Hi,

This week’s post is more mindset related with some tactical advice.

You’re probably going to start reading this and think “duh Mike, this is obvious…” but hear me out! I think being organized is not only a superpower in the music industry but suprisingly somewhat of a rarity.

The music industry, generally speaking, is chaotic and disorganized - having your s**t together can help get you ahead of a fair amount of the business.

I thought it’d be worth talking about why it’s so important along with a few tactical ideas of how. Also worth noting (2) new sections I’m introducing into the newsletter.

1. The Vault - a section featuring at least one resource that’s helped me and may be beneficial to other people. It can range from a platform, tool, app, etc.

2. B-Sides: a place for articles, news, social media posts, and stories that I found interesting this week or struck a chord - because they’re not the main topic of the newsletter, they’re more of a B-Sides.

Let’s dive in ⬇️

Right after graduating college, the first job I took was working as an administrative assistant in real estate.

Some of my duties included digital marketing (building out the online presence for a realtor in my area of northern New Jersey), CRM (creating drip campaigns for new leads), physical marketing (creating brochures & pamphlets for new listings), and general administrative duties like keeping paperwork organized.

I quickly observed how organized everyone in the business had to be to succeed. Some of the top realtors had legitimately built machines - their lead generation, outreach, follow up, and organization was top notch precision.

It allowed them to scale - they were growing quickly, eliminating inefficiencies, and most importantly, easy for others to work with because of how organized they were.

I was also fascinated how much of the communication was streamlined. It was channeled between text messages and emails (in addition to phone calls) but you had the ability to dictate which one you preferred.

I watched as some realtors only communicated via email to keep track of everything and ensure that it was all in writing - they sent emails that were legitimately pages long so they could keep a paper trail of important things like deal points, prices, negotiation terms, new listings, and more. One of my biggest takeaways from working in real estate was the importance of organization (particularly with communication) and having a system.

After 2 years of real estate, I eventually landed my dream job in the music industry and just as quickly, learned how chaotic and disorganized the music industry can be.

For those in the industry…you already know lol.

Communication between companies and people flies around between individual text messages, group chats, WhatsApp, social media DMs, email, Slack, phone calls, and more.

Over my last decade in music, I’ve noticed that similiar to real estate (and I'm sure pretty much every industry), the more organized things are, the higher the likelihood that person or thing is easier to work with.

It might seem obvious but you'd be surprised how many people either

a) aren't organized at all

or

b) have room to be more organized and take their career to the next level.

I find myself thinking about the idea of organization, particularly around communication, a lot (don’t ask me why lol). As someone who loves tech, I dream of a company building a platform that centralizes and streamlines all of these different mediums in one place.

Is that too much to wish for? Imagine logging into one central dashboard that pulls messages from all the sources mentioned above. You have the ability to message people back in one place and look at all of your messages, organize your workflow, and keep track of everything in one spot.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking. Hopefully there’s a startup somewhere out there already working on this.

Until then, I thought it’d be worth sharing a few examples of what I mean by organization in the music industry.

_{1) Producers}

It will make it so much easier for artists to do business with you if you’re organized!

For example:

• Organizing beats in folders

• Organizing beat stems in one place

• Timely communication in one place (email, text, etc)

• Keeping track of which beats have samples and what those samples are

• Keeping a list of artists who have purchased beats from you in the past and following up with them to share new beats (via newsletter, 1 on 1 outreach, etc)

It’s surprising how many producers misplace or lose beat stems from a lack of being organized and it can sometimes affect their business.

Producers can potentially lose beat sales or placements from it.

Being organized will increase the likelihood artists want to continue working with you.

_{2) Engineers}

Here’s a few ideas:

• Organize session files for each song

• Organize the stems of each session file

• Back up session files in more than one place

• Make the process of booking studio time with you easy - for ex: online portal

_{3) Artists and their teams}

A few examples of artists and their teams being organized and streamlining communication are:

• Organizing your assets in a Dropbox

• Create folders for each song and sub folders for each element to that song

• Organizing your marketing campaigns in a spreadsheet and tracking the result

• Having a checklist for releases (how can you know if you’re missing something if you don’t have a checklist to compare it to?)

• Contact directory (building your own rolodex can be helpful for keeping in tough with people and networking)

• Funneling communication into one channel (it’s okay to tell people you prefer one over the other! - for example: “I really don’t check my DMs that often, would you be down to keep this over email or text so we can better keep track of the conversation?”

Here's an example of what it could look like to organize your assets in Dropbox:

Dropbox home --> Music --> Project name --> Then folders for Artwork, Music, Videos, Paperwork, Digital Marketing, etc.

Within the music folder, you can have two sub folders for Bounces and FINAL.

It can be tedious (and even sometimes boring) but you'll thank yourself later when you go look for something!

Another thing you can organize is the A&R side of your music. For example, it could be a Google sheets with columns that include Song title, Status, Producer, etc to keep track of everything.

It's so easy to lose track of what songs are final, what needs to be completed, what beats are paid for, who produced what, etc.

The same thing can apply if you’re a creator: you can keep track of your process in the same way, the technical aspects just look different (storing your content, thumbnails, noting what videos are in progress vs complete, etc)

The truth is…we’re probably 18-24 months away from an AI agent being developed that does most of this for us. We’ll have the ability to simply type in a prompt and say:

“Take all of these files and organize them by X,Y,Z” and it will do it for us. Uploading, labeling, and organizing assets for us while streamlining our operations.

Until then, organization is everything and having that together will tremendously help you over the long run (and make it easy for people working with you).

Thanks for reading, until next time.

_{I’d love your feedback}  

In an effort to provide as much value as possible, I’d love your feedback on what content you find most valuable. I’m becoming increasingly fascinated with AI and I’m curious if that’s something you’d like to see more of in this newsletter?

_{The Vault}

1) Laylo - one of my favorite CRM platforms that allows you to build email and text lists. It generates a phone number that you can use on social media to allow fans to text you and once they do, you acquire their data and build up a list on the backend.

There’s an awesome Instagram DM feature where fans can DM you a keyword and automatically subscribe to your list. They also have a powerful tour announce feature that allows artists to embed their widget - fans can register to receive an automatic notification when tickets are on sale in exchange for entering their phone # or email.

Laylo also integrates with Shopify and can track which fans are spending the most money, allow you to message them 1 on 1, etc. More info HERE.

2) The Artist Marketing Playbook - I teamed up with my good friend and fellow music marketing expert Drew De Leon to present The Artist Marketing Playbook. An in-depth look at what an artist can do to set themselves up for success in 2025. More info HERE.