Sharing the Gig Love Interviews, How-Tos,and more

Our own Cisco sat down with Aurelia Group president, top electronic music publicist Lainie Copicotto. Lainie’s been a figure in the Electronic Music industry for quite some time now and has seen it progress from the early 90s dealing with Giuliani to today’s squeaky clean image and reputation backed by high profile corporations like Cisco. Read on to see our favorite quotes from the interview.

Lainie Copicotto Interview Pt. 1

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Our favorite quotes:
Guilliani had become mayor and we were trying to figure out other ways to generate revenue into our club place. So we had kind of like, started the whole sponsorship aspect of our club nights haphazardly. Just out of necessity because our budgets were cut. They were like, “sorry you’ve got to pay for lawyers, so uh, we can’t really pay for your DJ’s.” So we would go to, you know, restaurants, we’d go to tanning salons, we’d go to anybody, going “I will sell you the back of my flyer if you’ll pay for this thing to get printed.” We started doing all these kinds of events. [1:40-2:15]

When the nightclubs closed, I got into a friend’s website. We were like…this was like when the whole online promotion started and he owned a small website at the time called Club NYC – which eventually turned into Club Planet. 
Yeah, and we kind of came up with this concept of um, you know, selling mailing lists and selling off, you know, stickies on message boards and getting the online communities to matter more that handing out a flyer on the street, and kind of organically it became new media. Implicitly it became publicity, it became PR. [2:45-3:23]

In my perspective PR is public relations. So, I’m taking my clients and I’m constantly keeping their name relevant in the public’s eye. [4:23-4:33]

Some people think that, you know, just promoting a night and sending out like a press release, you know, by e-mail is enough – it’s not. A lot of it’s relationships. A lot of it is, you know, coming up with a lot of ideas for your clients, doing your homework in pop culture and going “hey, there’s a new TV show coming and I want to get you on it – how, how do I get you on with Lopez tonight? How do I get you on Chelsea Handler? Just because we’re in nightclubs and we’re in DJ culture doesn’t mean that it limits us to you know, just being on certain websites or certain magazines. [4:54-5:31]

Festivals like Ultra Music Festival and Coachella haven’t had a lot to do with us breaking through. But um, it’s about these artists and DJ’s and their teams and what they do with these opportunities to make sure that we break through that, that ceiling. [6:19-6:34]

It’s great because this sound, this electronic sound, which I think that a lot of us took our cue from synth pop back in the day – is making such a strong comeback that it’s not even – the people aren’t getting influenced by us, they’re stealing from us blatantly. Kanye West is sampling Daft Punk. [7:07-7:27]

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Tags: Aurelia Entertainment, DJ Rap, Lainie Copicotto, Paul Van Dyke, publicist, Publicity