Non-Existent Publicist Sends Out Fake Email To Promote Dead Musician

from the sign-of-the-times dept

John submitted this absolutely bizarre story from Rolling Stone about a mysterious email that went out last week, supposedly from a music industry publicist who was fired. In the email, the publicist talks about how stupid the record company was, pointing to the fact that they actually held a seance to contact a recently dead musician to ask him to try to promote his new album from beyond the grave. As bizarre as that sounds, the true story may be even more bizarre. It turns out that the musician in question had been a royal pain for the record company, always calling and emailing them with requests. The record company made up a history of mental illness to keep him away from the press, while also creating a fake publicist to handle his calls. They gave that non-existent publicist a voicemail and email account, and the musician was apparently satisfied, believing he had a publicist dealing with his requests. Then, a few weeks before the album was due out, the musician really did die (heart attack) and the record label brought back the fake publicist to "quit" in disgust, in the hopes that the discussion over the ridiculousness of the (also non-existent) seance would get the (now non-existent) band more publicity.