Felicia Okoye, Music PR
Initially I wanted to be a singer. Madonna was everywhere when I was a kid and I quite fancied making a living out of doing dance routines wearing lace dresses and pearls. Then I moved on to wanting to be a lawyer (short lived), before deciding I’d be a fiction writer to match my wild imagination. I went to uni and interned at magazines and Atlantic Records where I worked on the street team putting promo posters on street lampposts and generally being a public nuisance.
When I graduated, I got a staff writer position at Touch Magazine (R.I.P) where I did the TV review page each month, interviewed music artists and made up entries to go in the letters page (because no one actually wrote letters to say how amazing we were). I decided I wanted to get more behind the scenes with the music industry and have a hand in helping to build the profile and aid the output of artists, rather than reporting. I interned and later temped in the press department at Island Records and from there started at The Outside Organisation where I am now as an account manger which is another name for a music PR.
I then moved on for two years and got digital entertainment PR experience at an out-of-London-agency, before coming back to The Outside Organisation. I worked on the PR for the ThisDay Festival in Nigeria a few years back. It was two shows in Abuja and Lagos, which incorporated fashion and music with artists such as Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Rihanna and designers like Ozwald Boateng and Deola Sagoe. It was a huge learning curve and I’m of Nigerian heritage, so it meant a lot to me to be able to take journalists to the homeland for such massive events.
How to be a… music PR
Felicia says, “Study the media as much as you can. Read everything. Try and remember names. Live it. Explore new technology too, because there are so many PR opportunities to be had through a wealth of mediums. Also pick a sector you genuinely enjoy, you’ll have to talk lots about your clients and it helps if you actually care. If you don’t know your peas from carrots, maybe don’t go into food PR, for instance.”
