Good, practical advice about writing music press releases is in short supply. As someone who’s both written and received many, many press releases, I can tell you Michele Wilson-Morris’ article “Seven Mistakes To Avoid When Writing A Press Release” is sound. Particularly on-target is #2: “Don’t Believe The Hype? Don’t Write the Hype”:
Your objective is not to make people laugh. You may state factual details about your event, but saying that your upcoming performance is “going to be the bomb” or using adjectives and/or phrases that actually infer how great it will be is taking it a little bit too far…Bragging is not professional, and it is actually quite a turnoff.
Hear hear! However, considering the number of delusional characters I’ve run into making music, I’d amend that to “Don’t write the hype — even if you truly, truly believe it with all your heart. Because you’re wrong.”
Also, as someone who has also written more than his fair share of search-optimized copy, I wouldn’t advise one to spend too much time on #6: “Keywords: A Press Release’s Best Friend”, as there’s little more painful to read than amateur attempts at search optimization — just make sure you state clearly what the release is for and include all relevant information, and let the search engines work it out for themselves. Alternately, I’d recommend hiring a search-optimization expert to do the work if that’s really a major concern for your project, or at the very least doing some serious reading about proper SEO tactics before awkwardly wedging “hottest rock band San Diego” into every other sentence.
