For those of you who don’t know, C Squared is no longer solely a PR company. While we still work to secure press coverage, interviews, reviews, and other traditional media opportunities for our clients, our overall goal is now much broader: increasing visibility and awareness for a band wherever the right audience is paying attention. Focusing only on blogs, websites, and print media can severely limit your reach. As a result, we now consider ourselves a full-service promotion company that helps artists build awareness across a wide range of paid and unpaid channels.
Some examples of things we do that traditional PR generally doesn’t include:
- Pitching YouTube channels for interviews, reviews, unboxing videos, and other creative features.
- Pitching social media pages, especially those focused on a specific musical genre or subculture. These are not just paid promotions and can include collaborative posts with larger pages, organic features, product spotlights, and other opportunities.
- Pitching comic, horror, sci-fi, toy, gaming, and other entertainment outlets. This can include websites, podcasts, social media pages, YouTube channels, and more.
- Organizing creative collaborations such as themed drinks, burgers, tattoo shop partnerships, and other experiential promotions.
The idea behind this approach came from our co-founder, who noticed several years ago that more and more people were discovering music outside of traditional media. At the same time, we realized that we, along with much of the metal PR industry, were still heavily focused on blogs, print media, reviews, and interviews. Those things are still important and remain a major part of what we do, but they are no longer the only ways people discover new artists. That realization led to what has now become one of our mottos at C Squared: “A Feature Is A Feature.”
What does this mean? Instead of focusing only on traditional opportunities like song premieres, reviews, and interviews, we look closely at who our clients’ potential audiences are and where those people are spending their time. We also pay attention to the individual interests of the band members, because those interests can open the door to entirely different audiences. If someone in the band is heavily into horror, gaming, comics, cars, food, tattoos, or another subculture, there may be opportunities to reach like-minded people through those communities as well.
The goal is to identify as many relevant ways as possible to put the artist in front of people who may genuinely care about them. For one band, that may mean a strong traditional press campaign. For another, it may mean combining press with YouTube, podcasts, social media features, experiential events, or collaborations outside the music industry. In most cases, it is a mix of all of those things, with the campaign built around the artist rather than forcing every band into the same PR formula.
One example is the campaign we ran for Meshuggah’s 2025 North American tour. The band didn’t want to do a large number of interviews, but they were open to more creative and experiential opportunities. We developed a plan that resulted in themed food collaborations across multiple cities coinciding with the tour, along with an experience featuring vocalist Jens Kidman at a racetrack in Las Vegas.
We also pushed traditional press throughout the campaign, but by expanding beyond the usual PR avenues, we were able to earn Meshuggah more placements and generate more attention than during the campaign surrounding their most recent album release. That was particularly notable because there was no new album driving the conversation. These activations created new reasons for media, fans, businesses, and other communities to talk about the band while also giving fans memorable experiences connected directly to Meshuggah.
In short, when you work with us to plan a promotion campaign, our goal is to deliver more than just media placements. We look at the artist, the audience, the campaign, and the opportunities available, then work to find as many relevant ways as possible to get the band seen, heard, and talked about. Traditional PR is still a major part of what we do, but it is no longer the limit of what we do.
For more information on how we can help, reach out to Curtis at curtis@csquared.info or Cori at corinne@csquared.info.