Music Industry Jobs|Music Business Jobs|Music Internships

Thanks for coming back! If you haven't done so already, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed so you don't miss anything. We've also got Tweets going and the new MusicIndustryJobs.com Job Board. Your rock! Doc

How it works: Hi folks. Because I tend to get a lot of questions about how to get a job in the music business, and because it is difficult to craft a new response for every one I get, I’m going to start sharing a few of my more common responses here on the blog. Each time I do so, I’ll ask if I can post the message online before doing so, and if I receive your approval, as I did with today’s question, I’ll put ‘er up.

Today’s question comes from a reader interested in breaking “back” into the music business after interning several years ago. He initially asked about recruiting agencies in the New York area, which I also comment about briefly. Below is the text of a few emails back and forth with the names and places of the innocent removed for the obvious reasons, and as well as some of the extraneous stuff like the ‘”thank yous” and “hellos”

What sort of questions do you have about a career in entertainment? Place them in the comments section of this post. If your questions is chosen as our next “Reader’s Question”, I’ll send you a free copy of my book: “The Music Industry Guidebook: A clear guide to getting a job in the music industry. . .fast!”

First email volley from our intrepid reader:

“I’m currently looking for a job in music marketing/promotions. Do you know of any music industry recruiters based in New York? The recruiters that I have investigated so far do not help with promotions/marketing placements.”

My initial response:

“Thanks for the note. Recruiters in the music business are mostly for entry level admin jobs, unless you’re an exec already who needs an “agent”of sorts to help you get a bigger paying job. Can I ask what sort of work you do now? Are you a college grad, or still in school? And what sort of music you’re into?”

His second reply:

“For the past eight years I have been pursuing an acting career. While I have had success, I am now searching for a more traditional means of employment. I graduated with a Marketing degree from XYZ School in 1999. I also minored in Music Merchandising. My current job is as a customer service representative for XYZ Company. I’ve been working there for about a year and a half and still act as a hobby.

During college, I interned at Mercury Records and Roadrunner Records for a year each. I have had many jobs in street promotion, bar tending, administrative work and temping to supplement my acting income.

My present goal is to work in music promotions or marketing preferably in the heavy metal and rock genre. companies like Roadrunner Records, Sirius Satellite Radio, Revolver Magazine and Metal Maniacs magazine would be ideal. A place comparable to the now defunct Concrete Marketing and Concrete Management would be great too.

There’s nothing better than promoting music to people especially at events like concerts. The look on a person’s face after hearing a great band for the first time is priceless. I feel music is the impetus to bring people together in an increasingly isolated world and I thrive to make those connections.”

My second response:

“I like to shoot straight on these things, so here’s my take. First off, you’re lucky you’re be near NYC. By your area code, I’m guessing you’re in Long Island, so you’ve really got the music business right in your backyard. A lot of folks think rock music happens in LA, my opinion has always been that it’s really out East.

You’ve also already got experience in the business which is really good and can put you ahead of the competition for gigs.

The negative in this whole thing is that because the industry turns over so frequently, as often as every two to three years, many of the people you knew at Roadrunner and Mercury, and more importantly, the people THEY knew are most likely not working in music anymore, or are doing something not related to record promotion at least. I did independent promotion myself from 97-99 and probably know some of the folks you once worked with. Do you remember any names?

Question: after your internships with the labels why did you leave the business on the record side?
(he addresses this, later saying that he went to pursue a career in acting)

You mentioned Concrete. If I recall correctly, they were an independent promotion firm and are “no longer”, like many independent promotion firms, because the rules regarding indie promotion have changed, and the labels stopped paying most indies to do promotion the way they were doing it. What that means for folks interested in promotion, is that most of the real paying gigs are back “in-house” at the labels, and the labels can be hard to break into unless you’re starting from the bottom.

That said, since you’ve already interned you might be able to step your foot back in the door again at any of the labels you’re interested in as a volunteer/intern, and once you’re in and being recognized as a contributor, ask what the realities of becoming full-time staff are if you were to stay on as a volunteer. Many places will take interns of all ages. . .they might require credit. . .which you can get cheap at local community college, but it should still work. The main thing is you’ve gotta’ be willing/able to work for free again, which sucks, but might help get you back and rolling again. There are never any guarantees, but it’s a shot.

The other way is to take a look at any outlet in your area that plays the type of music you like. If you’re into metal, look for metal shows on the air (tv or radio) or the magazines you mentioned, and try to get a part-time or intern job there. Then you’ll want to aim to be someone the labels know and need to get their music played/reviewed. Once you’re that guy, then its MUCH easier to make the transition.

It can all involve starting over in a sense, and I’ll remind you that the turnover is high at labels, particularly in promotion as its a sales job. If you’re not sellin’ you’re not stayin’ is the mentality. If you’re a great salesman, then more power to ya!

I hope this helps a bit. If I were you, I would make a list of 10 places you think you would like to work. First go in with the idea of you’re looking for work, FT or PT. If that doesn’t work, THEN go for volunteer.

Radio doesn’t pay well, neither does journalism, records does pay well, but the lasting power is short. Can’t win either way, eh? If I was independently wealthy, I would work in radio the rest of my life.

BUT, if you love it, then sometimes its worth it. I always recommend that people first think about WHY they believe they want to work in music, consider the realities of the business, then think again about how much they want it. If the pull is still there, then they’ll probably never stop dreaming about it. I’m that way in a sense too. . .most will say the bug never leaves you. Finding the happy medium is the best way. Once, I met a guy who was a major A&R guy in the 80’s and worked with Guns&Roses, and a host of Seattle bands. The band dynamics and deaths of a few notable artists in the Seattle scene whom he had known hit him hard.

He’s out now and working at a college advising students on classes (another job I’ve had). What he said to me one day when I was asking him why he didn’t want to go back to music has always stuck with me. He smiled a bit, looked me in the eyes and said: “Right now, I’m just happy being a fan.” And sometimes, he’s right. You’ll have to make that call for yourself. For me, being a fan only works for a short period of time until the “itch” returns.

Let me know if there is anything else I can do for you, and good luck!”

So, I hope this helps a bit, if you’re in a similar situation. If you’re not, and just starting out, there are nuggets in here as well! Don’t forget to send in your own questions by commenting on this post for your chance to win a copy of my book.

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that this is my advice to this one person. It should not be taken as gospel, is certainly not the only way to tackle the dilemma, nor will following my advice guarantee any success.

Indeed has among the best job search technology out there. Type in music business and see what you get, then tweak it as necessary. It works like a charm!

Check out our new Music Industry Jobs and Internships board at MusicIndustryJobs.com It’s FREE!

what	where
job title, keywords or company	city, state or zip jobs by

Check out our new Music Industry Jobs and Internships board at MusicIndustryJobs.com It’s FREE!

To read part one of this story, visit: How to get an internship at Fashion Rocks: Part One.

Welcome back, folks. Alright. So you’ve invested some time and energy into locating the names of music business companies affiliated with Fashion Rocks. Maybe your little list contains a few of these types of firms: record labels, band managers, booking agents, street team companies, brand ambassador firms, lighting companies, rigging companies, modeling agencies, Fortune 500 firms.

First of all, great job! Now let’s think of a few ways we might get a hold of the right person at one of these companies who can help you get in the door at the event, and perhaps lead you to your first music business internship experience!

What to do with all these names?

Your next steps

If you have individual contact names: If you’re fortunate to have found a direct contact, then quite simply, pick up the phone and give them a ring. Some folks you call will not want to speak with you, and others will be glad to hear from you. People in marketing/promotions tend to be a fairly talkative bunch by nature, so if you catch them at a good time, you’ll probably be in good shape. A couple of pointers are worth mentioning here:

1. Have at least a resume ready before you start making your calls, this way, you can send something off after touching base with your contact. Doing so makes this process faster, and also demonstrates your professionalism to the person you’re contacting.
2. Don’t sweat a cover letter too much, I find they’re fast-becoming useless for this sort of thing. If they ask for one, I would be surprised. . .if they do, however, put something short and sweet together in the body of your email to them to facilitate this request.
3. If you’re calling record companies don’t call on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, these are typically the days the promotion folks are on deadline and/or in meeting and the times when they definitely don’t have time to chat. Shore up your calls for later in the week.
4. Be honest, know the label’s artist roster and don’t sound like too much of a fan. Music industry folks love passionate music-heads, because that is what helps sell artists and records. What they are not looking for are fans that will be too busy hanging out in the green room with the drummer and not out on the street working. Keep that in mind and you’ll be in awesome shape!

If you have company names, but no individual contact names: This will be common, so don’t let it freak you out. Believe me, this is where all the fun begins! You’re going to need to pick up the phone for this to work as well. Please don’t waste your precious time writing cover letters and sending them off in vain to the black hole of HR at these firms. If you do, I’ll bet one of two things will happen.

Scenario number one: Your beautifully crafted resume will reach the HR department and after reading it Mr./Ms. anonymous HR professional will wonder. . . “hmm. . .what do I do with this?”, and promptly put it aside/throw it away and all that effort will be for naught!

Scenario number two: Your beautifully crafted resume will reach the HR department and because those in HR are so insanely overworked/underpaid your resume and cover letter are never even looked at to begin with. Either way, your dead, and again, your efforts are wasted!

So please, don’t send anything in until after you have picked up the phone and called to speak with someone. If that someone later suggests you send something in, then by all means rock that baby in there.

Okay, so you’ve got company names with no immediate contact. . .what do you do? Well, after looking up the companies phone number by either going to their corporate website, or using something like the Fortune 500 list on CNN, give ‘em a ring. When you get through to the receptionist tell her that you’re a student and you would like to speak with someone in marketing who might deal with interns. If they ask what this is regarding, just tell them the truth. Being a student you have an advantage over 99% of the people that call in asking to speak with someone. Typically the person answering the phone should put you through. These three things are pretty much what you should expect to hear after asking this question:

1. “I’ll put you through to marketing”
2. “I can’t put you through without a name”
3. “You’ll have to call HR/I can put you through to HR”

If you hear number one, you’re gold. Make sure you have your spiel together when you get through and then run with it. By the way, I ALWAYS ask for the person’s name BEFORE they transfer me to “marketing”. This way, I know how to pronounce the person’s FULL name when they pick up AND if I happen to get their voice mail, I can call again in a few days to follow up without having to go through the whole introduction again with the receptionist. Getting their full name will also allow you to follow up with an email later in the week as well.

So, if you get number one, then you’re good to go. But what if you get numbers two and three?

Dealing with objections

If fate draws you the dreaded “no name, no game” response, thank the receptionist and do some quick homework. Unfortunately some companies restrict passing you off to someone unless you know your contact’s name. I find this ridiculous, but that’s the way it goes. So what can you do at this point? First step? LinkedIn. Do a search for the company along with the title of the person you’re looking for and viola! you’re in business!

If this doesn’t work, then it’s back to Google! Start playing around with combinations of words that will get you the contact’s name. Things like “marketing director” plus the company name would be one such example. Alternatively, you could type “Internship Coordinator” plus the company name you’re ringing up. You’re going to have to be creative, to pull this off, but I will say that marketing folks, more than anyone are likely to have their name on the Internet somewhere, you’ll just have to track them down. If all else fails, you could call the Public Relations department. . .their contact information is almost always plastered on the website for all to see. Music Industry Directories are also another good place to look!

Your browser does not support IFrames

These techniques can be used of course before calling the first time, but I find that a lot of times, it’s too damn time consuming to do upfront. Once you’ve got a name, pick up the phone and call again! If ugly number three rears its head, then go ahead and be put through to HR. If someone picks up (unlikely) give them your spiel. If you get voice mail, leave a message. I ALWAYS leave a message at least once. If HR doesn’t call you back, don’t worry about following up with another call. You’ve probably reached a dead-end. But, if someone does call you back, you’ll be one step closer than you want to be. If nothing pans out on the HR front, I would visit my advice in response to number two. It will get you far when doing your internship search.

Trust me, this works

When I was trying to get an internship at record labels back in the day, I sent out (literally) over 100 resumes to record labels big and small. Only a few responded back to me. The majority of responses I got were thanks, but no thanks letters from HR departments. The phone calls I received were from the Promotion Directors at the labels responsible for interns. Out of the two or three calls I received, one landed me a gig with Virgin Records. 100+ resumes and 2-3 calls=1 internship. That’s a lot of work, and way too much time on paper. The technology you have at your disposal for networking and landing the music industry internship of your dreams is remarkable. Put it to use, pick up the phone and get started. That volunteer or internship experience at Fashion Rocks awaits!!

If you think I’ve given a few good tips here, you might want to check out the Music Industry Guidebook: A clear guide to getting a job in the music business. . .fast! In minutes you’ll have ideas that you can put in motion tomorrow to get started on your dream of a career in the entertainment industry. I love being a teacher, let me share my insight with you today. Get the book today!

Good luck, I’ll see you at the meet and greet! TM

Check out our new Music Industry Jobs and Internships board at MusicIndustryJobs.com It’s FREE!

Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed in the upper right-hand corner, to never miss a post.

The running theme in just about everything I say as it relates to jobs in the music industry, or an entertainment career in general, is that it’s not as hard as it looks. The most difficult thing you’ll have to tackle if you’re going to pursue this trek is your own reticence to move forward and take a gamble — and perhaps equally as important — the necessity of working for free.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at what sort of approach might land you a plum internship gig working for something like Fashion Rocks 2007, which will air on September 7, 2007 on CBS. Now, I’m going to assume for the sake of argument that you’ve got very little if any experience in the music industry for this experiment. Heck, you might even live in Podunk-nowheres-ville, or even live overseas which would be a real challenge! You’ll see, however, that even with these apparent limitations, landing a music industry internship really isn’t that difficult. In fact, you might find that living overseas or in the middle of nowhere might even help your chances!

Okay, so this is how I would do it:

Research your butt off!

Finding your first little crumbs

Beginning with the end goal in mind, my first step would be to check out the Fashion Rocks 2007 website. If you go there, you’ll notice that, at the moment at least, it’s pretty much worthless. Typing “Fashion Rocks 2007″ in Google turns up the site linked above, which seems to be just a placeholder from the 2006 show. Great. Well, actually, it’s not too bad, because I want to show you how the entire process works. So, we’ve reached dead-end number one. Welcome to the music industry! Now what?

My thoughts at this point are: This isn’t the first time they’ve done this show right? So let’s see if there is anything we can learn about last year’s show that might help us get an internship at this year’s award ceremony. Let’s get our search engine fingers ready. . . .

Since I’m a researcher and freelance writer by trade, I have a method of sorts for locating the information I need to find. As a result, the first technique I use when conducting research either online is to start with a narrow field. I do this by choosing the most specific terms I can think of related to my question, AND by typing those words IN QUOTES within the Google search box.

Doing so, helps me stay focused on the topic, and helps to produce the most relevant leads. Now, I love Google, and I’ve used it for this example, but you can use any search engine you find works for you. I’ll add that in my experience traveling, I sometimes find that the localized Yahoo, sites for example, sometimes produce a better range of local results, so if you’re overseas and looking to intern at a specific event or company in your country, you might wish to keep this in mind.

But we’re talking about Fashion Rocks here, right? And this award show is being held in the U.S. so let’s take a look at what sort of results we get by typing “Fashion Rocks 2006″ in quotes within Google. . .Bingo!

By keeping the search wide and NOT using quotes around our search phrase, Google gives us a whopping 2,380,000 to look through for leads. Narrowing the search down, however, by using quotes yields us a much more manageable, and relevant 841 leads to move forward. This will help tremendously when trying to land this gig in such a short period of time. After all, we’re only talking about two months or less ’till Fashion Rocks launch time! Ahhhhh!

Making your own trail

Now that you’ve got some search results, let’s take a look at a few to see where to go from here. What you’ll want to do when looking through the return results is look for about five or six sites that you think might give you more information that could lead to some mention of the people and/or companies that make Fashion Rocks hum. Remember, because you used quotes, you now know you have relevant results to look. Reason being is that by using quotes you’re finding those specific words together in a sequence, so even though you might not see an angle to what you’re searching for when the results first pop up, the words “Fashion Rocks 2006″ are in there somewhere! So look with your business hat on!

When I looked through the results, the sites listed below popped out at me immediately as good targets to further narrow my search for this internship. I have detailed below the site name and the reason why I thought it might be a good site to explore further.

The site: Fashion Rocks 2006 Blog Why: The obvious day to day stuff about what happened
The site: Interactive Media Awards Why: Hmm…award winners. Nice leads?!
The site: Party Line Rentals Why: Might be a business with connections to the fest
The site: SAWF News Connect Why: Lots of news about fashion and entertainment
The site: The Swag Time Blog Why: Marketing departments targets. A God-send?!

Finding the nuggets

Now that you’ve got what seem like good sites that might help you narrow down your internship search, start looking on those pages for the names of people and companies associated with the event. And remember, we’re looking for folks that work behind-the-scenes. . .while it’s great that you know Kanye West was at Fashion Rocks 2006, and he looked dashing and all, you’re not concerned about his suit, you want to work with the folks that worked with him, behind the scenes.

So search for the names of managers, representatives, agents, etc. Basically anyone who might work with the talent and who might be interested in having you come on board to help out with the show. Remember, internship opportunities don’t purely exist with the show promoters, but with EVERYONE involved as well! You can also stretch this search out to the artist’s record label, management company, booking agency, clothing representatives. . .anything really. The potential is limitless.

Think you won’t find anything?

Skeptics, pay attention. For those of you leisurely strolling through these pages seemingly finding nothing worthy and ready to throw up your hands in disgust, I would recommend looking again.

Just glancing through these pages myself while writing this post I discovered tons of angles to worth pursuing if I was looking for this type of music internship. A little tip: look for the names of companies or associations that can take you to the next step in your search, and think outside the box. Who is providing services to this event? How about manufacturers, accountants, magazines, consumer products? If you’re coming to this event without much experience, what you’re really looking for is a leaping off point to get more experience. So if handing out water bottles to models gets you in the tent so you can network with the music industry insiders you’re looking to connect with then THAT is exactly what you’re looking for with this gig!!

Take for example The Swag Time Blog. Other than listing the cool s.w.a.g (stuff we all get) that award show attendees receive just for showing up, what else is there? What information exists on that page can help you get a job? Well, how about the product names of every dang thing these artists are going to get in that little freebie bag of theirs! Each one of those products is made by a company very interested in spreading their name all over the planet by giving away *for free* (notice that word there. . .you might be working for free as well for the same mission) their fancy product. AND, each one of those products is being pushed by a marketing department somewhere in the bowels of company ‘X’ that you could be helping out come ‘game day’. What you want to do is be one of the people working to help make that happen.

Don’t forget to toss away the idea of hob-knobbing with the celebrities, you want to work in music not be an idol worshiper. . .there is a huge difference. So let’s get started! On the swag site, the swag is listed. . . .go dig up the company information that will help you accomplish this, and get to work!

Yikes. This just in. . .searching a bit more and typing “Fashion Rocks 2007″ in Google, I turned up this great press release . Tons of great lead generating info in there. I’ll also mention that there are also several different web address for the show this year. . .why, I have no idea, but they are out there. For more info try www.fashionrock07.com and www.fashionrocks2007.tv

More on how to get the names of your contacts and what to tell them when you’ve got their attention tomorrow!

To read part two of this story, visit: How to get an internship at Fashion Rocks 2007: Part Two.

If you think I’ve given a few good tips here, you might want to check out the Music Industry Guidebook: A clear guide to getting a job in the music business. . .fast! In minutes you’ll have ideas that you can put in motion tomorrow to get started on your dream of a career in the entertainment industry. I love being a teacher, let me share my insight with you today. Get the book today!

Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed in the upper right-hand corner, to never miss a post.