On any given weekday, my inbox contains 100 or so new emails before I wake up, and I get up early, around 6am, California time. By the end of the day, when I go to sleep, usually around midnight, if I haven’t managed to delete any emails, my inbox will easily have 400 in it.
This is the current stage of the form letter template that I occasionally send out in reply to queries for coverage of a particular band, album, song, video, sound app, gallery exhibit, and so forth:
Hi. I don’t reply much to PR correspondence, even directly from musicians/coders/artists.
There’s simply too much of it, often as many as 400 emails per weekday.
The best way for me to state the situation is as follows: I receive an enormous number of inquiries for me to write about music/sound, and I listen to — I consume/absorb — as much as I can without doing what I’m paying attention to the disservice of being too casual about it. I then write about what I find interesting. And I write about something I find interesting every day, often more than once per day.
Important note: I pretty much focus my writing on “technologically mediated sound” — ambient music, sound art, sound design, sound in the media landscape, experimental classical, hip-hop production, that sorta thing. And I write very little about what would traditionally be considered a “song.”
Feel free to send me email (with any related materials, such as MP3 files, as links, not as attachments). Just please don’t take it personally, or even read into it any reflection of my (dis)interest, if and when I don’t respond.
And yes, this is a form letter, as is 99% of the PR I receive.
Best,
Marc