Careers In Music: Labels, Management, Live & Beyond | Ege Yorulmaz

 In last week’s Careers In Music: Labels, Management, Live & Beyond event, organized by Center for Communication, music professionals from various disciplines were originally supposed to discuss how the music business was evolving with new technologies and how job opportunities were emerging, with recent circumstances they ended up evaluating the devastating COVID-19 effect in the music and entertainment industry instead. Event’s speakers included musician Richard Barone, artist manager Joe D’ambrosio, Atlantic Records Vice President Dionnee Harper, NYC Mayor’s Office Nighlight Director Ariel Palitz and music label S-Curve Records Founder Steve Greenberg, who was the moderator.


The discussion started with each speaker’s introduction of who they are, in what capacity they work in the music industry and how their individual work has been affected by the ongoing COVID-19 situation. Imaginably, live music business has been impacted harshly by the ongoing situation. With music festivals being cancelled for the foreseeable future and event venues/music clubs being closed for about 2 months now, live music business is one of the severely suffering industries. I discovered that NYC Mayor’s Office has a department dedicated to Nightlife and Entertainment through this online event. Their director Ariel Palitz, a former club owner herself, mentioned how the government has been taking incentives in an attempt to support these businesses through the crisis.

Most musicians and songwriters have been spending productive weeks, working on new music   from home said artist Richard Barone and others working with artists confirmed. Since most music producers have at-home studios, music production, mixing & mastering can still continue and new music can still be digitally released. With the latest online tools, it has become incredibly easy and cheap to independently release music. As long as one’s music project doesn’t require special investment in a very fancy music video etc, all artists can theoretically can record and release their own music. It is only challenging for record labels and artists to create the additional media that is required to accompany a new release such as shooting an album cover, recording a music video, etc. Atlantic Records Vice President Harper said they were getting more creative to respond to this challenge. For instance, they just discovered a photographer who specializes in taking headshots from FaceTime and collaborated with them for an album cover. She also mentioned, artists lean more into self-made or animated videos, which give young artists a chance for exposure. I agreed strongly with her when she said now artists also need to find better ways to stay relevant to their fans, than just doing Instagram lives. Since everybody’s all activity is online right now, we’re drained by constant Instagram live notifications and it is not even interesting anymore. This is only one of the problems artists should find a creative solution for.

Q&A portion of the event focused on how the class of 2020 was supposed to start a career in music under these circumstances, all present employers’ internship programs being cancelled. As for obvious reasons, all speakers were able to do was encourage students to keep looking and making contacts online and wait patiently for when all programs are going be back on again. I guess, this crisis showed for the music business too, that online content is forever. Online sales are enough to keep the record label sustained. However, most artists make their actual living from live shows and only time will show, lack thereof will impact artists in the long run.


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