#pr 101

With talent or artist support, there’s a few different players in the game when it comes to PR specifically:

·         Record Label in-house publicity team

·         Personal publicist/publicity team

·         Tour publicity team (sometimes the labels or tour promoters will have a separate team handling everything surrounding JUST the tour itself)

·         Sponsor publicity team (if a project or tour has someone helping underwrite it – ex: Verizon tour sponsorship and consumer experiences or Flow partnership)

All of these people will have their own goals, metrics, boundaries and needs for what PR should be accomplishing. Also, each of these folks have different contracts, different obligations that are required. Most of the time, they’ll be some discussions, but everyone will play nice in the sandbox all together. There are times though that this is not the case and concessions will need to be made somewhere along the line. It could be something as small as if the artist needs to do specific social posts to how they’re quoted in a press release and everything in between.

Now all this is completely separate and apart from contracts the artist may have. Those can include:

·         Record label deal/contract

·         Management agreement

·         Personal publicist/PR agency contract/scope of work

·         Talent agent contract (WME/CAA/UTA – these folks would help sell and broker deals for commercials, films, soundtrack inclusions, etc.)

·         Touring promoter agreement (LiveNation, AEG)

And each of these are different terms, different timing, different expectations and stipulations. They should all work in concert together, however, there’s going to be different times and different projects where one may not have a play/say in things.

Management is not hired by a label, that’s a whole separate deal aside. The artist is the one that has a direct line to that, and they’re the ones who are responsible for securing their own management. Labels, if that deal comes around first, may point artists in the direction of some names but ultimately that’s 100% the artist’s call.

Same goes for their own personal publicity – their management can help secure or recommend, but again, that’s a separate contract and what in PR we call a scope of work or SOW; a fancy way of saying contract but in that contract it stipulates how much a monthly fee/retainer is, what they are responsible for handling, possibly down to how many billable hours a month they spend on the artist’s publicity efforts and how many, if they’re at an agency, people will be on the ‘team’ supporting them. They should also be providing monthly recaps of coverage, strategy documents on how they’re supporting the artist in regards to PR and are also the ones responsible for media training and media/interview prepping ahead of any type of interview/media ops – we’ll get to THAT in another post down the line.

For example: the record label would have more control and more of a say when it comes to marketing/promo/pr around an album launch or anything directly related to the music that falls under their specific contract and deal with the artist; especially so when they’re footing the bill or their team is in the lead. That also doesn’t mean they have ULTIMATE control; the artist and their team still have somewhat of a say in how things roll out and what’s the final PR plan/strategy.

Anything regarding the artist personally, that would all roll through management and their own publicity team – the label would rarely have a say in anything for that. Anything regarding touring, it would be a mix of the label, the tour promoter, if the tour promoter hires separate PR support just for the tour they would be involved, as well as their direct team with management and publicity.

Suffice to say there’s a ton of cooks in the kitchen and a bunch of different ways they can all be working together or not be involved all at the same time. It’s a balancing act to keep everyone on the same page and everyone happy.

This is super topline, super 30,000-foot view on this just to give some basic understanding on how there’s so many moving and working parts, it’s definitely not as simple as a lot of folks think.