR is very much a music industry “email job,” and one in which even the top performers have a spectacularly high failure rate. There are no guarantees when it comes to publicity and promotion, and most records fail to find much traction in the real world, no matter how strenuous the marketing campaigns behind them.
At first glance, that doesn’t seem like a bad deal for publicists. Guaranteed paydays are increasingly hard to come by in the music industry, and when it comes to PR, the payday is not just guaranteed, but independent of an end result. Add in highly volatile nature of today’s music and media landscape (and the average person’s lack of understanding about how it all works), and it’s become easier than ever for less-than-honorable publicists who’ve promised clients the world to put in a minimal effort, claim they’ve “done all they can” and issue an invoice for their services. That sort of thing undoubtedly happens—the music industry has always been a magnet for grifters and charlatans—and that doesn’t help publicists’ collective reputation. Thankfully though, it’s also true that PR reps who engage in these kinds of underhanded practices rarely last long, especially when most of them are being hired by artists and labels based on word-of-mouth recommendations.
Some publicists are better than others, and sometimes dramatically so, but having spent more than two decades on the receiving end of their pitches, I can say that most of them—particularly the ones who work with electronic music, experimental music and other niche sounds—are acting in good faith. Yes, they’re getting paid to do so, and yes, much of their job does revolve around emailing people, but that doesn’t mean that their job is easy. In an era of media upheaval, with journalists regularly popping in and out of the field, publications intermittently conducting mass layoffs and / or suddenly blinking out of existence, and new content platforms rising and falling (sometimes within the span of just a few months), simply keeping tabs on who might potentially be interested in talking about a new release is practically a full-time job in itself. (A big part of what you’re paying for when you hire a publicist is the knowledge that they have an up-to-date rolodex of media contacts.)
This is a big part of why I’ve found myself feeling bad for electronic music publicists lately. They get hired to do a job, and most of them genuinely want to do it well, but with each passing month, it seems that there are fewer and fewer people out there that they can even talk to about potentially covering their latest projects. Earlier this year, I wrote about the lack of negative reviews at most electronic music publications, and while that’s still an issue, it’s since been supplanted by something far more fundamental:
Looking at the various media outlets, there are hardly any reviews being published at all.