How Covering Artists Has Changed This Decade: 2016 PRSA Tri-State Conference
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From the 2016 PRSA Tri-State Conference session on covering artists.
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How Covering Artists Has Changed This Decade: 2016 PRSA Tri-State Conference
- 1. Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift and more: How covering artists has changed this decade BRIAN ANTHONY HERNANDEZ HUGH MCINTYRE Artist Relations Specialist GENIUS.com Twitter: @BAHjournalist Contributing Writer FORBES.com Twitter: @PopBangHugh
- 2. PR Lessons From My Coverage of BEYONCE: 1. Don’t just pitch; interact / 2. Experiment
- 3. PR Lesson From My Coverage of LADY GAGA: 3. Leverage brand partnerships
- 4. PR Lesson From My Coverage of TAYLOR SWIFT: 4. Journalists will be critical; help them help you
- 5. PR Lesson From My Coverage of SOCIAL STARS: 5. Never underestimate the power of influencers
- 6. PR Lesson From My Coverage of LEGACY ARTISTS: 6. Find cool ways to repurpose old yet valuable content
- 7. KEY PR TAKEAWAYS FOR YOU TO USE 1. Don’t just pitch journalists; interact with them regularly 2. Experiment with storytelling methods, including live 3. Leverage brand partnerships to increase your reach 4. Journalists will be critical; help them help you 5. Never underestimate the power of influencers 6. Find cool ways to repurpose old yet valuable content 7. Don’t be an asshole; respect each other’s time
- 8. Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift and more: How covering artists has changed this decade BRIAN ANTHONY HERNANDEZ HUGH MCINTYRE Artist Relations Specialist GENIUS.com Twitter: @BAHjournalist Contributing Writer FORBES.com Twitter: @PopBangHugh
Editor's Notes
- Meet Brian Anthony Hernandez — a multi-dimensional music journalist, the artist relations specialist at Genius, former senior music reporter at Mashable and 2016 contributor to Billboard and Forbes. He's the man music publicists go to when their celebrity clients need to be more than just seen and heard. As someone who holds the keys to the top echelon of music media, hear how covering the biggest artists in the world has changed over the last decade. In this session, Brian (a.k.a. @BAHjournalist on Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat) will sit down with industry peer Hugh McIntyre (Forbes contributor and music writer) to discuss what goes into conceptualizing and executing creative projects with artists, songwriters, managers, publicists and record labels for social media, live interviews, viral videos and editorial content. 1. So what is your current role at Genius? So what Genius is is an online museum of songs, where artists and their fans visit to post lyrics and annotate them in order to publically discuss the deeper meaning behind every verse and every chorus. My role at Genius is Artist Relations Specialist. It’s a unique role in the music space because it’s a hybrid between journalist, creative director and talent booker, which means I not only receive tons of pitches from PR professionals that I’ve worked with over the past decade but I also send pitches of my own to record labels, publicists and managers to get artists involved in creative projects that I conceptualize for Genius. So in a nutshell, I build relationships with the artists and songwriters to work on cool shit for video, social and editorial that will be seen by more than 60 million monthly unique visitors. 2. Why has covering artists evolved in the past decade? Well, there’s no question that digital and social media has drastically changed music PR and music journalism. Because of social media, artists have a direct line of communication to fans, so if they want, which they often do, they can bypass media outlets and go straight to the fans with releases and commentary. Everything. And because of the amount of streaming services, artists can choose to do exclusives on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal or elsewhere instead of going to a traditional online media publication. There are more options than ever for artists and their publicists to really control or steer the narrative.
- 3. Let’s talk about Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. Using examples about them, how has covering artists evolved because of what you just described? Beyonce is the queen of making journalists scramble. And it’s been that way since she released her surprise visual album that cold December night in 2013, when many journalists on the East Coast were already sleeping. Do you remember that night? I luckily was visiting home in Nebraska and got a barrage of texts from friends and nice PR folks asking if I had seen it drop. The cool thing about this was that these PR folks who were texting me didn’t work directly with Beyonce, but because we have great relationships working on other projects, they wanted to make sure I was on top of everything. So when you guys and gals are out there working with journalists, talk to them about the major happenings in your industry and not just the projects your pitching. That behavior goes a long way in establishing a strong two-way street! My favorite Beyonce story I’ve written was actually for Forbes when I went to this year’s Super Bowl and got access to watch the halftime show from the field. That’s how I was going to make my story stand out from all of the halftime show stories. But I took it a step further and added another layer by broadcasting this experience using Facebook Live, which was still fairly new at the time. This got a lot of attention, and PR pros reached out to me afterward wanting to experiment with FB Live and other online forms of storytelling with their artists. Don’t be afraid to experiment.
- For Lady Gaga, my favorite story was covering her seven-night residency at Roseland Ballroom. Artists often work with brands, because touring and brand sponsorships and partnerships are the things that make them the most money nowadays. Here, Gaga partnered with Verizon on a live stream and had me cover it in person. Depending on the brands you all work for, you’ll be dealing with musicians and things like this sometimes because brand partnerships are profitable for the artist and important for the brands’ overall marketing strategies that you’ll have a stake in.
- To continue that point, for Taylor Swift partnering with brands is also important. She did that with American Express when she released her “Blank Space” video and a companion app that turned it into an immersive video game experience. I was one of the first dozen people to watch the music video before it came out in order to interview director Joseph Kahn to write these stories. Hugh was one of those first few people, too, right? So for Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, they are leveraging brands in authentic ways to bring in the dollar dollar bills. Taylor Swift is also a prime example of what happens when you give music exclusives to a certain streaming platform and leave it off another streaming platform. That can be news in and of itself and we as journalists have to cover that decision with a critical eye while still maintaining a good relationship with the artists and their teams. Because of this story, I ended up being quoted in Businessweek and other major outlets. But throughout the writing process, I kept in touch with Spotify’s PR team and Taylor Swift’s camp to ask for comment and to explain my reporting. I say all this to say that you’ll be working with journalists who aren’t always going to write favorable things about your clients, but these journalism contacts are important so it’s vital to realize they’re doing their jobs. Help them help you by providing a comment. Not doing so usually does more damage to your client.
- 4. But these shifts aren’t just confined to the current queens of music. Who else is changing the landscape of how PR professionals and journalists are working together? Social media stars are a big part of the music journalism cycle now because they’re creating a lot of buzz but also performing well on the Billboard charts. Take Shawn Mendes, for example, who was discovered on the Vine app a few years ago before being signed to Island Records. Since then, he has released two albums that have gone No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. That success couldn’t be ignored. That’s why I recently partnered with him on this because I knew there was an intense appetite for his music. The lesson here is: never underestimate the power of influencers!
- But on the other end, you have legacy artists who are either not releasing new music or who are dead like Miles Davis. But their record labels still want their music to live on for a new generation of listeners so they’re finding clever ways to repurpose old yet valuable content. Legacy Recordings did that with Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which surprisingly never had a music video. So they partnered with a tech company to created this interactive video that mimics TV surfing. It allowed viewers to use their keyboards or cursors to flip through 16 channels that mimic TV formats such as games shows, shopping networks and reality series. People on each channel, no matter what TV trope they represent, are seen lip-syncing the lyrics. For what would have been Miles Davis’ 90th birthday, Legacy Recordings also did something clever with content that was readily available in the world. The Universe of Miles Davis tool visualized all 2,452 Wikipedia pages that mention Davis — such as Lady Gaga’s Davis trumpet tattoo and Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign — on one clickable and easily digestible webpage. Lesson here is “find cool ways to repurpose old yet valuable content.”
- 5. So ultimately, what works and what doesn’t work when PR pros are pitching you? 1. Don’t just pitch journalists; interact with them regularly 2. Experiment with storytelling methods, including live 3. Leverage brand partnerships to increase your reach 4. Journalists will be critical; help them help you 5. Never underestimate the power of influencers 6. Find cool ways to repurpose old yet valuable content 7. Don’t be an asshole; respect each other’s time