When Paul McCartney went on a publicity blitz a little over a month ago for his new studio album The Boys of Dungeon Lane, his PR team targeted formats and creators like TikTok and the banter-filled YouTube show Chicken Shop Date. One creator who didn’t make it on to the schedule: Rick Beato, the musicologist known for his deep-dive interviews with musicians like Brian May and Sting—and whose YouTube channel boasts more than 5 million subscribers.
That omission, which didn’t go unnoticed by some of Beato’s fans, was in spite of the appeal of the host’s formula—which was on full display again over the past week, in the form of an hour-long video interview between Beato and Billy Joel that racked up more than 1 million views in just three days. In it, the two men geek out over things like chord progressions, song structure, and the harmonic texture that dissonant notes bring to Joel masterpieces like “And So It Goes.”
Many of the viewers who watched it headed straight to Beato’s comments section afterward to call for a McCartney sit-down, prompting Beato to drop a follow-up video titled “Why Paul McCartney Won’t Be On My Channel” that reached 1 million views even faster than the Joel interview.
Rick Beato vs. music publicity gatekeepers
In his newest upload, Beato essentially lays out why he believes he’ll never book a McCartney chat. Because, in his telling, the gatekeepers around stars like the former Beatle too often prioritize highly controlled, mainstream publicity loops designed for mass reach rather than the technical breakdowns that Beato’s channel is known for.
“My channel is actually about music,” Beato says. “The people that tune in to my channel are interested in music, they’re interested in how people write songs, how people play things.”
He goes on to contrast the deep musical appreciation of his own audience with prestige media brands and Gen-Z viral gimmicks that he sees too many artists chasing—gimmicks, by the way, that have a hard-to-quantify impact on sales but no doubt massage a star’s ego, by putting that star in front of whatever has the attention of the zeitgeist at the moment.
Continues Beato: “The publicists that work for these people, I guess, don’t consider YouTube to be a legit outlet, even though all of these things end up on YouTube—that’s where everybody watches them.”
He’s right, to a point.
As someone who’s spent more than 20 years as a professional journalist, I not only agree with Beato; it’s clear that this discussion actually transcends the music business, to the point it’s also a modern media story. It’s partly about the chaos of metrics, and an era in which nobody really knows what actually moves the needle anymore.
‘Nothing’s really working anymore’
Maybe a piece of content online, for example, didn’t perform well because it wasn’t sufficiently optimized for Google. Maybe chatbots like ChatGPT cannibalized it, or maybe it was just a subpar piece of content. It could be all of that, or none of it.
I interviewed The Lumineers’ lead singer Wesley Schultz a few years ago, and he made a version of this same point to me. “Nothing’s really working anymore, quote-unquote, it’s all just everybody guessing,” he told me. “You still need good ideas, you need good songs, but we should get creative with how we roll things out.”
When it comes to the Beato video, meanwhile, multiple things are going on here.
Start with the fact that prestige is no longer the guarantee that it once was of a critical mass of eyeballs, in which case a choice has to be made between what amounts to attention or a vanity media placement.
Then there’s the fact that even though it’s easier than ever for a star to reach the public, that’s still no substitute for targeting the right public. Consider which of the following groups is most likely the larger one: The number of potentially persuadable music fans who could be converted into McCartney fans, or the existing fanbase that McCartney has amassed over his six decades as a musician?
If a PR team happens to think there are loads of potential McCartney fans out there who are up for grabs, then sure—put him on a buzzy internet show like Chicken Shop Date. A case could be made, though, that McCartney’s existing fanbase is the much bigger crowd, in which case logic suggests doing what politicians do on Election Day: Get out the vote.
Specifically, make every effort to reach and speak to the existing fanbase, a route that would seem to take a legacy rock star like McCartney straight to Beato’s channel.
The reason a McCartney-Beato interview is unlikely
All that said: While Beato’s latest video has tapped into some fascinating modern media dynamics, there’s probably a much simpler reason for why he’s right about McCartney.
It’s that McCartney simply doesn’t do the kind of interview Beato conducts.
At 84 years old, McCartney has carefully manicured his public persona over six decades into a fortress of charm. His publicity playbook is built around easy smiles and the same stories told over and over again. Whenever an interviewer threatens to knock him off course, he deflects—as listeners heard recently, when McCartney appeared on NPR’s Song Exploder podcast to discuss his song “Ripples in a Pond” from The Boys of Dungeon Lane.
Song Exploder is a show designed around exactly the kind of deep-dive musicology that Beato champions, albeit with much shorter episodes. When host Hrishikesh Hirway pushed for the “why” behind the track, McCartney eventually made a show of lighthearted exasperation: “Hey, Rishi, I’ll tell you one thing. You’re making me think more about this song than I’ve ever thought about any song ever. My gosh.”
That’s the real wall Beato is up against.
Part of his challenge is convincing PR teams to consider him as a viable destination, on par with legacy media outlets like The New York Times whose YouTube content Beato regularly outperforms in terms of total views. The fact of the matter, though, is that some PR teams are simply shielding clients from a format that essentially demands they break character.
