With the “We’re America” song video breaching 2,000 views now on YouTube and various social media play in progress, the next phase of my release strategy is the issuance of a press release. I’m using two services to distribute the release: Beat Wire and PRWeb.

Beatwire is a musician-centric service that distributes multimedia releases to some 10,000 music journalists and reviewers, including both mainstream press and the blogosphere. PRWeb, which is owned by PR-industry leader Vocus, also distributes a multimedia release to the main news desks of mainstream press and social media sites. PRWeb gets thumbs up from the likes of PR guru Annie Jennings, among others.

Both these services are reasonably priced, with advanced packages in the three- to four-hundred dollar range. PR Newswire is another good mainstream media service, but their packages start at $680.

In both cases, the release includes an embedded video and an audio stream of the song as well as artist photos and album cover. I’ve used both services before and had fair to good results.

In addition, I will personally send pitches of the story to key journalists, including newspaper, TV and the blogosphere. You can’t depend solely on press-release services. Pitching journalists is an art in itself, but I’ll go into that another time.

I’ll report results in a future post.