One of the more frustrating aspects of the traditional music business is PR. Every artist, manager and label wants to have that New York Times piece, that Pitchfork review, and all the other usual suspects. Whether it be as validation for their ego that what they do is important, or straight up to spread the word and increase the fan base. PR is a fickle animal, extremely challenging, and quite a pricey endeavour. Your average serious indie pr company will charge you upwards from $2000 per month, with no guarantees of any coverage. If you’re not careful you can end up spending more on your PR campaign than on recording your album, again with no guarantees of anything happening. In the spirit of taking a step back to see if the traditional ways still make sense, I present to you a graph of web traffic for two of the top indie music websites in comparison to the traffic Urban Outfitters gets. Urban Outfitters is not a traditional press outlet, not do they focus in any way on music aside from some vinyl sales. But it’s a clothing store largely targeting the same exact audience as the one we’re after in Indie Rock land. As you can see they have much more traffic, yet I never see them on a target list for the traditional PR campaign. Why not? Are we focused on the wrong things?
On a related note, in a week or so Family Records will be teaming up with the amazing lifestyle accessory company Hard Graft for a cross-promotional campaign. Each Hard Graft customer will receive an exclusive free digital Family Records mixtape automatically with their order of a Hard Graft product. Both companies will highlight this campaign on our websites, twitters, mailing lists, etc. and promote each other to our own audiences. Be sure to check them out. If you’re a fan of the FR aesthetic, you will also love Hard Graft, even though they sell a very different product from music.
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