Highvioletprandplugging Avis 3

If I could give minus 10 to this company I would.

I was running a successful meta ads campaign for my song in 2021, this gobsh*te Sean Crossey saw the ad and got up in my DMs, he promised me he could do better for my song using his PR company citing that he had just worked with already popular sinead o connor

I asked him what he could do and he literally said "yknow like sites" and reiterated that he had done work for Sinead O Conner.

Anyway, I am dyslexic and wrote a basic EPK for my song. He takes the EPK and on one of his Ghost blogs what do I see but my own badly written EPK. Then also on the report comes up all these weird obscure website radio channels in france and germany that are utterly useless to my brand and im supposed to be thankful. when I complained they didnt offer me a penny back.

He didnt even bother to do the basic part which he had charged me for.

If he couldnt work with my music then why the f did he click my ad and chase me offering me a so-called better deal and direct me away from where I was headed.(I ended up saving this track to some degree but it was too late)

I then recieved 3 streams.
Any radio play I got myself as damage control was recorded in his report which he didnt even do. he even included a blog or two that I had already contacted.

Scumbags to the maximum. They werent listed on companies house as active at that point so they werent even paying tax.

Sean often runs charity events that are designed to launder his own image.

Stay the hell away from this company!

they are now called allcapspr

For some reason they needed a brand change

I worked with High Violet this spring to promote a single. A warning to anyone reading - the service is overpriced and you get low quality return for what you’re paying. Some of the info below relates to Ireland because that’s where I’m from.

In terms of reviews and coverage - the PR campaign started on 15th April for my single’s release date on May 9th. In that time he secured five pieces of online written coverage. The quality of the coverage was poor - one of the blogs even misspelled my name in the headline. I got no mentions in the usual Irish publications who have covered my music before. I have a larger social media following than all of the publications/blogs secured by High Violet to cover the single. When I did some outreach myself as damage control the following two weeks after the release date I managed to get nine different publications to cover the release with minimal effort on my part. So with my release date in the past I managed to get almost twice as much coverage. Also, in his final report he included some of the coverage I secured, as if to take credit for them?

For the radio campaign he sends your release out to DJs/stations in a list along with releases from multiple other artists (I was told this by a radio DJ in my hometown who received the PR email) - so he is not sending dedicated emails about your release. According to his report 104 stations played my song, supposedly about 40 percent community, 17 percent college, 19 percent commercial, 1 percent online radio stations. I used WARM radio monitor to see which stations picked up my single after his campaign - WARM monitor indicates that only one commercial radio station played the track - Midlands 103 - and I have a personal relationship with two of the DJs there. My radio monitor report mentions plays from 4 other community stations, one in Germany and four in the UK. There is a huge difference between the 104 stations on his report and the 5 stations who actually played the song. Also, in his list of 104 stations who supposedly played the song, he included an electronic music station. My song is a folk song, they definitely didn’t play it haha. So the report was falsified to the teeth, and the radio campaign run by High Violet is totally ineffectual.

On his site he advises that he provides ‘a detailed report’ after the campaign. The ‘detailed report’ was simply an email listing the names of radio stations and blogs (see image). No additional information about what countries the different stations/blogs were based in, type, etc.

All in all it really ruined this single release for me. I know if I had gone to a different PR company I would have gotten a far better service, probably way cheaper. Or I could have just done it myself and gotten far better results (like I have done in the past). I work full time as well as making music and performing live so I thought it would be good to get help this time around - I was so unbelievably disappointed with how it turned out. I contacted Sean after I got his report and asked to set up a call so I could give him some feedback. On the day I was supposed to call it turned out he had blocked me on Whatsapp and Instagram. Up to that point all of our communications had been polite and positive so why block me? It suggests to me that he is wilfully scamming people, lying on his reports, and he knew I was going to say something about it. I requested a partial refund on Paypal (I paid £899 and asked for £200 back - despite the service being awful I still got minimal coverage from it so felt I couldn’t request a full refund) and it got denied. So yeah, I do not recommend High Violet PR! Save yourself the headache and the heartache.

Sean Crossey messaged me around August 2023 about this companies PR services. I told him I wanted to promote an album. I ended up having a chat with him on Messenger and told him I was primarily interested in having reviews, features and blogs. Sean said he had worldwide contacts and could run a campaign for several weeks that would pitch radio stations and music reviewers for radio spins(plugging) and features, blogs, reviews etc. As the campaign progressed it was apparent there would be no more than a trickle of radio spins and no reviews at all. I requested a refund but Sean said he could only work with what was in front of him inferring that the problem was with my music rather than Sean's inability to pitch successfully to his 'worldwide contacts.' At the end of the campaign I had not received a single review and only a handful of spins from some radio stations. Since then I have built up contacts with a steadily growing network of radio stations that not only play my songs but put them on rotation. I have also had several good album and single release reviews. This company has been the worst PR company I have had the misfortune to deal with. Avoid at all costs.