Launching an experimental suite of new-media promotions services that grew into a department I ran within electronic music's premier PR agency.
By the time I joined the agency in 2021, INFAMOUS PR had spent fifteen years at the top of electronic music PR.
Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs
INFAMOUS specialized in narrative-driven campaigns that ran over many months, which often narrowed the projects taken on to albums, tours, and larger activations. Meanwhile, the streaming economy was pushing dance music's release cycle toward singles and EPs with a short shelf life and not much of a story for journalists to pitch their editors. There was lots of inbound business from the agency's clients who wanted to promote these releases, but the agency was turning them away due to the difficulty landing placements for these sorts of campaigns through the confines of a traditional PR campaign. I was hired to solve that problem.
There was no playbook, so the early campaigns were experiments. The services I offer have always been heavily shaped by client feedback, and in the early days, there was a lot of evolution between campaigns. Pitching music to be supported by playlist curators across streaming platforms was the first service launched, but I went on to offer a suite of services including radio plugging, a modified PR service focused on individual releases, YouTube distribution, and social media post seeding and influencer campaigns.
When demand for the services outpaced what I could do manually, I started building the workflows that allowed me to handle the necessary volume. The first ones were small: browser macros, text snippets, and mail merge. But watching them do work I’d always done by hand felt like creating magic. I kept looking for the next thing I could automate. That feeling led me to realize that the shape and feel of the work was itself something I could iterate on and improve.