The boutique promotions agency behind some of today's most influential electronic music releases.
Brain in a Vat Music Promotions is the agency I founded in 2024. I specialize in promoting electronic music through playlist placements, radio airplay, social post seeding and influencer campaigns, and press features.
ClientsArtists, labels, and distributors the agency has run campaigns for. Every campaign starts the same way. I need to understand the surrounding context: what the music sounds like, and where the artist, the label, and the genre are right now. Then I talk to the client to understand what their goals are for the release and how my campaign may or may not be aligned with these goals. The campaign is only taken on once these two steps have taken place and I am confident I can create value for the client and for the curators I'll be pitching.
That bit about the curators matters because of how the agency is built. With the exception of social media seeding, Brain in a Vat only pitches for organic, earned placements, to curators who are happy to be sent music with no strings attached. The value I offer a curator is simple: I’m very careful to send them new music that is consistently suited to their taste and that they’ll be excited to include in their editorial curation. In return, I’ve built a network of influential curators who continue to open my emails because they’ve come to expect a thoughtful pitch, not spam or quid pro quo.
This extreme care for my pitch target lists was simple enough to manage while I was offering one service and had one, perhaps two, new campaigns kicking off each week. But as the business grew, it became very difficult to maintain these standards at scale. The same logic rules out casting a wide net with pitches. Some curators receive hundreds of pitches a day, others a handful a month, but either way, pitching a release that's a poor fit one time too many will ruin the relationship and land your emails in spam. So the model only works when the quality of the roster, and the quality of the network, remain high, and I only accept campaigns from clients that I am confident that I'll be able to secure impactful, earned placements aligned with their goals for the release.
I've experimented with narrowing the roster to a limited number of related genres and a limited number of service offerings to get more placements out of every pitch, and found the campaigns competing for the same finite openings each week. Intentionally broadening the genres and media I pitch was the alternative, which costs operational complexity and loses the advantage I have with the network I've built within my clients' most popular genre niches.
Brain in a Vat is where that realization got room to run. There were no approvals to wait on and no inherited systems to work around, so the operation could be built to my own judgment and taste. Building strong systems is the only way to keep the quality standard high and grow, and every promo campaign crosses three of them: kickoff, pitching, and reporting. Between them, campaign assets and metadata are collected from the client, bespoke targets for the release are researched and identified, pitches are drafted from dynamic templates, hundreds of personalized emails are sent, placements are tracked and coordinated with curators and clients, and the evidence of what happened is collected and turned into reports that update themselves. Yes, these automations have removed a lot of tedious labor. But the real value is the attention I've gained back for the creative and strategic calls on each campaign, for my relationships with clients and curators, and for improving the processes themselves.
More at braininavat.dance.