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Edition 01 · North America — Issue 01 ships October 1, 2026 · free brief live now
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For artists, DJs & producers · North America

The electronic music
industry is a
closed club

It is. And I've spent twenty-five years inside it, as North American publicist to Carl Cox.

AAA is not a database — it's the room. Every month I tell you who's actually commissioning, what they're hungry for, and how to reach them without landing in the delete pile.

0%
of 15,000+ DJs and producers surveyed say the industry is a closed club that limits access to new artists.
Source · Pete Tong DJ Academy survey
Who's commissioning right now
Who moved last month
Why they said no
Who's commissioning right now
Who moved last month
Why they said no
File 01 — The problem

Everyone will teach you to make a better record

Nobody will tell you who to send it to. The press in this scene has shrunk faster than anyone wants to admit, while the number of people pitching into it has exploded. Three numbers tell you everything.

0
Reviews published by Resident Advisor in a 30-day period
The outlets that built this scene have cut reviews to a trickle. Pitchfork put theirs behind a paywall. The editors still standing open hundreds of promos a day. Volume isn't a strategy — it's noise. Precision is all that's left.
0
Electronic music journalists in a 1,000,000-contact database
A leading media database advertises over a million journalist contacts. Search it for "electronic music" and two names come back — one of them a producer, not a journalist. Search techno and you'll get a French science site, a film blog and a consumer electronics magazine. These tools have no idea what this scene is.
$0k
Annual cost of the enterprise tools that still can't help you
The professional databases run $3,500 to $40,000 a year. Below them, $49 scraped spreadsheets full of dead addresses. Nothing in between. And nothing at any price built by someone who actually works in this genre.
File 02 — The other problem

Pay-to-play isn't access. It's a receipt

The promo economy

What you're actually buying

Artists, labels and PRs send thousands of promos a day. An industry has grown up monetizing that flood.

You buy credits at roughly $0.80 to $1.10 each. A curator is paid for their listening time — not for playing your record, not for writing about it. You get a paragraph back. Between 5% and 20% of submissions get approved depending on who's counting, and the share that becomes a published review is smaller again.

None of that is secret and none of it is illegal. It's the published model. But here's the part nobody says out loud, so I will: a lot of that spend was never for the artist. It's for the report. We buy the comments so there's something to show the client at the end of the month. I've sat in those meetings. I've built those decks.

Feedback is not coverage. A paid listen is not a relationship. And a folder full of paragraphs from people who were paid to write them is not a press campaign — it's a receipt for one.

AAA exists because the alternative to paying for attention is knowing where to put it.

File 03 — The flagship

The No

§ 05 — Every issue

One editor.
One real pass.
In their own words.

Every artist alive has sent a pitch into silence and never learned why. Editors almost never explain. Not even to friends.

I've pitched Lesley Wright plenty of times and been passed over without a word — and we're mates. Twenty-five years in and I still don't always get told. That silence is the most expensive thing in this business, because you can't fix what nobody will name.

So every month, one editor takes one real pitch they passed on and tells you exactly what happened. Where they stopped reading. What the subject line did. What would have changed their mind. Anonymized for the artist, on the record from the desk.

Nobody publishes this. Nobody has ever been willing to.

File 04 — What you can get

Three ways in

Subscription$249 / yr

The Access Brief

Monthly. Who's commissioning right now, what they're covering, their real lead times, and who quietly moved outlets last month. Intelligence that goes stale in weeks — which is exactly why it's worth having fresh.

Inside the brief →
One-time$397

The Pitch System

The whole method, written down. Bio and release craft, the promo itself, embargoes and exclusives, campaign timelines, target tiering — and a line-by-line teardown of pitches that died.

Nine parts →
ServiceFrom $450

Press-Ready Audit

Send me your bio, your release and your pitch email. You'll get back a written teardown — what an editor kills in the first three seconds, what your real story is, and where it belongs. Ten working days.

Inquire →
File 05 — Coverage

Two editions

Edition 01 · Live

North America

US, Canada and Mexico. Written by Sara Cooper — 25 years as Carl Cox's North American press manager.

Edition 02 · In development

Europe & UAE

UK, EU and the Gulf — written by Lesley Wright, founder and Editor-in-Chief of iamCrü, formerly an editor at DJ Mag and Hype UAE, with seven editorships behind her. Pro subscribers get both.

Twenty-five years inside. Now written down.

Start with the free brief. Every two weeks, no cost, one click to leave. Don't wait for the scene to find you — walk in.

Product 01 — Subscription

The Access Brief

A monthly intelligence brief on the North American electronic music press. Who's commissioning. What they want. Who moved. What actually landed.

Six sections. Every month.

§ 01

The Board

15–25 named editors, writers, radio producers and curators commissioning across North America right now — what each covers, real lead time, and whether they'll take an unsigned artist.

§ 02

Moves

Who changed outlet. Who got promoted. Who left. Which section got cut. The fastest-decaying intelligence in the brief — and the most valuable.

§ 03

What Landed

Three campaigns that got real coverage this month, anonymized and pulled apart. What the angle was, who took it, and why it worked.

§ 04

The Delete Pile

Real pitches that failed, and exactly where each one died. Usually the subject line. Usually the first sentence.

§ 05

The No

One editor takes one real pass and explains it in their own words. Anonymized for the artist, on the record from the desk. Nobody else publishes this.

§ 06

Windows

What to pitch now for cycles closing next quarter — Ibiza season, ADE, festival announcements, awards, end-of-year lists.

Two tiers

Start here
Artist
$249/ year
Founding rate · locked for as long as you stay
  • The Access Brief, monthly
  • Full back-issue archive
  • The Windows calendar
  • Quarterly Q&A thread
  • 10% off any Press-Ready Audit
Join the list — first access 1 Oct →

Founding rate — $249 a year, locked at that price for as long as you stay subscribed, and it never goes up. Checkout opens October 1, 2026, the day Issue 01 ships. Join the list and you'll be told first, before it goes anywhere else. Cancel any time, online, in two clicks — here’s how. Full refund within 30 days.

Pro — label, manager, agency
$699/ seat / year
Founding rate · 3-seat label pack $1,850
  • Everything in Artist
  • Roster view — filtered to your territories and genres
  • Quarterly 45-minute strategy call
  • Priority audit scheduling
  • Invoice billing, PO accepted
  • Both editions when Europe & UAE lands
Buying for a team? See the Pro door →

When checkout opens on October 1, paid plans renew automatically at the price shown until you cancel. You'll get a reminder before every renewal. Cancel any time, online, in two clicks — the same way you signed up. No phone calls. No retention gauntlet. How to cancel. Prices exclude sales tax where it applies; any tax is calculated at checkout and shown before you pay.

Product 02 — One-time · Lifetime access

The Pitch System

The complete method for getting electronic music covered, written down for the first time. Roughly 140 pages, twelve working templates, one campaign calendar. Read it once — then keep it open every single release.

01
Finding the story
Why "I released a track" is not news, and the seven angles that are. Including the hardest case — no story, three weeks out.
02
The bio
Three lengths, built to be cut from the bottom. The paragraph order that survives an editor's first pass — and the eleven phrases that mark you as unrepresented in a single line.
03
The press release
Structure, headline, the first forty words, the asset folder. The release doesn't exist to describe your music. It exists to make somebody else's job easier.
04
The promo itself
The unit of work nobody teaches. File naming, formats, private streams vs downloads, metadata, what a DJ opens on a phone at an airport. Which pools editors genuinely check — plus honest arithmetic on paid platforms, and when they're worth it anyway.
05
Tiering your targets
A real target list in three tiers, and why ten of the right people beats three hundred of the wrong ones every time.
06
Embargoes & exclusives
What an exclusive is actually worth, who to offer it to, how long to hold — and how to run one without torching the relationship.
07
The pitch email
Subject lines, length, attachments, links, and the follow-up rhythm that reads as professional instead of desperate.
08
The campaign calendar
Twelve weeks, mapped backwards from release day. Where the premiere sits, when radio goes, and why most artists start four weeks too late.
09
The delete pile
Twenty real pitches that failed, annotated line by line. The most uncomfortable section in the book. Also the most useful.