Music PR: A Hidden History

Music PR is an area of the music industry broadly tasked with gaining ‘earned media’ for artists and products (as opposed to the ‘paid media’ that results from advertising spend), through developing and leveraging connections with cultural intermediaries such as journalists and broadcasters. As such, they enact a kind of hidden power, at odds with popular conceptions of talent and reward in popular music that attribute popularity to luck, destiny, or possession of a mysterious ‘X factor’. The chapter will counter an artist-centred conception of the music commodity by presenting the ‘star’ artist as a collaborative, discursive construction, and PR professionals as key to that process. In recent years, ‘critical PR studies’ has emerged as a valued media sub-discipline, highlighting the role of public relations in exacerbating and legitimating socio-cultural inequalities, as well as its contribution to an accelerating ‘promotional culture’ (Demetrious, Public Relations and Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022; Somerville et al., Public Relations, Society and the Generative Power of History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019; Edwards and Hodges, Public Relations, Culture and Society. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). However, music PR has received very little attention from scholars—despite comparable social issues being in play. This chapter traces a critical cultural history of music PR—from the Beatles’ famed ‘press officer’ Derek Taylor, via the trans-Atlantic excess of the late twentieth century, to the relatively buttoned-down ‘comms’ work of contemporary independent PR firms in the digital age. Music PR is broadly intended as behind-the-scenes work, and accordingly it surfaces only sporadically. This history draws on such glimpses in popular music press and trade press archives, as well as the small corpus of autobiographies from notable music PRs, to document the changing relations between PRs, labels, artist, and other intermediaries.