Royce D.
If I could give zero stars
If I could give zero stars, or negative stars, I certainly would. "Scammers" are the first word I would use to describe Starlight PR. They took credit for every bit of self-promotion I did on the back-end, in an attempt to rescue my release from falling victim to their almost completely useless $4,200 promotion package. First of all, they assigned a junior writer to craft my press release, who absolutely botched it... the writer failed to form complete sentences, and the majority of the bio/press release was entirely incoherent. I had to rewrite it as best I could, seeing as how Starlight failed to take any responsibility for the abhorrent quality when I notified them. Being on a tight release schedule, this was immensely stressful, and overall detrimental to the release of my record. After I spent ten hours rewriting the press release to give it some semblance of coherence, I sent it back to Starlight with a sharp admonishment, and in response, they began a nasty email thread, arguing with me about how great their employees are and how wonderful their work is. At this point, I felt trapped, as I had entrusted Starlight with my first release, and had already passed their refund deadline with no other promotion strategies in place. In our initial phone consultation, Shealin had repeatedly assured me that Starlight PR was properly equipped, and maintained the appropriate industry connections, to promote my solo instrumental acoustic guitar album. In reality, they copy/pasted the garbage press release (which I had spent so much time and energy attempting to salvage, but which in the end was like polishing a piece of trash) into ten different RAP MUSIC "blogs" and "magazines", the vast majority of which were front companies with no readership or social media following. After learning that their "ten to fifteen reviews in top blogs and magazines (like SMASH Mag and Pigeons & Planes)" actually meant them copy/pasting my press release into exactly ten fake websites which did not even rank in a google search, I furiously emailed them, to which they responded again by arguing that their services and employees are "actually VERY good". I received ZERO organic streams, ZERO real social media follows, and almost no overall results from this $4,200 promotional campaign. The small amount of streams and TikTok follows which they generated were clearly from fake accounts, and resulted not only in ZERO engagement, but negatively affected my social media presence by cluttering it up with bots. The writers whom they hired to review my album wrote about it in such a way that indicated they had not even listened to it, and the playlists that Starlight secured for my songs included "70s, 80s, 90s Smash Hits" and a Portuguese "Guardians of the Galaxy Soundtrack Playlist". Oh, and out of the several podcast and radio interviews which they secured, the majority of them were largely centered around rap music, which was completely inappropriate for my album, and the majority of the interviewers clearly had never listened to the music, let alone prepared for the interviews, and were unable to represent the music effectively to their minuscule audiences. On a positive note however, a couple of the radio interviews and articles were relatively well done. Publicist Kurt Beyers wrote a decent article for SMASH Mag, and an iHeart Radio syndicated show that actually seemed professionally run was a pleasant surprise. But all in all, the promotional campaign was entirely ineffective for generating new followers, streams, or any kind of engagement with the music. 95% garbage, 5% half-decent, 100% not worth a quarter of what was charged. Beware of Starlight PR.