Journalists and bloggers get hundreds of pitches. Most get deleted in seconds. Yours won’t, because you’ll do the three things that matter: be brief, be newsworthy, and be easy to work with.
Lead with the news, not your biography. A sold-out hometown show beats three paragraphs about your childhood. The hook goes first, always, no exceptions.
Keep it to one page. Who, what, when, where, why, plus one strong quote and your links. If they want more detail, they will ask for it.
Personalize every pitch email. Reference their last piece and explain why your story fits their beat. Mass emails get mass deletions, every time.
Include a press kit link: high-res photos, the music, your bio, and past coverage. Make their job effortless and they will cover you again next time.
Follow up once after five days. Short, polite, with the link again. Then let it go completely. Persistence is professional, but pestering is not.
Build a media list before you need it: twenty local bloggers, five regional papers, ten writers adjacent to your scene. Read their work and engage genuinely for a month, then pitch. Warm pitches convert at ten times the rate of cold ones.
Create newsworthy moments worth covering: a charity show, a hometown record, an unusual recording location. Journalists need stories, not just songs. Give them a real angle and the coverage follows naturally.
Draft your one-page release tonight using this exact structure, then build your media list of twenty writers tomorrow. By Friday you could be sitting in twenty real inboxes instead of shouting into the void.
About the Author – Ruben Burgos: Ruben Burgos brings over 25 years of music expertise and more than 15 years of model guidance to the table. He is the indie major pinnacle to retaining credits for musicians and helping them navigate this wicked industry without the fuckery.