Nobody in this industry publishes prices, and artists reasonably assume that means something is being hidden. Usually it does not. It means the work is not comparable between two releases, and quoting a flat number would be quoting for a job nobody has described yet.
Still, you deserve to understand what moves the number before anyone sends you a figure.
What actually changes the price
Lead time. A release four weeks out and a release next Friday are different jobs. The second one costs more or gets refused, because half the outlets are already closed for that week.
How many texts have to be written. This is the real cost centre and the one artists never see. A campaign across twenty outlets is not one press release sent twenty times. Done properly it is a piece per outlet, in that outlet's language and register. That is twenty pieces of writing.
Territory. Spain plus one neighbouring market is one shape of campaign. Spain, Germany, the UK and Latin America is another, and it needs writing in more than one language.
Whether a cover is on the table. A cover is not a bigger version of a feature. It is a negotiation with an editorial calendar, a photo shoot to coordinate and a long-form interview to run. It behaves like a separate project because it is one.
What exists already. If there is no biography, no release note and no press photo, someone has to make them before any pitching happens.
What you should get, whatever you pay
Three things. If a campaign does not end with these, it was not a campaign.
- Clippings. The actual links, with dates. Not a screenshot of a media list, not a number of "impacts". Links.
- What the editors said. Including the ones who said no, and why. A no with a reason is worth money: it tells you what to change on the next record.
- Honest reach. What the coverage was, where, and what it plausibly did. Not a made up figure with six zeros.
The part that is not about money
The fastest way to waste a budget is to run a campaign for a record that is not ready. Not the mix, the framing: no story, no angle, no reason for a magazine to care beyond the fact that it exists.
I say no to those. Not out of principle, out of arithmetic. A campaign that places nothing costs the artist money and costs me the relationship with every editor I pushed it to. Both of us lose, and I lose twice, because I still have to pitch to those people next month.
If your record has an angle, a date and four weeks, there is a version of a campaign at almost any budget. If it has none of the three, the honest answer is to fix that first, and it costs nothing to ask.