Interview with Whitney Caroline

Transcription Andrew: So, you’re a Promoter? Caroline: I guess you could say that. Andrew: well what would you say? Caroline: I’m a business owner who focuses on marketing and publicity. So promoting is a part of that, but we do a lot marketing is very broad. Andrew: Is it mostly for musicians? Caroline: Yes, we try to stick to musicians, but we get a couple business, I try to say no. But mostly music. Andrew: what is your day-to-day like? Caroline: well this is my side gig. Andrew: Really? What’s your main gig? Caroline: My full time job is a digital marketing strategist at an international non-profit. Called Child Fence, its very fulfilling. On the side, and pretty much daily I’m coaching indie bands. So, I consult indie bands, I call it a jam session. But I sit down with indie bands a lot like this and I talk to them about marketing. 00:01:00Andrew: So to you is this a hobby or would you like to make it full time? Caroline: I’m really passionate about it, its been growing, id like to replace my income before I jump over, im getting there. Andrew: Why are you doing it in Richmond? Caroline: Well I went to the university of Richmond, got my masters degree in Richmond, and then I got my first official job in Richmond. So everything just kept falling into place here, I tried to move to Nashville, applied for jobs in Nashville but everything worked out here. 00:02:00Andrew: Was that because of promoting? Why Nashville? Caroline: I got in internship at Capital Records. Capital records is one of the biggest records labels in the country, owned by Universal Music Group. They have Katy Perry and a couple of other really big artists on their label. So I took an internship in Nashville to work for Capital, I worked on an AV grant and got to work with some celebrities. Andrew: Did you work with anyone you think I’d know? Caroline: Michael W. Smith, their mostly from the 90s, a new rapper called NF, he’s really good. I got to do website design for him and social media strategy stuff. I just loved that I could do advertising for music and so made a bunch of friends while in Nashville and they started recommending their indie friends to me, because indie bands which couldn’t find a label needed marketing help. And so I started coaching bands and it wasn’t until 2 years of coaching bands that I felt confident enough to start charging bands, so that’s how I started the business. 00:03:00Andrew: So you started with people in Nashville? Caroline: Ya I started in Nashville and was coaching five different bands when I started. Andrew: How is it different here than in Nashville? Caroline: The networking scene is a lot different here, so if you’re an artist it’s a lot quieter here, people are not as open about being an artist. It’s not like a music city like Nashville is. In Nashville you can pretty much assume everyone you meet is a musician, whereas in Richmond most of us have a day job or something else which we do so you wouldn’t necessary know. Andrew: Has that changed since you’ve been involved in the Richmond music scene? Caroline: It hasn’t changed, but its opened my eyes to how many people in Richmond are actually musicians. 00:04:00Andrew: So its harder to find musicians here Caroline: it’s a lot harder to find, like someone like Andy, I know he’s a music professor, but just seeing him on the street you might not know necessarily that he a musician so you have to know him. Andrew: What would you like to see change in the music scene here? Would yo like to see it be more open like Nashville? Caroline: Ya, I would love to see more collaboration. Andrew: Do you think it’s possible? Caroline: Ya I think that it takes people like Andy, I think it takes people who are passionate about music getting together and creating opportunities. We need places to network, not just like to jam, but places to meet each other because we don’t even know who there is in Richmond. Andrew: What do you play? Caroline: I’m a singer songwriter. Andrew: Do you play at local venues? Caroline: We played at Ashucomfity(?) So we’ve been playing for about two years, we’re focusing on music licensing now. That’s a whole other story, so I got a lot of my experience in Business School. I have my masters in Business and Licensing. So, I applied it to music, but as a musician… I started doing musician stuff in 2014 also. So I learned how to make money as an artist by being an artist and by going to Business School and all of those things together helped me form the business. Because I can confidently say this is how you make money this is how you make still make money, these are things business care about, these are things venues don’t know. Like all that stuff. 00:05:00Andrew: Growing up were you interested in marketing or growing up what did you think you’d want to do? Caroline: Um, well first I wanted to be a ballerina, I wanted to be an interior designer all through high school. It’s kind of like marketing for your house. But there wasn’t enough depth to it, to me there wasn’t much humanity to that, there wasn’t an opportunity to write, I really like to write. 00:06:00Andrew: So once you got to Richmond did your perspective change of the fact that you could make money off music? Caroline: So, I didn’t actively pursue music until 2014, when I became a musician and started playing shows and put out a record and all of that. I learned that it takes a lot of work, I think a lot of musicians think that their going to become famous overnight or when they release a song, so there’s often an unrealistic expectation of what’s going to happen when you put your music out there. Everyone’s going to hear it or everyone’s going to care, its going to blow up and go viral. You hear that a lot. It doesn’t really work that way now a days if you’re an indie band and you don’t have the support of a label financially or emotionally or marketing, without that stuff you’re on your own. And you have to form a team and you have to find people. You either have to pay people or you have to find people who believe in you enough to work for free. The second ones a lot harder. So what you end up with is a lot of indie bands with a lot of dreams and labels who just won’t sign them because they don’t have a following yet, they don’t have traction, so getting an indie band with nothing to a place where labels will even care, that’s kind of where I live. I live in that space. 00:07:00Andrew: What is your advice for them? Caroline: I tell them they’ve got to work for it. So for me they can pay me to do the work, if they want a PR campaign or a marketing team I have people that can do it. If they want to do it themselves to save money they need to learn how to do it. So a lot of what I offer is education, a lot of coaching. How do I actually do this? 00:08:00Andrew: I might be confused, but do you want to stay in that niche market or would you want to become a label? Caroline: Ya, I want to stay there because I think there are more indie bands here that need help. Andrew: Is there a lot in Richmond? Do you have trouble finding them? Caroline: There’s a lot. So I started in Nashville and have a lot of clients in Nashville, I have clients in New York, LA. I now have a lot of clients in Baltimore. Andrew: Oh, so even though you’re here most of them aren’t from Richmond? Caroline: Most don’t live here so I skype with them and we talk. Design is something I can do from anywhere. So if I’m designing their website I can do it from here. Once people found out I did marketing it started to spread so now I have a couple of artists that I work with from here. Andrew: What do you think about Spotify and streaming music? Caroline: It is a hot topic right now. As you might notice. As an indie band everyone wants to get their music on a Spotify playlist. So I work in PR and promotions so the contact information for Spotify playlist creators is not public. For good reason because there’s millions of artists who want to be on there, they would get millions of emails. So all that stuffs very underground. 00:09:00Andrew: Ya, I’ve always wondered how you get on Spotify. Caroline: Ya everyone is wondering, so I’ve found ways that are actually effective. We’ve gotten some of our artists on Spotify playlists. Andrew: Does Spotify have to reach out to the artists or how does it work? Caroline: No they pick up the music. So what I do is I help artists get their music in front of the right people. So, now a days there are things which everyone has access to but they don’t think of using, so I’ll show artists the resources online that are here and available public to you, like here are the things, right now, today, to increase your chances of getting discovered. And then we do those things. 00:10:00Andrew: We talked a lot about Spotify in class, but negatively because they aren’t paying artists much, so its interesting to hear your perspective. Caroline: Some artists actually are, I have an artists who is making a lot of money. Andrew: Really? In the news I see big artists who don’t want to join Spotify. Caroline: three of the artists I work with have Spotify placements, if you get streams in the millions because you land on a playlist, you know those Spotify playlists now where you can listen to mood music and all that stuff? Those things have great listenership, so if you get on one of those the numbers just go up and so some of these artists are making thousands a month and living off that. Andrew: So you don’t get paid much per stream but there are so many people on Spotify that you can still make money. It’s probably really effective for you. Caroline: For me as an artist we’re on Spotify, but we’re not in the millions. For artists that I manage three of them have been in the millions. So I know the strategies, just you don’t know what people are going to like. So if you have a product that doesn’t strike at the right time, if its not heard by the right people or its just not the right sound. They use algorithms to see what people are listening to. If your music is not striking it’s just not going to shoot up and they are not going to place it. But if you have music that’s promising it’s a lot easier. So, lucky for me, I have artists that are really talented which makes my job easier, because if the music’s not good it doesn’t matter what I do, because the music is still not good. That’s your product, I can help them make it look good, but it might not place. 00:11:00Andrew: You do continual coaching throughout their career right? Caroline: I do, I’ll help them as much as they want it. My goal is never to keep them or to enable them. I want them to learn stuff and then go do stuff on their own. So my goal is not to keep them forever, I don’t want them to be dependent on me. 00:12:00Andrew: What should I be asking you? Caroline: I can tell you how artists are different than normal brands. Andrew: Ya because like you said business will approach you but you don’t really like to do business with them. Caroline: Ya, my company’s called the Marketing Mixtape, and when I started I had a met a couple local entrepreneurial who had small businesses. They needed marketing too, so at that point I didn’t really care and I took them on. They are not as much fun, artists are so much fun. They’re so fun like they aren’t professional ever, they don’t have any clue what they’re doing a lot of the time. They’re kind of lost and they’re okay with that. An artist will look at you and be like I don’t know I just make music. But they still need help, in being an artist and working with a lot of artists I know how to work with artists. I know to be too professional in meetings. They’re also passionate in a different way. When you work with business a lot of people might not be doing what they really really want to do in that job. They might just be doing what pays them well. But an artist who has the nerve to would go for it. They’re passionate they’re invested they are present because it’s their emotion, its their heart. It’s way more fun. 00:14:0000:13:00Andrew: Do you want to stay in Richmond? Caroline: My goal for 2018 is I really want to go on a studio tour. So I’m doing my first artist workshop in December. Its in exactly a month. Andrew: what’s an artist workshop? Caroline: It’s going to be a marketing workshop, so we’ll bring in a lot of artists and talk to them about marketing, talk to them about PR, brand. I’ve made different guides for them so they can work on stuff and they can walk away with something. Andrew: So instead of individual coaching its group coaching. Caroline: I’m piloting that in December, with a really great studio called Blue Moon Productions. Apparently they have a great reputation and they wanted to partner so I’m going to go up there. 00:15:00Andrew: So is a lot of the advice you end up giving pretty similar? Caroline: It’s very similar. For an artist they’ll come to me and tell me all their problems and be like I don’t know how to solve any of them. But for me I hear a lot of the same things. So I know exactly how to get them to where they want to be. Andrew: So, its kind of one strategy and up to them whether or not their music’s good enough? Caroline: It’s not always the same strategy, but the same tactics you can apply. But it will vary for the genre, so if you’re a violinist who plays in an orchestra the strategy will be different than a guitarist who plays on the street. So it’s taking similar tactics and helping to apply it. Andrew: So when you teach the tactics in the group you hope they can apply it on their own. Caroline: ya, I hope so. Andrew: How many clients do you have right now? Caroline: Right now I have three. Usually its three to five at a time. Right now I have three clients im working with this week and then I have five that I’m talking to. 00:16:00Andrew: How long do they last? Caroline: depends on the size of the project. If you’re doing a website redesign and everything, website, social media strategy, PR, all of that, usually its three to four months. Andrew: Are most of them like that? They have nothing? Caroline: No, most of them have something, but they don’t like what they have, so a lot of time it will be a brand make over, where I’ll take what they have and make it look better. Or we’ll design their logo or album cover and build the brand around that. Andrew: So other than website design and social media what exactly do you tell them to do? Do you introduce them to certain people? Caroline: Well if I have an artist who has nothing, they just got to the studio they never established anything. They need a website to centralize all of their music and pictures and everything so if they don’t have a website I’ll recommend that. From there they need an Electronic Press Kit. Do you know what that is? 00:17:00Andrew: No Caroline: An EPK is like a resume for your band, so it shows a video a picture a biography everything that’s impressive about you in bullet form and social media links, so I help them get that together. That’s like standard minimum. If they don’t have photos we get them photos. Andrew: Where does that go? Do they put that on their website? Caroline: It’s private. So instead of having a lengthy email they can just click it and have it right there. So those two things. If they don’t have photos, we’ll get them a photo shoot. That’s like minimum. Like I strongly recommend they need it. Some of them are like no I’m above that and I’m like good luck with that. So I let them do what they want, ultimately it’s up to them. It’s their career, but I strongly encourage them to have those things. From there they need a social media outlet, some they need a page that people can like, it’s just how people listen to music nowadays. You need to build your audience so I’ll help them sell to other social media channels. Tell them which ones they actually need versus the ones they think they need but they don’t. Twitter is debatable. Not a lot of artists update their Twitter so it’s better to not use it. 00:18:00Andrew: Is it mostly just Facebook? Caroline: Facebook and Instagram if they have it. Some of them don’t know how to use it so I don’t want them to have to overcome that. In addition to trying to make new music being forced to learn a new platform. At the end of the day who’s going to manage that if you’re managing your music and your show. It’s just not worth it. Once their good on social media then we can start to promote them. So that when promotions come in. So, in that sense I am a promoter, but I would never promote a brand that wasn’t complete, so we focus on the whole brand. So its branding, social media, and PR. So PR is last and for promotions its who’s going to care enough about your music, you’re brand new. No ones heard of you so who can we talk to who’s into that. So a lot of time it’s indie journalists, indie magazines, a lot of times it’s local magazines. We just got an artist featured in style weekly, so he’s going to have a big promotion around his album. 00:19:00Andrew: So do you know a lot of local indie magazines, you must have formed good relationships with them. Caroline: I do, I’ve forged relationships with total strangers that is promotions. Andrew: I didn’t even know there were local indie magazines. Caroline: ya there’s a lot there’s Dust Up, there’s RVA Magazine, so I’ve learned how to find, this is a great PR skill, but find contact information through people you don’t know. I teach artists how to do that. How to connect with people that you’ve never talked to. 00:20:00Andrew: what percentage of your clients are in Richmond? Caroline: Lately it’s been more in Richmond than ever. Overall maybe 5%. 5-10%. So mostly it’s not. A lot of my relationships with producers have led to more work. So when I partner with producers and production agencies they’re the ones that see the indie bands. So the artists comes to the studio, they record their whole album and then at some point along the way they talk to the producer and then they realize that the producer doesn’t do marketing. I think a lot of artists assume that the producer will also do marketing, but it doesn’t work like that, so the artist will leave the studio and need help. So that’s where partnering is helpful. 00:21:00Andrew: So the producers recommend you? Caroline: Ya so when I partner with the produces I become… it’s kinda like that whole I know a guy thing. That’s kind of true. So, in the music industry its very tessellated but if you know a guy that’s how you find and meet people. So, I am that guy. Andrew: is it an official relationship or do you just know the producers? Caroline: I don’t know, it’s not on my website. At various times it’s been on my website. There are three producers, four producers that I work really closely with. Some of them are in Richmond. There’s two in Richmond. I can tell you who they are, in your ear studio is a partner of mine, they’re downtown, they’re really great. I met Andrew through that network. And then Dojo Productions is also in Richmond and they refer their artists to me as well. And then there’s a guy… I forget his name… Steven. 00:22:00Andrew: I really don’t know anything about this, is this something you are doing that no one else is really doing? You said you’re in a niche market. Caroline: It’s definitely niche in Richmond, in Nashville there are people who are starting to do this, but there are ways that we do things that aren’t the same as other people do things. Trying to think of what those things are. In Nashville it’s a lot more prominent, I’ve met other people who do marketing strategy for musicians. In Richmond I don’t think you would expect it because there aren’t enough musicians. So having relationships around the country helps because if I was just doing it in Richmond for artists in Richmond it would probably never grow. Andrew: Why do you think there aren’t that many in Richmond? Caroline: I don’t know. I think part of it is opportunity. If you really want to make it as an artist it would be great if you lived in a city where you could meet somebody who knows somebody who could help you launch your career. In Richmond it’s a little bit harder to find that. There is a music scene but it’s also a lot quieter and I think that’s because there aren’t a lot of opportunities people don’t always want to share the opportunities they have because there’s so little opportunity. So people are very exclusive in town. 00:23:00Andrew: So not as friendly as Nashville? Caroline: Ya, in Nashville people will just openly share. If they know someone who can help you they will share. In Richmond if they know somebody and they can help you they probably won’t let you know. Andrew: Is it just you working for the company? Caroline: I have five people on my team. Andrew: They have similar backgrounds as you? Caroline: Ya I met a lot of them at Grand Center, so two of the people on my team went to grad school where I did. So they’re trained in advertising like I am. One of them lives in Richmond, went to grad school at VCU. The other is from the Nashville area and she is just really good at design. They help me mostly with design stuff, I do a lot of the publicity on my own. We have a publicist too. I delegate when I have to. Mostly with the coaching I don’t delegate, so we try to do most of the coaching. Because the more that an artist an artist knows the further they can get. But we do have a team so if it’s a big campaign or a big grant… 00:24:00Andrew: Did you guys start it together? Caroline: I started it my self and ran it myself until I ran out of what I call bandwidth because I am still working full time. Andrew: Sorry, what’s your full time job again? Caroline: I work for a non-profit called Child Fence International, its like across the street. We have offices in like 25 countries around the world. 00:25:00Andrew: Thank you (I attempted to stop the interview here because she had emailed me saying she needed to leave by 1, but she kept talking. I added in relevant parts to the transcript but most of the rest is irrelevant) Caroline: you’re welcome, the music industry is wild do you want to get into it? Andrew: No, it was just for my class. Caroline: Oh well its really tough to make it. Andrew: Ya, especially with the local scene I didn’t know about that all because I barely get to leave campus. I did not expect that all. It seemed like going into Cary Town it seems like there’s a lot of local musicians playing. Caroline: Compared to Nashville its not even close. Nashville it’s like everyone and their mom is a musician.