Open any press release from a promo pool and count the sentences that contain a verifiable fact. In most of them it is under a third. The rest is adjectives about a journey, a soundscape, and an artist who needs no introduction, which is a sentence that only ever appears next to an artist who does.
Editors delete that part. Every time. So the useful question is not how to write it better, it is why write it at all.
The six facts
A release note has one job: give an editor everything they need to publish without opening a second tab.
- Artist name, spelled exactly as it appears on the release. Including the capitals, the ampersands and the accents.
- Title and format. Single, EP, album, remix. Say which.
- Label and catalogue number. The catalogue number is what a magazine's back office actually files by.
- Release date, with the year. "Out Friday" is useless in an archive.
- Tracklist with durations, including remixers and featured artists, credited the way they want to be credited.
- A link that works and does not require an account.
If those six are missing, no amount of writing saves the email. If those six are present, you are already ahead of most of the inbox.
Then, the only paragraph that matters
After the facts, an editor wants one thing: the angle. Not a description of the music, they can hear the music. The reason this record is worth their readers' attention this month.
An angle is a fact with consequence. Occipital spent years building the OXI One sequencer and this is the first record he made with the tools he designed. That is an angle. It is checkable, it is unusual, and it gives a writer a paragraph to write.
"A hypnotic journey through deep atmospheres" is not an angle. It is filler, and every editor recognises it as filler within four words.
Write about the record, not around it
If you have to describe the music, describe what it does. Groove, pressure, tension, texture, where in a night it works. A track that opens at 3am and one that lifts a festival main stage are both good, and they are not the same product. Say which one you have.
Avoid the vocabulary that means nothing: incredible, brutal, spectacular, next level. If the record is good, a concrete sentence will show it. If it is not, no adjective will hide it.
The length nobody tells you
Three hundred words. Occasionally four hundred for an album with a real story.
Anything longer will not be read, it will be skimmed for the six facts, and you will have spent an afternoon writing something an editor scrolled past to find the tracklist.
Why it matters more than the pitch
There is a version of this job where you write a beautiful email and attach a bad press release, and you get one placement out of thirty tries.
There is another version where the release note is so clean that an editor can copy four fields out of it and publish, and you get placements you never even pitched for, because a writer at that magazine had a gap on Thursday and yours was the easiest thing on the desk.
That is not luck. That is document design.