Publicity Duties Differ For Avril & Velvet Revolver

Fly magazine recently spoke with Maggie Wang, Senior Director of Publicity of RCA Records in a Q&A session and asked about her current promotional duties representing Avril Lavigne and Velvet Revolver, and how she approaches them differently from a publicity standpoint. “I think when you are approaching a pop band or artist, a lot of it is about video and radio. Not that you’re not still conscious of wanting to make your artist a career artist, but I think there’s just a difference,” she responded. “Avril is perfect for the teen magazines and women’s magazines. Those aren’t targets when you’re working with a rock band. For me, it’s more of a delicate situation because with a rock band, you always have to be conscious of the fact that you have to start from the ground up. You really have to build a foundation for a rock band. If you don’t have that and if you don’t do all the regional zines and all the newspapers and fan zines and you don’t cater to the real hardcore fans, then you’re not going to have a foundation on which to build a career. With pop artists, you put a video out there, you’re all over MTV, your song is all over the radio and all of a sudden you go to super-stardom and people just perceive you as not a career artist. For rock bands, that’s at the forefront of their minds: ‘We wanna be here for the long haul’.”