Do not recommend - overpriced and false information
I worked with High Violet this spring to promote a single. A warning to anyone reading - the service is overpriced and you get low quality return for what you’re paying. Some of the info below relates to Ireland because that’s where I’m from.
In terms of reviews and coverage - the PR campaign started on 15th April for my single’s release date on May 9th. In that time he secured five pieces of online written coverage. The quality of the coverage was poor - one of the blogs even misspelled my name in the headline. I got no mentions in the usual Irish publications who have covered my music before. I have a larger social media following than all of the publications/blogs secured by High Violet to cover the single. When I did some outreach myself as damage control the following two weeks after the release date I managed to get nine different publications to cover the release with minimal effort on my part. So with my release date in the past I managed to get almost twice as much coverage. Also, in his final report he included some of the coverage I secured, as if to take credit for them?
For the radio campaign he sends your release out to DJs/stations in a list along with releases from multiple other artists (I was told this by a radio DJ in my hometown who received the PR email) - so he is not sending dedicated emails about your release. According to his report 104 stations played my song, supposedly about 40 percent community, 17 percent college, 19 percent commercial, 1 percent online radio stations. I used WARM radio monitor to see which stations picked up my single after his campaign - WARM monitor indicates that only one commercial radio station played the track - Midlands 103 - and I have a personal relationship with two of the DJs there. My radio monitor report mentions plays from 4 other community stations, one in Germany and four in the UK. There is a huge difference between the 104 stations on his report and the 5 stations who actually played the song. Also, in his list of 104 stations who supposedly played the song, he included an electronic music station. My song is a folk song, they definitely didn’t play it haha. So the report was falsified to the teeth, and the radio campaign run by High Violet is totally ineffectual.
On his site he advises that he provides ‘a detailed report’ after the campaign. The ‘detailed report’ was simply an email listing the names of radio stations and blogs (see image). No additional information about what countries the different stations/blogs were based in, type, etc.
All in all it really ruined this single release for me. I know if I had gone to a different PR company I would have gotten a far better service, probably way cheaper. Or I could have just done it myself and gotten far better results (like I have done in the past). I work full time as well as making music and performing live so I thought it would be good to get help this time around - I was so unbelievably disappointed with how it turned out. I contacted Sean after I got his report and asked to set up a call so I could give him some feedback. On the day I was supposed to call it turned out he had blocked me on Whatsapp and Instagram. Up to that point all of our communications had been polite and positive so why block me? It suggests to me that he is wilfully scamming people, lying on his reports, and he knew I was going to say something about it. I requested a partial refund on Paypal (I paid £899 and asked for £200 back - despite the service being awful I still got minimal coverage from it so felt I couldn’t request a full refund) and it got denied. So yeah, I do not recommend High Violet PR! Save yourself the headache and the heartache.
9. mai 2025
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