Have you ever met a Rock Star? I mean someone who just walks into a room and has all eyes on them. Believe it or not, every industry has them, not just in the music world. Ariel Hyatt of Ariel Publicity is her industry’s Rock Star, and Thomas Starks of PopWreckoning got on the phone with her to find out why and how she got to the top of her game.
Thomas Starks, PopWreckoning: Thank you so much for taking my call Miss Hyatt.
Ariel Hyatt, Ariel Publicity: The pleasure is all mine, thanks for liking what we do! 
TS: You know what, I’ll tell you what, I actually put your plan into action, and I along with my fans found some success! But we’ll talk about that in a minute, we are chatting with Ariel Hyatt of “Ariel Publicity” and we are very pleased to speak with you, thank you so much.
AH: Pleasure is mine.
TS: So you got into this some 10 to 13 years ago?
AH: I got into my own PR firm approximately, gosh it’s almost 15 years ago.
TS: You’ve obviously done pretty well for yourself, can you tell us the story of how that actually came about?
AH: Sure, we founded as a traditional P.R. firm and we’ve always represented and worked primarily with artists who were independent, meaning non major label affiliates. For many many years, I clicked along very comfortably with a successful traditional P.R. firm., meaning we promoted to newspapers and magazines and television and radio,we also did a lot of tour P.R. and it was going along quite swimmingly until September 11th, 2001. At that moment, when that tragedy happened, I noticed a very very sharp downturn in the success rates of the campaigns that we were managing, and what I noticed was, all of the local beat music writers at all of the smaller newspapers around the country were getting fired, or, they were beginning to cover different types of events that were not locally focused on music. I realized that we had a big problem and that problem was that my clients were literally paying me thousands of dollars of a month to get them wide coverage and I couldn’t provide it. So that’s when we started looking for other solutions. Luckily, we had been heavily involved with the internet and it just made perfect sense to me to go where there were ENTHUSIASTIC fans. I mean at the time there weren’t even blogs, it was like, “news servers” and “zines.” That was the big thing, “webzines.” And it was before internet radio really took off, so you know, we started promoting to passionate people in those domains, and obviously that’s all morphed into what we NOW know as blogs, podcasts, internet radio stations, and social media sites.
TS: I did notice that just in the last week or week and a half you have changed your web site.
AH: We have indeed.
TS: Your site has always been user friendly and now as I see is much more user friendly. I’m also aware that with the social media aspect of all this, I do know that you were always prescribing that to your clients. What exactly keyed you into that?
AH: As far as how we represent artists?
TS: Let’s say you have a company come to you and say, “We are such and such website…we would like to help promote to musicians.” What is your process of sifting through the thousands of web sites that want to assist musicians?
AH: You know, our whole philosophy is, even if a web site seems like it’s small, maybe they don’t have a ton of readers, maybe it’s kind of homemade or homespun, but we think it ALL counts because with Google, it ALL counts. So we’re not only going for the top top top players, you know, like the large sites where there’s millions of readers. We are also going for anyone that wants to show love. We have a vetting process obviously, like we don’t want the web sites to contain anything offensive or that we deem inappropriate, but basically, if there is someone with passion on the other end that wants to cover our artists, we pretty much want to work with them. So our vetting process is liberal and we really believe ourselves to be the solution if you’re looking for a long tail solution as opposed to “Just promote to the top 10”…we don’t believe in that.
TS: So when an artist comes to you and says “I would like to figure out how to succeed in the music industry…” What is the first thing you say to them?
AH: You know one of the first things we try to do is find out how open to social media they are. Obviously, I’m a social media coach and this is my area of expertise, so I come with a very biased opinion of how I think survival will happen for them. So if I get someone that is completely resistant and is saying, “I hate this; I hate all this communication; I hate social media; I don’t like it.” It’s going to be very very hard for me to work effectively with that person. I need to know that the person is educable. Because if they are really negative about social media and really feel that it is so confronting and so upsetting, I’m not going to be able to be effective. So I think the one key we are looking for with all the clients we represent is how willing to do this are they? That’s really the number one deciding factor. Then it’s up to us to help them identify an audience and connect with them in a way that makes them feel comfortable. So obviously there are so many different ways to focus in on social media. You might be into Twitter, maybe you like Facebook, maybe Last FM is how you like to share with different artists. Maybe you just want to blog; maybe you like to take photos. You know we don’t want to limit anyone’s preference online. There are so many ways of expressing yourself online, so if some one says, “Look, I really think Twitter is dumb. I have so much to say. I can’t say it all in 140 characters.” I’m not going to force them to tweet. If they say, “Look I’m really long-winded and I like writing long essays about my traveling or my tour schedule,” well than I’m going to say maybe blogging fits better. So then it’s how do we identify what the artists resonate with.
TS: So without playing favorites, can you tell us a story…a success story without having to say the name of a particular client that actually succeeded in your program?
AH: Now one of our crowning achievements, and this no secret because I’ve blogged about her, is Kelly Richey. She’s an artist that called me, literally lying on her kitchen floor two and a half years ago. She’s a blues guitarist who had toured literally the world, very successful in her own right. She had played HUGE festivals, you know, Europe and across the country. She had put out 13 albums and she realized that she had an enormous mistake. Now, the mistake was she tried to go for it in the major leagues. She hired the major publicist, she hired the major radio plugger, she got the glossy photos, she really tried to be the next Bonnie Raitt and she tried to do it without a major label budget. It’s pretty much impossible to do and she had spent tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, chasing this dream. She had a stunning realization which was that she didn’t even listen to these radio stations that she was so desperately trying to get on to. Then she realized: “Wait a minute…if I am my ideal client, and I don’t even listen to these radio stations, what on God’s green earth am I doing trying to fit myself into this thing that I don’t even believe in?” And she figured there would be a better way, so by the time I got her on the phone, I got someone who had really taken a stab at achieving mainstream success the old fashion way and it wasn’t working. I said to her, “I would love to help you transform your career,” and she started a BRUTAL re-education. She did not know ANYTHING about Twitter or blogging or podcasting and months into this, she called me up and she said “I feel like I’m a Martian that got dropped down from the sky into a shopping mall and I didn’t even know what money was. Not only did you give me a fistful of money, you dropped me into a mall. I didn’t know what shopping was, I didn’t know what stores were, I had to learn EVERYTHING.” So it was really really interesting to listen to her equate that, but what I’m really proud to say is, she did it. She took on Twitter, she took on blogging, she took on photo sharing, she took on reinventing her sites, and she took on reconnecting one by one with her fans. It’s three years later, she emailed me last week and she said, “I’ve made a radical decision because of the thousands of people you helped me connect to online, I’m not going to be touring anymore, I’m going to spend time in my studio, I’m going to release things online and I’m going to use the base that you’ve helped me build up to make my future money.”
TS: And that is something, if we can dig into will truly be a success story with all of us. Miss Hyatt, I sincerely appreciate your time.
AH: The pleasure is mine and I can’t wait hear what you’ve been doing with your own career!
TS: HAHA. Yeah, I’m gonna get off the record here in a minute, but I just wanted to thank you OFFICIALLY. Where can we find you, our readers and musicians find you, to gain more success and knowledge on how to succeed in the music business?
AH: You can find me at www.arielpublicity.com.
TS: Again, thank you so much, Miss Hyatt.
*We spoke for another 20 minutes because that’s just what Miss Hyatt is about: connecting and being real about it.
Dammit, Amy. Even your name forshadowed things to come.
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