We Need To Talk About Music Journalism and Publicity

Radio/Media 47 Comments


“We need a change.”
–Waylon Jennings

The idea that print journalism and music media can just trundle forward with business as usual acting like the entire industry isn’t in many ways imploding underneath us doesn’t make sense for anyone, either the journalists, the publicists put in charge of finding press for artists and events, or the performers and events themselves that the whole system is set up to support. Whatever that system used to be, it’s not any more.

Really, the entire way media and publicity interfaces with music needed to be radically transformed years ago, probably coming out of the pandemic. When Pitchfork and a bunch of other print and online outlets imploded in the first quarter of 2024, that should have been the mother of all wake up calls, and music media should have gone through a dramatic overhaul. But it didn’t.

Old habits die hard, and the belief out there that a puff piece behind Rolling Stone’s paywall, an exclusive premier at Glide, a nice write up at Holler, or an album review at Saving Country Music will make a difference anywhere beyond the margins is archaic thinking. Everything has moved to social media. Even video media and podcasts can’t compete with influencers leveraging clout on Instagram and Tik-Tok, along with artists sharing their media directly with consumers.

This is not to say that music journalism in print or online is completely meaningless. It can still make a difference in an overall, holistic approach by artists to help get them the listeners they need to build sustainable careers. There are even still moments when the right piece of music journalism can make a major impact and help launch an artist into the stratosphere. But the frequency of those big moments, and the effectiveness of that support diminishes a little more each day.

These aren’t easy or fun conclusions to come to. Trust me. After all, this is what I do for a living. For nearly 20 years I have devoted my life to writing about music. I built a career and a business out of it, and have nothing to gain, and everything to lose by the reality taking shape before our very eyes. But just like print publications that shook their fists at the advent of internet publishing and blogs, you can rage all you want, but the cold hard reality looms in the offing.

Does this mean Saving Country Music is planning to cease operations? Absolutely not. There is still important work to do, and that work can still have impact. As a mostly one-man operation, this has insulated this particular website from some of these issues other publications with bloated staff and significant overhead have been forced to wrestle with.

But for many other publications, they face a tough battle. A revenues go down, you have to cut staff and freelancers. As you cut writers, there’s less and less content. The less content, the less reason for readers to frequent or follow your outlet. You can write puff piece content for performers with guarantees the artist will link to it on social media, but this erodes credibility. It’s a doom cycle. Or like Rolling Stone and Billboard, you institute paywalls, have 25% of your content paid-for brand endorsements dressed up as journalism, and cash out your brand like Sharper Image.

Recently, legacy alt-country and roots publication No Depression announced they’re ceasing their quarterly print publications. They already had limited content online. Now, they’ve decided to go exclusively with paywalled content. Sure, a paywall can help support the publication. But it severely limits the reach of the content and music being highlighted.

Many publicists and labels still believe in the power of legacy branded publications like The New York Times or Rolling Stone as tastemakers, when in reality its social media-centric outlets like Country Central and Country Chord that are moving the needle these days, and by many multipliers compared to the legacy outlets. And as opposed to centering coverage around websites, these outlets are working the system vice versa, focusing on social media first, and then offering website articles to try and capture some of that virality, and give an option to listeners who want to read a little more.

Meanwhile, having a publicist work a song, album, or artist to the media used to be a requirement if they wanted attention. Now it’s a luxury, or maybe even an unnecessary expense for certain projects. Though you continue to see publicists for performers catering to the 40-somethings and older listeners who still enjoy reading about their favorite artists from media sources, up-and-coming performers and their fans are connecting directly via social media. There’s little need for the journalist, or the publicist in these instances … with some exceptions.

There is still something to be said about the clout or credibility a recommendation of music coming from someone else can hold. This is the key to understanding how music journalism and publicity can still play an important role in music moving forward. But importantly, those recommendations have to reach the right people, and that’s difficult to impossible with social media properties downgrading links to outside articles, and Google offering AI answers right in the search queue as opposed to recommending links.

If you’re an artist under 30, getting a mention in Rolling Stone might impress your parents, but not your peers. Appearing on the after-news late night shows like Kimmel and Fallon? Again, it’s great bragging rights, but will offer little or no uplift in your career. CBS’s Sunday Morning and perhaps SNL still can move the needle, but only if you’re moving the needle already, usually through a social media strategy.

Social Media Content & TikTok

Artists and labels are paying exorbitant amounts to video production companies to follow performers around, fly drones over shows, take professional-looking slo-mo video, edit it in a professional manner, and upload it to social media. But all this slick produced content smacks of product and marketing to viewers. It feels like a commercial, and completely misunderstands what graces a piece of social media with virality. What goes viral are the moments that feel spontaneous, captured in the wild, seen through the eye of the audience as opposed to the artist—something that sweats and bleeds and smells of a real experience.

Also, though an artist can reach their fans and perhaps friends of their fans through this type of highly produced social media content, they can’t really reach beyond their established sphere like an independent third party can. Seeing an artist, band, or song recommended from someone else is also what creates the clout behind them. Anyone can pay to have produced content uploaded to social media. If other people are posting about you, that is when you know a true buzz is brewing.

The whole pay-to-play Tik-Tok craze also feels like it’s coming to a close, with less dance challenges and other things taking off, and more organic moments coming back into focus. Kaitlin Butts recently went viral for a simple video of her in a pool mouthing the spoken words to her song “You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead To Me).” It took off because it felt spontaneous and unscripted. Similar to puff pieces behind paywalls, if something feels simply like publicity copy or paid for, the public sniffs it out.

Saving Country Music can spend 7 hours listening to an album, crafting a serious, objective review for it, and publish it at an optimal time for maximum viewing. And this will still continue to happen. There were 122 album reviews posted on this website in 2024 alone.

But a 17-second Instagram reel of Charley Crockett dancing around on the stage of the Broken Spoke last year received 1.3 million views. A reel of Zach Top playing guitar got 1.2 million. A video of Indian Relay Races with Tyler Childers received 922,000 views, and a recent video of Braxton Keith covering Eddie Rabbitt has 617,000 views, and counting. This is how you reach wide audiences now.

Of course, these examples are exceptions and not the rule. And we could rage about how nobody wants to engage in weighty discussion about music anymore, and the attention economy has moved to short form video. But if you want to launch an artist in 2025 and beyond, this is the way to go. In previous eras, it was Saving Country Music’s first review of Sturgill Simpson, the first interview with Zach Bryan, and the first ever feature on Sierra Ferrell that were significant spring boards for their careers. Now it’s sharing experiences directly from live events that resonate with large audiences.

Of course, this new school approach to helping to push music comes with great perils. Though Tik-Tok is far and away the most superior format for this work, it’s too easily corruptible with unregulated, paid-for promotion similar to the payola that corrupted radio back in the day. Massive influencer turned actor Addison Rae recently revealed how record labels would pay her to push songs. This is a common practice that at least needs transparency behind it.

Meanwhile, Tik-Tok continues to flirt with being outright banned in the United States, or might be relegated into a minor player in the future. It was set to be banned once again on June 4th, though others pin that date on June 19th. But either way, for the 3rd time, President Trump has delayed the ban. But those delays are being challenged in court, and can’t keep happening indefinitely.

Those who’ve been around long enough will remember the implosion of MySpace, or Twitter shutting down Vine. YouTube’s algorithms are extremely fickle. Not any single social media platform can be counted on to be there forever. This is also why “brick and mortar” websites are still an imperative for building any sustainable media outlet.

Journalists and outlets are going to have to learn to adapt to these new paradigms. They’re going to have to learn social media. They’re going to have to create tools and resources to reach people under the new rules. Then they’re going to have to use the virality of social media moments to cycle that attention back to native websites to help sustain their business models and make new readers and visitors of younger audiences, while also continuing to serve older music fans.

With so much energy and attention shifting to social media, some artists and labels aren’t even hiring publicists to work music to the media anymore. So what can the publicity industry do to adapt to the changing landscape?

One of the ways bad publicists and certain events are completely misunderstanding the moment is by limiting journalists attending events from using their phones or any other devices to take videos to share with their readers on social media, or limiting access to these events at all.

As general admission ticket holders walk around events sharing moments with friends on social media, the front rows of concerts are filled with phones trained on the performers, journalists and especially photographers are being asked to sign legally binding contracts in some cases to not post any video at all from events. The reason? Because they want the only media to come from the events to be their super-produced and ultra-curated stuff crafted by professional production companies. But as mentioned above, this is not what goes viral, and this is not what earns your artist or event new fans.


Meanwhile, there are still publicists and some artists who don’t even allow professional photography at concerts at all, not seeming to understand that every concert goer has a 4K video camera in their pocket. All this does is allow amateur photos and video to be what catalogs the performance on the internet and social media.

Instead of restricting journalists, artists and events should be giving journalists more access, and more opportunities to capture media that can highlight why an artist, band, events, venue, festival, etc. is worth paying attention to. In such a crowded musical landscape, that 3rd party endorsement is what the public is looking for.

The Email Issue

The fact that we’re still relying on a system where publicists scatter shoot out press releases, and then give individual follow ups to journalists they think might be interested in an artist, song, album, or event is inefficient, and unsustainable.

The most existential threat to a website like Saving Country Music is not the emphasis on social media, and it’s not the incursion of AI. It’s the excessive amounts of emails received weekly, of which 75% should never hit the inbox, and are coming from publicists who have no idea what Saving Country Music even is, because the publicist is under the age of 30, and never goes to websites. Their reality is centered around social media.

The amount of unnecessary emails directly results in less features for deserving artists getting written because of all the time it takes to manage the inbox. This is also how important artists get lost in the shuffle. And since one of the things Saving Country Music is known for is discovering undiscovered talent, it’s imperative that all unsolicited submissions are read, and all emails opened and considered since they might include the next Sturgill Simpson, Cody Jinks, or Zach Bryan.

How do we improve this system? Honestly, that is for the publicity industry to figure out. There are scores of publicity houses doing excellent work for artists and events that easily earn their keep by returning artists the attention they’re looking for through meaningful press coverage. But many are simply siphoning off large sums of money from your favorite artists (especially the top ones) to often get in the way of journalists doing their job, and try to “control the narrative” about an artist in way that employs archaic thinking.

That said, one suggestion might be making portals for all new music and events where journalists can then go and see a list of all the albums and songs being released in a given week, click on a link for the publicity copy if they want to explore more, find what they believe is the right music to feature for their outlet, and email the publicist of they want more info or to set up an interview. This would seem like less work for everyone.

This is one of the reason Saving Country Music publishes Releases Radars for Albums three times a year, and in 2025, published a Festival Guide. Otherwise, there are no resources like this available, either to journalists, or to the public. Country Central and Nikki in Nashville do the same for single releases each week, but all of these resources are invariably incomplete.

If organizations like the CMA for mainstream country, the Americana Music Association for Americana, the IBMA for bluegrass, Folk Alliance for folk, etc. hosted databases of music, and curated it using things like Saving Country Music‘s Dewey Decimal System, journalists and fans could more easily find the music that might appeal to them. With the music space becoming increasingly more crowded by the minute, this is a project that is imperative to undertake.

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What’s for certain is believing that somehow the problems facing music journalism and publicity are going to solve themselves instead of continuing to become even more grave over time is not an option.

And of course, this is all probably just table talk before AI escapes from the lab in 2027, and eviscerates large swaths of the American economy, with journalists and musicians being some of the first to have their careers eviscerated, if not descending society into utter chaos entirely.

But especially with AI in the offing, these are discussions we need to be having right here, right now, and are perhaps more important than where the next puff piece might get published. Because the window to reshape journalism and publicity into a more sustainable model for the future is closing rapidly. And those not willing or able adapt will quickly go the way of the Dodo.

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