The New Music Business with Ari Herstand

Our guest this week is Alex Ciccimarro, the Vice President of Marketing at RCA Records. In this episode, Ari and Alex dive deep into the digital marketing endeavors across Atlantic and RCA Records, why artists don’t need to be on all social media in order to be successful and how to embrace the future of music fans. 01:28 Alex’s creative journey 10:07 Working as Digital Marketing Director at Atlan...

Joining us on the New Music Business is the CEO of Comedy Dynamics, Brian Volk-Weiss, who’s officially our first guest that does not exclusively work in the music industry. Given how parallel these two industries are, there are incredible revelations on how he operates the most successful independent comedy record label in the world. 04:20 Welcome 08:02 Breaking into the comedy industry 11:35 Mana...

Joining us this week is Sam Duboff, the Director and Head of Creator Brand & Product Marketing at Spotify! In this episode, Ari and Sam dive deep into everything about Spotify for Artists’ promotional tools, editorial vs. algorithmic playlists, production credits, payment structure, and much more. Visit Spotify's resources here: Spotify for Artists: https://artists.spotify.com/ Made to Be Foun...

Our guest this week on the New Music Business is music supervisor and Vice President of the Guild of Music Supervisors, Madonna Wade-Reed. Her credits include TV shows such as All American, Batwoman, American Crime, Reign, Blue Mountain State, Smallville, One Tree Hill, plus films such as 8-Bit Christmas, Lovesick, A Thousand Words and the documentary Let It Fall. In this episode, Madonna breaks d...

Our guest this week on the New Music Business is singer/songwriter Sammy Arriaga. Ari and Sammy dive deep into everything songwriting and his successful endeavors in the world of NFTs. To learn more about Sammy, visit https://sammynft.com. 2:34 Welcome 4:07 Upbringing and auditioning for American Idol 8:35 Life-changing move to Nashville 16:37 Writing 1000 songs, shopping on Music Row and signing...

Our guest this week is Anne McKinnon, the co-founder and CEO of the web3 experience platform Ristband (ristband.co). In this episode, Ari and Anne break down everything musicians need to know about the ever-evolving metaverse and how exactly it’ll add value to artists’ careers. To hear all of the most up to date news about Ristband, you can join their Discord community here: https://discord.com/in...

This week on the New Music Business, our very own Ari’s Take Academy course instructor Carey Rayburn (Good Co. and Rayburn Entertainment) joins Ari to discuss Performing Arts Centers and how to best navigate your live career within the Special Events market. 3:07 Welcome 4:32 Breaking down the Performing Arts Center market 7:13 Benefits of a subscription model 8:41 The kind of acts that PACs book...

This week on the New Music Business, Ari is joined by Lyle Hysen and Kyra Wendel of the sync licensing agency, Bank Robber Music. They discuss everything from how they organize and pitch playlists, what today’s sync fees are looking like, negotiations with record labels and publishing companies, the best pitching methods, and much more! To learn more about Bank Robber, visit https://bankrobbermusi...

This week on the New Music Business podcast features Bob Babisch, the Vice President of Entertainment for the glorious Summerfest. Following its 1968 debut, Summerfest has evolved into what is now recognized as “the World’s Largest Music Festival” and Milwaukee’s cornerstone summer celebration with approximately 800k people. Babisch manages tens of millions of dollars in the entertainment budget f...

This week on the New Music Business, the 4-piece Georgia band Walden breaks down their fully independent and successful Where’s Walden Tour that grossed $80k and carried them across the entire U.S. with only a $50 budget. 3:18 Welcome 3:53 The Where’s Walden Tour 9:03 Booking and outreach from start to finish 12:58 Breweries vs. traditional music venues 16:42 With a little help from Indie On The M...

Enrollment is NOW OPEN for Ari’s Take Academy! In this episode of the New Music Business, we’ve got all the ATA instructors together to discuss the current state of the music industry. We also invited our community to be a part of this special live round table discussion, so be sure to stick around for the Q&A at the end. To learn more about ATA, please visit: https://aristakeacademy.com and u...

Nonstop Management founder and principal Jaime Zeluck Hindlin has signed, shepherded, and spearheaded the success of numerous GRAMMY® Award-winning multi-platinum songwriters and producers. In 2018, the roster ignited smashes such as Meghan Trainor’s “No Excuses” and “Let You Be Right,” XXXTentacion’s “Numb,” Jason Mraz’s “Have It All,” Young The Giant’s “Simplify,” and more as well as singles for...

This week on the New Music Business, I interviewed the multi-faceted Benoni Tagoe. As the president of Issa Rae’s music label and supervision agency, Raedio, Tagoe breaks down the “audio everywhere” company, what it means to develop an artist, as well as his experiences supervising shows such as Insecure and The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Learn more about Raedio here: https://theraedio.c...

In this week’s episode, I spoke with artist NEFFEX (Bryce Savage) and his manager Ryan Sullivan of ATG Group (Against The Grain). We breakdown NEFFEX’s impression release strategy in which he successfully released one copyright free song a week (yes, you read that right!) to eventually surpassing 4 billion DSP streams all independently. We also dive into his previous record deal with 12Tone Music,...

This week on the New Music Business, I spoke with the co-founder and partner at Brilliant Corners Artist Management, Jordan Kurland. Artists such as Death Cab for Cutie, Toro Y Moi, She & Him, Best Coast, Soccer Mommy, Real Estate, New Pornographers, and Pup are all amongst their diverse talent roster. We discussed what the role of an artist management entails, his history working with Death C...

This week on the New Music Business, I spoke with the multi-faceted Ryan Chisholm. He is the General Manager of Work of Art Management, as well as the Senior Vice President of Arista Records’ West Coast division. At WoA, the company currently represents notable artists such as Mike Posner, Trevor Daniel, Verzache, Tai Verdes, Wes Period and MILCK. Prior to WoA and Arista Records, Chisholm worked w...

This week on the New Music Business, I spoke with Pink Noise’s business manager Khloe Churko, alongside tax preparer and fellow podcaster Stephanie Belcher. We dive deep into the weeds of music industry finances including bookkeeping, 1099s, LLCs versus S Corps, DBAs, how PROs pay artists, and so much more! 4:00 Welcome 7:30 What does a business manager do? 9:00 Sirius XM and Sound Exchange 13:30...

Trousdale is a pop-folk trio born out of the USC's popular music program, consisting of band members Quinn D'Andrea, Georgia Greene and Lauren Jones. In this episode of the New Music Business, we discussed what their creation process entails, self-producing their last releases, as well as how they stayed productive during the pandemic and successfully embraced TikTok. 4:00 Welcome 5:00 The story b...

David McTiernan is the Head of Artist & Label Relations at Vevo. We discussed everything about how Vevo is generating higher revenues for artists than on YouTube, their emerging artist performance series Discover, other music-related content they allow on the platform and much more. Learn more about Vevo: https://www.hq.vevo.com/ 2:51 Welcome 4:29 What Vevo is and how it is different from YouT...

More Fatter is an indie-funk pop band from San Francisco, California, currently based in Los Angeles. During the summer of 2021, they embarked on a fully-independent statewide tour performing primarily in backyards. On this episode, half of the band members Tommy and Théo join Ari to discuss exactly how they successfully pulled this off, and share some very insightful tour stories throughout. Find...

Talya Elitzer is the co-founder of Godmode, a GRAMMY-nominated artist development company whose label and management clients include genre-breaking artists like Channel Tres, JPEGMAFIA, and Yaeji. Prior to Godmode, Elitzer was a Senior A&R at Capitol Records (Katy Perry, Sam Smith, Beck), and a previous booking agent for WME (Britney Spears, Grace Jones) and Mick Management (John Mayer, Sarah...

Dan Mangan is a two-time JUNO award winning and two-time Polaris Music Prize listed musician and songwriter, based out of Vancouver, Canada. Mangan has released 5 studio LPs and has embarked on various worldwide tours, most notably performing at Glastonbury, Jimmy Kimmel Live and selling out Massey Hall. Additionally, Mangan has scored for feature film, as well as television for Netflix and AMC. A...

As we continue to honor Black History Month, we are re-airing one of our favorite NMB episodes with Vo Williams, an incredibly talented hip-hop artist based in Los Angeles. Vo is originally from Sarasota, Florida, and has been extremely successful in getting his music synced in film, commercials, TV shows, and video games. He has thousands of sync placements and makes a lot of money from them. He...

On this episode, Ari breaks down the whole Spotify issue of the moment and why the music industry seems to be up in arms. He discusses the discrepancy between streams and sales, why the per-stream rate is the wrong conversation to be having, how songwriters can get paid more from streaming, why everyone’s anger is misguided, how indie artists can monetize their audience, how many artists are actua...

In honor of Black History Month, we’re re-airing one of our favorite NMB episodes with Brian Vickers. He is a music supervisor at Disney. He works in the in-house trailer department where he developed a number of trailers including The Avengers, Star Wars: The Last Jedi & The Rise of Skywalker, Black Panther, Soul, Hamilton, Frozen II, Black is King, and many, many more. Ari and Brian dig into...