Indie music PR that starts with the list
Fixed-price press campaigns for indie and guitar bands across the UK. You approve every outlet before we pitch a single one, and you watch the replies land in real time.
Indie is the most crowded desk in British music press. The editors at the titles that matter receive well over a hundred pitches a week, most of them a Dropbox link and a paragraph of adjectives. The campaigns that get through are the ones with an angle a writer can build a piece around before they have even pressed play.
That is the part we spend our time on. Before a single email goes out we work out what the story actually is: the scene you sit in, the records you sit next to, the reason a features editor should care this month rather than next. Then we show you the list of who we intend to send it to, and you approve it.
The outlets an indie campaign is built around
This is the tier a campaign at this price works hard at. It is where an indie band's audience is genuinely built, and where a first campaign can realistically land.
Independent, prolific, and consistently early on bands who go on to break. One of the more receptive desks in British indie.
Long-running and generous with coverage for developing artists who arrive with a real story.
High-volume independent coverage across guitar music, with a genuine appetite for unsigned acts.
Genuinely open to unsigned submissions and a realistic first radio play for a debut single.
Regional uploads are listened to properly, and the route from a local show to national specialist play is real.
Tom Robinson's open submissions inbox. Free to enter, widely read by other tastemakers, and a legitimate first credential.
The station shows in your own city and the specialist indie shows on community radio nationally. Small audiences, high engagement, and they reply.
Bido Lito! in Liverpool, LeftLion in Nottingham, Exposed in Sheffield and their equivalents. Genuinely readable, genuinely local, and a foundation the national desks respect.
Independent shows built around discovery. Long-form, low competition, and frequently a better conversation than a two-line review.
Curator playlists with real listenership rather than bot-inflated follower counts. Pitched individually, never bulk-submitted.
This is an illustrative view of the landscape rather than the list you would receive. Your actual media list is built for your specific release and sent to you for approval before anything is pitched. Coverage is never guaranteed anywhere.
The tier above, named honestly
These are the titles most artists have in mind when they think about indie press. They are worth naming, because they are the ladder. They are not what one campaign at this price buys.
Long-standing champion of new guitar music. Realistic once you have a body of specialist coverage behind you.
Its Neu section is one of the most reliable first-look slots in British indie, and correspondingly hard to get into.
Youth-facing and quick to move on a band with visible momentum. Momentum is the prerequisite, not the outcome.
Print-first and deeply scene-embedded. Long lead times and a high bar.
Long-form, considered, and sceptical of anything that reads like a campaign.
Specialist shows first. Almost always reached through a regional Introducing show rather than directly.
We list these so you can see the ladder, not to imply that one campaign puts you on it. If your release is genuinely in range of this tier, we will tell you, and we will tell you what it would take.
How we build an indie pitch
Scene before sound
Editors think in scenes. A band from the Windmill orbit, the Leeds DIY circuit or the Glasgow guitar underground is a legible thing to write about. A band with influences ranging from The Smiths to Radiohead is not. We position you inside a scene an editor already covers.
The live proof point
Indie press still respects the room. A sold-out show at a well-regarded 150-capacity venue, a support slot with a credible touring act, or a festival billing gives a writer a concrete reason to move now.
Print runs on a different clock
The print titles work months ahead. If print matters to you, the campaign has to start earlier than a digital-only one, and we will tell you honestly whether your timeline allows for it.
Premieres are a trade
A premiere gives an outlet exclusivity in return for a bigger placement. It is worth doing once per campaign, with the right outlet, for the right asset. It is worth nothing offered to eleven places at once.
The sub-scenes we work across
Post-punk and the south London guitar axis. Jangle and dream-pop. Shoegaze and its current revival. Midlands and northern DIY. Bedroom indie that has grown into a live band. Each of these has a different set of receptive writers, and a pitch written for one will be ignored by the others.
What's included
The same package regardless of genre. What changes is who we pitch, how we pitch them and when.
Indie PR by city
Where local media and the local circuit change how an indie campaign should be run.
Questions
Planning an indie release?
Send us the track and the date. We will tell you which outlets are realistic, what the timeline needs to be, and whether it is worth running at all yet.