Published by: New Music Scotland

Marketing and how to work with the press and media to promote new music.

Our second Peer to Peer of 2026 brought together composers, performers and arts managers from Glasgow, Aberdeen, Orkney and beyond for an honest conversation about promoting new music with limited time, money and marketing experience. Here's a rundown of the main points that came up.

Update:

The session was led by Katie Kean, Communications and Marketing Officer at the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, who also does freelance marketing work for traditional music summer schools. Katie opened with a short presentation on how the RSNO approaches marketing and communications, before the group moved into a wide-ranging discussion.

The press landscape

Katie was candid that getting press coverage is difficult even for a national performing company. Much of the arts coverage that appears in the broadsheets is advertorial, paid for by the organisation, which is worth knowing before you judge your own efforts against what you see in print. Press releases still have value, but the coverage tends to come from smaller outlets rather than the nationals.

Practical tips from the session

Break the work down without being patronising. The RSNO promoted a recent timpani concerto premiere by getting the soloist to explain the piece on camera. You don't need a videographer, a phone and a microphone will do.

Behind the scenes content works. Rehearsal footage of composers and performers building a piece together generates real interest and doesn't cost anything.

Don't always be selling. Audiences engage more readily with an account that has personality and isn't constantly asking them to buy a ticket.

Use collaboration posts on Instagram and Facebook to reach into other people's networks.

Find the hook. New music often involves unusual instruments or approaches, which is exactly the kind of thing that travels. A glass harmonica video posted three years ago is still circulating on TikTok.

Tell people how they'll feel, not what they'll hear.

Look for photo opportunities. A Ghostbusters themed shoot made the front page of the Scotsman.

Target your press releases. Rather than sending to everyone, search for who has recently written about your composer, your genre or your subject, and approach them directly. Give journalists everything they need to write the piece.

Keep the language simple. Technical description puts people off, and a sentence you think is basic will usually still reach further if you cut it in two. Hemingway App scores your copy for readability and flags anything overlong.

Keep visuals simple. Resist cramming every date, time and price onto one square. Video and movement outperform static images.

Emojis as bullet points cause problems for screen readers.

Tailor by platform. The same copy performs differently on Facebook and Instagram, and the audiences are not the same.

Repetition is not annoying. You are far more sick of your own copy than your audience is. Most people need to see something several times before it registers.

Discussion points from the group

Reaching adjacent audiences. There is a core new music audience that is dedicated but small, and reaching past it is hard, particularly for work that sits between disciplines. Targeted emails to specific interest groups tend to work better than blanket press releases, and it pays to work out where the audience you want already gets its information. Advertising a folk collaboration on Celtic Music Radio was one example of reaching listeners who wouldn't otherwise have heard about it.

Starting out without a track record. Marketing yourself at the beginning of a career is difficult when you have no portfolio, no reliable run of concerts, and no settled sense of what your work is. The reassurance from the room was that nobody entirely knows what they're doing, that being present matters more than being polished, and that if a post doesn't land you can take it down. Culture Hive, the Arts Marketing Association's resource library, came recommended as a starting point, and is used by freelancers and large organisations alike.

Paying for PR and plugging. Whether external PR support is worth the money seems to be a lottery. A Spotify plugger transformed the reach of one release, while press results from paid campaigns have been more mixed. Investing in training instead, in that case digital marketing training through Music Ally, and running your own campaigns keeps the budget and the control in your hands.

The mindset shift. Several people recognised the difficulty of switching between making the work and analysing how to sell it. As one participant put it, you can create or you can analyse, but not both at once.

A structural question. The session closed on a broader point about the sector: composers and independent artists are being asked to do a job that other people are trained and employed to do. The ability to self-release and self-promote has never been greater, but the flipside is that the marketing work falls to the artist. The group asked whether there's scope for organisations to collaborate more openly here, sharing knowledge rather than guarding it, and what New Music Scotland's role in that might be.

Links shared

Culture Hive - Arts Marketing Association's resource bank - https://culturehive.co.uk/

Arts Marketing Association - https://www.a-m-a.co.uk/ 

Hemmingway App - https://hemingwayapp.com/

Music Ally digital marketing training - https://pro.musically.com/

Katie's Slides