ABOUT

Fully Altered Media has been leading the field in creative music public relations and social media marketing, without boundaries since 2007. In recent years, as the media landscape continues to change, we have developed a hybrid approach to marketing music and ideas. While our hearts will always be filled with pride when we see our clients with a print spread in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or WIRE, we feel just as pleased with a client takeover of a media outlet or sponsor’s social media channel or a premiere by Gilles Peterson on Worldwide FM. The landscape has been irrevocably blurred and non-traditional outlets from crossposted Facebook live-streams to highly curated Instagram stories to consultations with artists on crowdfunding or Patreon roll-outs qualify as “results” in our new landscape, where artists and organizations are unencumbered from the strictures of gatekeepers. Our greatest strength lies in our relationships and our credibility representing artists and organizations we believe in. Our goal is quality placements with knowledgeable journalists or influencers that maximize potential reach nationally and internationally. Each campaign is customized to each client’s needs, often concentrating on different aspects of career development and brand recognition from traditional press campaigns to social media curation and strategy to digital advertising plans for albums, videos, songs, festivals and new ideas. Our unique team includes publicists, social media marketers, online advertising specialists, software developers and more.

Matt Merewitz – Founder

As founder and director of Fully Altered Media (FAM) since 2007, Matt Merewitz has become known as one of the most effective, social media-savvy publicists in the world of jazz and improvised music. Through FAM he offers not just album publicity but also label services, consulting on distribution and streaming, career guidance, social media consulting and more. Part of Matt’s success lies in the longevity of his professional relationships. From 2008-2019, he handled publicity for pianist, MacArthur Fellow, Harvard professor and Grammy nominee Vijay Iyer. His persistent work on behalf of composer and bandleader Miho Hazama since 2015 led to a 2020 Grammy nomination for her large-ensemble album Dancer In Nowhere. Since 2009 Matt has also handled publicity for poll-winning bassist, composer, bandleader, and environmental and gender justice advocate Linda May Han Oh. He has also consulted for Dave Douglas’ Greenleaf Music since 2011.

Matt ran the PR campaign for John Coltrane’s Offering: Live at Temple University on the Resonance Records label, leading to author Ashley Kahn’s 2015 Grammy win for Best Album Notes. He has handled publicity for NYC Winter Jazzfest, Chicago Jazz Festival, Vision Festival and numerous events produced by the Afro-Latin Jazz Alliance (ALJA) and Philadelphia’s Ars Nova Workshop, and overseen or consulted on publicity for top labels including ECM, Blue Note, Concord, AUM Fidelity, Enja, Cryptogramophone, Biophilia, Firehouse 12, Marsalis Music and others. Other celebrated clients past and present include Tyshawn Sorey, Myra Melford, John Hollenbeck, Kris Davis, Nicole Mitchell, Aaron Parks, Marta Sanchez, Amir ElSaffar, Allison Miller, Anna Webber, Adam O’Farrill, Kassa Overall and more. A native of the Washington, DC area, Matt began his PR career in Philadelphia under the wing of Don Lucoff, Brad Riesau and Stephanie Brown at DL Media. He was a classical piano student from age eight, and later a saxophone student of Paul Carr and other fine teachers. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh he became immersed in college radio at WRCT-FM, where he delved into avant-garde jazz for the first time, while being exposed to all kinds of indie rock, experimental and electronic music, hip-hop, folk, singer-songwriters, alt-country, blues, reggae and more. With this personal and professional history, Matt has gained a unique understanding of how jazz in our time came to be unconstrained by genre, embracing limitless possibilities. Every campaign that Fully Altered Media undertakes starts from this premise. Matt resides in Westchester County, NY with his wife, daughter and chocolate labradoodle, Sonny (named in honor of all the great Sonnys of jazz: Rollins, Stitt, Clark, Fortune, Greer, Payne, Criss, Blount, Sharrock, Simmons, Red, etc.).