The New Public Relations

I noticed a copy of NME sitting on the shelf at Tesco the other day. I was actually quite shocked that it was even still in print. Do music fans still read these magazines?

For the past few decades, the only way to find out about new music was through the radio, tv or newspapers and magazines. Of course there was word of mouth - the most powerful of all mediums - but this was largely unquantifiable - labels couldn't measure effectiveness or spend their budgets on it as easily as they could on the trusty stalwart of PR. As a young pup I was a devout reader of NME, Spin, Melody Maker, Select and Rolling Stone. I consumed the stories in these bibles without fail, every week/month. It was how I kept in touch with artists - the only way I could access information about them. Those stories wouldnt have been there without the industry's PR gurus.

The music industry has always relied heavily on PR. If you didnt have a good PR, you didnt have a career. But what was this magical power that these PR people weilded?

PR as "public relations" is essentially the manipulation of public perception through story telling via media. The PR professional creates the story - sells it to the press by convincing them that the story is worth telling - and voilà, a story appears. The story is used to sell the various media, so the more fantastic the tale, the more likely it is to be spun.

The power of public relations was therefore in the ability of the PR to spin a big hype-filled ball of yarn, alongside the relationship they had with the hack who was responsible for getting the story to press. Labels still spend oodles for this service. The tactic relies on the premise that winning over the press will result in an endorsement of your artist, and the public will follow.

In reality today, the service is media relations, not public relations. The relationship that the public has now with press is quite a different beast. The internet has allowed us to discover music in an entirely different way. Artists can create their own PR and build a community of fans without a journalist ever hearing about them. In fact these days, the journos are most often the last to write about new acts. Magazines and newspapers are struggling to survive. TV no longer has a captivated audience, and radio is being revolutionised by services like Spotify and Last.fm. Media relations has become the ego PR that rarely results in any audience connection.

"Public Relations" - real PR - is now something totally different. It is the relationship that an artist or label has with its audience. It is how an artist tweets back to a fan, or the comments it places on its Facebook group page. It is interacting with bloggers who become tastemakers for the life of a project, rather than just writing a story once to fill column inches. It is speaking directly to the people that are interested in their work, rather than relying on a salesman to force it into a journalists intray. Finally public relations is becoming a genuine interaction between the makers of music and the listener.

Doing A Moby

Climatechanger brought this article to my attention - regarding the use of music in advertisements.

The piece is an interview with Bethany Klein from University of Leeds, who has written the soon-to-be-published As Heard on TV: Popular Music in Advertising.

I have often thought it odd that people criticise artists for allowing their music to appear in ads, accusing them of "selling out". To me it is no different than having your music played on commercial radio - which exists solely for the purpose of selling airtime to advertisers. Although your music may not be directly linked to one product, the intention still remains - you provide the interstitial soundtrack to blocks of ad space. Obviously there are products that I would never have my music associated with - but there are also radio stations where I would rather my music was not performed.

One section of this interview stood out to me. It follows a discussion on Moby's whore complex over the licensing of every track from Play:

MM - In your paper, you also quote a journalist who identified the “pragmatic reason that electronic music is making an instantaneous leap to commercials and soundtracks: No one else will play it.”

Klein: Yeah, that’s true. Historically, if you look at the terms of constructed authenticity in popular music, you’ll find that Moby gets out of certain aspects of it because it is electronic music; it’s not rock ’n’ roll.

Now this is odd. Are they really insinuating that no one is "playing" electronic music? Surely if this were the case the medium would not exist - without an audience, there would be no desire to create. And the "constructed authenticity" - are we still having that argument, at a time when electronic music is so prevalent?

Rather it is the versatility of electronic music that makes it so desirable. There is such an abundance of it - in various shapes and forms, that the genre itself is to vast to be generalised in such a way. And consider who is placing the music in ads - young, impressionable tastemakers working in ad agencies, who seek out new music and strive to be the first to use it in the commercial context. 

Of course this isn't a universal rule - there will always be a place for rock'n'roll in advertising - just in time for the next DFS sofa sale.

Scrobble Me This

I love readers' letters.  What inspires someone to take precious time out of their day to write to the editor of a newspaper to comment?  (probably the same part of our brains that motivates us to blog.  Touché.)

Somewhere between following the exploits of Lilly Allen's tits and Amy Winebar's ever increasing slide into zero self respect, The London Lite carried a story last week about illegal downloads.  A few days later they had a selection of reader's comments.  Jane from London had some strong views about how great things were in communist Russia when bands were only paid when they performed live.  Chris from Perivale brags that from borrowing from friends and illegally downloading he has amassed over 10,000 songs.  

My favourite was Jerry from West Ham:

It is time for music companies to reap what they sow.  The industry ripped consumers off for something that should be free or at least cheaper.  Finally the consumer controls the market.

How Jerry has come to the conclusion that music should be free is not clear.  However, I'm quite certain he hasn't walked into Selfridge's and taken a few shirts and a pair of jeans just because he feels that clothing is too expensive these days.

The consumer does not control the market.  Artists do.  There will be no music for Jerry and Chris to enjoy if their favourite artists quit and go get a day job because they can't afford to pay their rent.  

Illegally downloading is theft.  Sharing is great though.  It is based on mutual respect - a great trait that the world needs more of.  Last FM is getting better and better at this.  When they first kicked off I found the site kinda clunky and wasn't quite sure how it was going to materialise into something user friendly.  With some investment, they have built a brilliant networking site and radio station.  And they pay artists for the songs that are streamed - just like radio does.