When I first joined New Ams, I was merely a beginner in anything related to the music business. However, having already had experience working in the music industry as a music producer, DJ and rapper I thought I was quite prepared. How awfully wrong I was.
I came into the company as a marketing and A&R intern. Meaning I would help create content and strategise marketing plans for New Ams’ current music catalogue. Meanwhile, I would be making playlists and finding new artists to sign to the label. I thought by pitching old marketing ideas I had for my own musical projects would suffice. Only to realise that these ideas are only useful to upcoming artist and not for already established artist. Very quickly I was accepted into the company not as an intern, but as a full-time employee. This really put me in the deep end, but I felt that was the best way to learn. After feeling uncomfortable for the first month and bit, I quickly started getting a good grasp on my daily responsibilities. I started to create relationships with the artist in the label and artist trying to find a label to support them. However, I still needed the guidance of the founder.
That changed once I entered into the mid-part of my internship. I felt that my confidence and affinity about the music business started to grow and strengthen. I found myself able to go onto music business related calls without the guidance of the founder. I started to understand the business contracts, and the percentage cuts on royalties that New Ams takes for new artist. This made me feel like a real A&R employee and for once it was interesting to be on the other side of the table.
However, after getting comfortable with my responsibilities. I was given more responsibilities that made me tread through unknown waters. I was given the task to set up a new sub-label section for New Ams. This section was focused on pushing lofi beats (a type of beat that is mainly used for studying). Luckily I have had many experience with lofi beats, but the market is entirely new for me. Hence that pushed me to take an initiative to research more into the lofi beat segment. I started joining discord chats, creating meaningful relationships with lofi listeners on reddit. I started doing research into the demographics of these listeners. Only to find out that the Lofi segment of New Ams had to close down as it was doing more harm than good for the label. This was quite a big setback for myself, as I felt I failed. But through sheer resilience I had to come into terms with my failure and moved on.
Instead I started to focus on areas that I was doing quite well in. Which was artist relationships and writing press releases for our musicians. I quickly learned I had a bit of a “talent” in writing press releases. This was an area that the founder said I should focus more once I finished my internship.
Although as my time in the internship was coming to an end, I could only feel a sense of excitement. I personally did enjoy working for the music label and for once being a apart of the music community. But then I remembered why I joined a label at first. Which was to get insights on how the business runs and tips and tricks to use for my own label. It was an amazing experience and the connections I gained are priceless. However, I now realise that I want to start my own label/collective. As I felt that it made more sense to work for my own dream instead of someone else’s.