The Public Relations Approach to Music Promotion

From the outside looking in, it may appear that the music and recording industry functions like a well-oiled machine, a machine that, in theory, runs free from any significant administrative and creative strategical input. In reality, however, the recording industry requires significant contributions from experts within various different facets of the music promotion process. After all, platinum selling records are not mass-produced on some sort of "musical conveyor belt," programmed with one-size-fits-all promotional tactics that are guaranteed to catapult the record, and the artist themselves, into industrial stardom.

Countless talented artists, songwriters and musicians have gone unnoticed by the public with no immediate hope of ever breaking into the mainstream music scene. Success and notoriety are not guaranteed and, unfortunately, talent is not always a consistent measure of record sales. If talent is not an accurate predictor of record sales then what is? The answer is simple, advertising and promotion.

Similar to any other industry, the recording industry requires a little help from its friends in advertising and public relations in order to function effectively and achieve their primary target objective: to sell millions of records. The concept of "good music" selling itself is an ideal concept, but, unfortunately, it is not quite feasible within today's overpopulated music market. Artists have to "stand out of the crowd" in order to get noticed and attain merely a fraction of their musical genre's market.

The trick to succeeding within this cutthroat music industry is, as you may have guessed, traditional public relations methods guised as music promotion and artist publicity measures. In the past, the music industry has relied heavily upon antiquated marketing and advertising measures that may have been effective 15 years ago, but they have long since outgrown their prime. The modern-day version of recording industry music promotion and artist publicity is, fairly simply, collaborated public relations and marketing efforts, with an emphasis on public relations within the recording label decision-making hierarchy.

Public relations based music promotion and artist publicity tactics will, in my opinion, help the music industry to harness and employ the alterations occurring as a result of the industry's transition to digital distribution and promotion. Consumer engagement havens such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and iTunes are simply too successful and frequently used to ignore. Public relations-rooted promotion is, indeed, capable of handling and optimizing social media and music sharing platforms that will eventually prove to be instrumental to the music industry's digital success.

In the future, I hope to see a significant paradigm shift or transition within the recording industry's preferred methods of music promotion and artist publicity. I expect to see an increase in promotional tactics that are rooted within the public relations discipline and, as a result, a decrease in alternative promotional methods such as marketing and advertising. Considering the industry's current restrictive financial situation, the comparison of earned media (public relations) as opposed to paid media (marketing) is a real "no brainer."