The New Music Business with Ari Herstand

Hilary Gleason is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Backline, a non-profit that provides free mental health and wellness resources to music industry professionals and their families. In this episode, Hilary breaks down Backline’s positive impact within the industry, and the various programs they offer such as weekly support groups over Zoom as well as therapy through their Case Management P...

Griffin Haddrill is the co-founder and CEO of the leading viral marketing agency, VRTCL. Alongside business partner Sean Young, VRTCL was founded in 2019 providing marketing services for some of today’s most popular artists and record labels such as Universal Music, Warner Records, Sony Music, showing them how to best utilize TikTok and execute campaigns to optimize records performance and brand a...

Justin Vibes is a multi-platinum songwriter, producer, vocalist, and vibraphonist. Over recent years, the Baltimore born and Trinidadian musician found success in Los Angeles writing songs for Eminem, Chris Brown, Tyga, and Kodak Black. With the alternative pop duo, Capital Cities, he has performed at festivals such as Coachella and Lollapalooza, as well as different world tours under his belt. In...

Marty is Head of Sync at Primary Wave, overseeing licensing activity for Primary Wave’s music publishing and management clients. With staff in Los Angeles and New York, the dynamic Primary Wave Sync team is a key part of Primary Wave’s proactive marketing approach, constantly creating new opportunities and driving big ideas for music in film/TV, advertising, video games, and other visual media. In...

Ifiok Effanga , professionally known as Fiokee , dubbed as Africa’s No1 sensational Guitarist is a Nigerian talent who hails from Akwa Ibom . He is known for his treble guitar solos infused with highlife steeped guitar lines. Fiokee is associated with acts such as Tiwa Savage , Yemi Alade , Patoranking , Reekado Banks , Adekunle Gold , Flavour , Simi , and Kiss Daniel , among others. Connect with...

Self-produced British composer and recording artist for over 20 years, Imogen Heap has released five solo albums, another as one half of Frou Frou and collaborated with countless and varied artists including Taylor Swift, Nitin Sawhney, Deadmau5, Eric Whitacre, Jeff Beck and Jon Hopkins. Her compositions and songs pop up in blockbuster and indie films as well as countless TV shows, are featured in...

This interview with Andy Grammer was recorded live during Ari's book signing event at Barnes & Noble at The Grove in Los Angeles on January 16, 2020. Andy dropped gem after gem after gem for artists, songwriters, and managers on how to approach songwriting, a music career, and just life in general. Multi-platinum selling pop artist Andy Grammer is all about inspiring and empowering the world b...

This is a re-run episode from last year with music supervisor Jen Malone. She has placed music and worked on Euphoria, Atlanta, Creed 2, The Resident, Boomerang, Baskets, Shelter, Lady Dynamite, and Step Up. That's just scratching the surface. She has worked in sync licensing now for over a decade and is so well established respected. We dug in deep on sync licensing. We talk about what a music su...

Ritt Momney (real name Jack Rutter) is a 21-year-old musician who went viral on TikTok at the end of 2020 for his song "Put The Records On." This virality propelled him into a favorable deal with Disruptor Records under Columbia Records. Jack talks about how he distributed "Put The Records On" via TuneCore and why he signed it over to Disruptor Records. We also discuss perspective, numbers, approa...

Today my guest is David Potter of the band Stand Atlantic out of Sydney, Australia. This is the first guest on the show from the pop punk music scene. The band typically does 200 shows a year, and we talk about what it's been like going from 200 shows to 0 shows. We dig into how they got started, found their manager, and booking agents. We discuss tour buy-ons and what he thinks of the whole pay-t...

Most know this week's guest, Cory Wong, as the guitar player for Vulfpeck, but he's also played in Jon Batiste's band for Stephen Colbert's late night show as well as Blake Shelton and others. He currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  I encourage you to spend time with this episode, especially if you're a session player, band leader, or studio cat. We talk about payment models, ethics, a...

Daniel McCarthy is the CEO of FM, which includes the music platform Musicbed. It's one of the more popular sync hybrid platforms. It includes the typical sync agency but also acts as a music library. Musicbed works with indie filmmakers, wedding video filmmakers, and photographers. Their clients go all the way up to brands that place commercials in the Super Bowl and everyone in between. We talk a...

My guests today are Noble, a production duo originally from South Africa now residing in Los Angeles. They recently signed a publishing deal with Campfire Songs.  They talk about their story and are most known for their cut of Beyoncé's Lion King soundtrack. They have tons of other cuts with artists from all over the world, but they're just getting started. We nerd out a little bit on gear, a...

My guest is Alexandre Williams, the co-founder and COO of Create Music Group. They're a distribution, publisher, YouTube royalty collection, rights management, influencer, and TikTok (through Flighthouse) marketing company. Inc Magazine named them the second fastest growing company in America in 2020. Create Music Group has over 25,000 artists and 5,000 label clients. They distributed Tekashi 6ix9...

Michael Walker is a keyboardist for the band Paradise Fears, who made headlines years ago for a thing they called "tour hacking." What they did was sold 24,000 CDs at around $10 in just a few months to fans standing in line for concerts. Not their concerts. This is the DIY method of DIY'ers. Obviously this tactic doesn't really work anymore, so we talk about the evolution and what that turned into...

Today's guest is Austin Georgas. He is the senior account manager at Flighthouse Media. They are a full on influencer and media agency that help break songs on TikTok. They've worked on previous campaigns like Doja Cat's "Say So," Internet Money's "Lemonade," Surfaces' "Sunday Best," and Arizona Zervas' "Roxanne." They are one of the best at what they do. Austin breaks down exactly how going viral...

Joe Conyers III is the EVP and Global Head of NFTs at Crypto.com. He's also the co-founder of Songtrust, the largest admin music publisher. Songtrust is owned by Downtown Music Holdings, and when Joe was the chief strategy officer at Downtown they purchased CD Baby.  He was named a digital power-player four years in a row by Billboard magazine. The real headline of this episode is that Crypto...

Kris Ahrend is the CEO of the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC). This is the organization that was set up and appointed by Congress by the Copyright Office after the Music Modernization Act was signed into law. They officially went into effect in January of 2021. What the MLC does is collect mechanical royalties from streaming services in the United States. These are just royalties for songwri...

VÉRITÉ is an incredible artist who has had over 350 million streams all independently. She has never signed to a label. She discusses why she stayed independent her entire career.  We also dig into NFTs. She's, to date, dropped 3 NFTs and made 10s of thousands of dollars on them. She explained what they are, how she got started, what the future of them is, why they're important, and their cha...

Today's guest is the CEO and co-founder of Audiosocket, Jenn Miller. Audiosocket is a sync licensing company. They have an agency side, ASX, and a micro licensing section, which we get all into the nitty gritty and depths of what that actually means. They're the inventors of mass music as a service, which deals with the micro licenses that we talk about. They invented the platform. So if you need...

You may know Ricky Montgomery from his Vine days. You may know him from his band The Honey Sticks. Or you may know him because a few of his songs went viral on TikTok in 2020. This led to a massive bidding war amongst 50 major labels. He ended up signing a deal with Warner Records.  This is a very interesting deal he signed. We get all into the weeds of this, so I encourage you to listen to t...

My guests today are Livia Tortella and Brian Popowitz of Blackbox, a marketing agency that has worked with artists like JP Saxe, Christina Perri, Jesse McCartney, and many others. Before Livia started this marketing agency, she was the co-president and CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of Warner Brothers Records. Before that, she was the SVP of Marketing at Atlantic Records. And before Atlantic Record...

Today's guest is Jessica Severn. She, for 7 years, worked at Scooter Braun's company, SB Projects, doing creative direction. She spearheaded the campaigns for Justin Bieber's stuff over the past decade. She also worked with Yungblud and Ariana Grande. If you look at Scooter Braun's roster you will see the kinds of campaigns she's worked on. Don't worry! We didn't talk about how to run a superstar...

Winslow Bright is a music supervisor and music producer at Search Party Music. They primarily put music in commercials. They do really big campaigns like Sephora, Beyond Burger, Calvin Klein (the one that featured Justin Bieber and Lil Nas X), Mini Cooper, and many more.  We talk about what that job is all about and how they decide what songs are going to get placed. Winslow shares informatio...

I'm so excited to have Lindsay Wolfington on the show today! She is a music supervisor and initially broke into the music supervisor world when supervising for One Tree Hill. I feel very closely connected to this show because it was one of my first massive, massive placements. It changed the trajectory of my career once my song got placed. I tell the story of how it all went down and what came fro...