Why Are We Doing This?

We’re publishing this newsletter to give you an insider’s view on the complexities of the music business and to help you navigate them regardless of your role or level of expertise. Over the years, we’ve found ourselves answering the same questions and giving the same advice time and again, so we decided to start this newsletter and go “on the record” with a weekly newsletter answering the music industry’s most burning questions.

Being a small PR firm — it’s just the two of us! — we can only take on so many records/clients at once, which means we simply can’t work with everyone all the time. We started this newsletter to extend our network of musicians, labels, and other industry professionals, as well as enable you to extend your network through the connections we make.

Our mission is to empower independent musicians with everything they need to be successful.

What You Can Expect

We’re going to tell you everything we know about the music business. We’ll educate you on licensing, publicity, digital distribution, playlisting, podcasts, touring, radio promotion, pitching labels, social media management, advertising, marketing, booking, live streaming, live sessions, legal advice, and whatever else we can think of — and we’ll have experts in these fields back us up. Basically, everything a manager should be able to educate you on. And we’ll give it to you straight and to the point with actionable items - no filler.

Why? Because the music business is just like every other business, one built on relationships, and we’ve spent two decades building ours.

We want more of you to be successful so that we can all grow together.


To find out more about the people behind this newsletter, visit us at SweetheartPR.com, or continue reading below.

Who We Are

Rachel Hurley & Frank Keith, IV co-own and operate Sweetheart Pub.

Rachel has created successful press campaigns for dozens of clients including Shawn Colvin, Drivin N Cryin, Ben Lee, and a wide variety of other musicians from those releasing their first EPs to established artists releasing specialty projects. She started her music career as PA for Tony DeSantis, the VP of Development at MTV, and went on to work at a handful of MTV-produced shows as a production coordinator. She created one of the very first successful music blogs in 2004 and had an award-winning personal blog, working with brands such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Red Bull. She was the official blogger for two years at Lollapalooza and Beale Street Music Festival. She has worked as a writer with bylines in Spin, The Vinyl District, Talent Zoo, and many others, and spent two years writing a weekly music column in The Commercial Appeal. She’s been a talent buyer at a club, she started podcasting in 2006 with multiple shows, and hundreds of thousands of listeners on Breakthru Radio. She was recruited by legendary producer and engineer John Fry to work at Ardent Studios, where she spent six years creating podcasts, running social media channels, working as a publicist for Big Star, and helping launch their label Ardent Music. She has also worked in the non-music realm, specifically as the content marketing director at Morris Marketing Group, and as a traffic manager at Signature Advertising. She was accepted to and trained by the Seed Hatchery entrepreneur accelerator where she earned a grant of $15,000 to start a business. Rachel is a self-starter by nature, having already worked at three successful start-ups.

Frank began his career as a publicist with Baby Robot Media in 2017 and has been a professional bassist for over a decade, recording & touring with the likes of Great Peacock (of which he is a current member), Faye Webster, T. Hardy Morris, Ruby the Rabbitfoot, and more. After dozens of successful campaigns with Baby Robot Media, Frank & Rachel decided to venture out on their own and founded Sweetheart PR in 2020. Frank earned his bachelor’s degree in Journalism with a certification in Music Business from the University of Georgia in 2013, and although he wouldn’t take a job in “the biz” until joining Baby Robot in 2017, he turned his time touring into more than just playing shows and making albums — building his professional network and learning from veterans in all facets of the music business along the way. Frank knows what it takes to succeed in a professional capacity on both sides of the industry line.

Subscribe to Sweetheart Pub

Sweetheart Pub is a weekly newsletter written by two music industry veterans. We'll share with you actionable items to help you with publicity, digital distribution, radio promotion, social media, booking, tour management, industry news, and much more.

People

Head Master