The last few weeks of my internship have been very productive. I have done a lot of video editing work. My supervisor reached out and said that one of our bands, Now More Than Ever needed help editing their music videos so they could be in a vertical format so they could share on Tiktok and Reels. I downloaded the files to the group’s four music videos off of our company’s shared drive and started editing. I have converted horizontal videos to vertical before but I have only edited them to 15-30 second clips. What was different about this project is that the band requested that the entire music video be converted to vertical. This was actually quite challenging because the group’s music videos have a lot of things happening in them and when cropped you miss a lot of what is happening. However, I was able to find a solution to this and it was to use keyframes to help shift the view to whatever is in focus. I usually use premiere pro for edits but for this project, since I am creating content for Tiktok I used the app Capcut and I found their keyframe feature very simple to use. I made two types of vertical cuts for the 4 music videos, one was zoomed in full screen using keyframes and the other was the background kind of blurred and the video zoomed out so you could see everything without keyframes. The band loved the videos and were excited to share them. Another task I’ve done these last few weeks was do promotions for Record Store Day. Record Store Day is a big event where independent Record stores get exclusive releases. For this RSD the ambassador was our very own Jason Isbell, we had several artists performing at local stores, and two vinyl releases so I made a few different posts to promote this day. The first was a post on our feed dedicated to our two vinyl releases which were a Jason Isbell record, and a SonVolt Record. I also posted the official ambassador video Jason made. In addition to those feed posts, I designed a schedule highlighting all of the in-store performances our artists had that day. All of those posts did great engagement-wise. In addition to that, I attended the regular meetings and worked on our New Music Friday stories, I also created vinyl mockups for one of our artists, and for my last week I will be working on updating their website. This has been such a great internship and I am very grateful for the experiences and connections I have made.

For the 11th week of my internship I met with my supervisor again, this time it was on Zoom. We discussed the social media idea documents I created the week prior. He really liked all my ideas and we started to come up with a plan to make things work. A big thing we are working on is posting more on our stories. We want to post multiple times a week day sharing things that relate to our artists whether it’s things like a song that is releasing, a tour announcement, a positive press post, late-night tv appearances, and more. I actively monitor the social media pages of our acts each day to see what they are up to and I text my supervisor the things I think we should highlight, then we create a story post about it. We are also focusing on interacting with artist accounts more and sharing their posts and tagging them in our to help boost views and engagement. This new format has been working well so far and lots of artists have been sharing our posts and we have gained lots of engagement through this method. When we post on our main feed it is mainly to highlight the albums that are released that week, however, we are working on other things to post there as well, like reels showcasing new music videos or live performances. A big part of our social media posting is our New Music Friday Stories where I make custom graphics promoting the music that we release that week. Every post I do for NMF includes the artist’s name, picture, song, or album name, and a link to listen to. I really try each week to make an eye-popping design to catch people’s attention. In addition to working on social media that week, I also attended our weekly company-wide meeting. I am feeling excited about the way things are working out for our social media channels.

For the 10th week of my internship at Thirty Tigers, I was introduced to my new supervisor. The week prior the two supervisors that I was previously working with had exited the company. I now work with the head of distribution for the company. We met that Monday afternoon on a phone call and had an hour-long conversation about ideas for future work. A big part of our phone call was about what can we do to boost our social media presence. He said he wants our content to be very accessible and natural and less sales based. We brainstormed a bunch of ideas for posts and stories that would be more engaging. He also discussed how he wants me to be more involved with the company and he will keep me updated on what’s happening with our current campaigns. After that great phone call, I felt very excited about my work with my new supervisor and could tell that we are going to work well together. That week I began to go through the social media schedule doc I made with my last supervisor and began to make edits and revisions based on the ideas discussed in our phone call. Then I began to do some research on social media sites on companies similar to ours and tracked what did well on those pages. I made another document dedicated to inspiration for our social media channels and I scheduled another meeting with my supervisor on Zoom for the following week to go over these documents.

During my 8 & 9th weeks of my internship with Thirty Tigers were pretty slow and I was mainly working on researching vertical video content and getting strategies for our social media. On my 8th week I realized why things suddenly got quiet. I received the news early that week that both of my supervisors would be leaving the company and that the new person I would report to would be the head of distribution, who was my supervisors’s boss. I then spent that week planning out our social media schedule for the next month with completed post and captions so I could keep on posting during this transition period. I also worked on making some vertical video cuts for one of our artist who was dropping a new song that week. I took the horizontal video, converted it to vertical and added text overlays with the song information. I attended our weekly company wide zoom meeting and made my weekly New Music Friday posts that I add to our stories each week. On Thursday my supervisor connected me with the head of distribution and we planned a meeting for the follow week.

The 6th and 7th weeks of my internship were focused a lot on social media. Nothing major really happened. I worked on the google document that my supervisor and I created which is a planner for all our future posts. I come up with about two weeks’ worth of posts and my supervisor looks at the doc and gives me feedback and approves the posts. When we post on social media we like to keep a steady rotation of tour dates posts, the album features for our new releases, and music videos for new releases. On Mondays and Tuesdays, I post about what albums were released that past Friday and then alternate between tour stuff and music videos. This has been a good formula for us and since I have started posting for them, I have boosted engagement by over 40 percent! It has also been interesting in seeing what posts do well and what gets less engagement, for example, I noticed that sometimes our music video posts get a lot fewer views than our photos do. I have been keeping an eye on them lately and found that if I post in the middle afternoon they get better engagement. Another thing I have been working on is tracking popular TikTok accounts for artists not on our label and taking notes on what performs well. My supervisor created a spreadsheet that lists some popular accounts right now like Hardy, Zach Bryan, Noah Kahn, and Paramore. I went through these videos and picked out their most popular stuff and tracked what is in these videos. That way we can have examples to show our artists what they can post. Lastly, I ended the week with another concert, I saw Chris Thile from Nickel Creek perform with The Orlando Philharmonic at the Doctor Philips and it was incredible. I even got to introduce myself to him after the show and he was super kind.

Week five of my internship was very exciting for me. I was invited to join a meeting call to discuss the marketing plan for my favorite artist, Jason Isbell. I have attended one of our artist meetings before and the last call I attended, was between the artist’s team and our team discussing new music and how we could market it. I expected this meeting to be the same, but to my surprise when I joined the call, Jason was there in the Thirty Tigers office with lots of our team members. I had no idea Jason was going to be there because usually, artists do not usually make appearances. The meeting lasted about two hours and not only was it super fun to listen to, but it was also educational. I got another insider’s look at what goes into an album release cycle and all the ideas and concepts that get thrown around and what sticks and what ends up working. I can’t discuss most of the contents of the call, but I can say that we discussed Jason’s new record that comes out in June. I find it so fascinating to see what goes behind the scenes of records, I never knew how much thought goes into things like teaming up with companies for variants, in-store advertising, social media ad plans, and more. It takes a big group to promote music and get it to the listener and I am learning more about how that process is done.

The fourth week of my internship was super fun! I was still working on video edits and made some final edits my boss requested I add to the Nickel Creek videos, then I was tasked to make some more videos for Parker Millsap. I was asked to go find some of his older videos and make edits and 30-second clips for reels and TikTok. I was unfamiliar with Parker’s old content so it was cool getting to go through some of his videos and cut these clips. I sent it over to my supervisor and she loved it so it was an easy task. Another huge focus this week was social media. I was given a list of artists and albums to post about for the week and wrote up captions. For the content of the captions I referred to the press releases that are up on our shared drive, I came up with a draft and got it approved by my supervisors. Then we decided that we need to come up with a schedule of post content for the next coming weeks. I made a document with a list of different types of posts we can do spanning a range of artists. The posts consist of album features, singles posts, Reels, tour dates, and positive press pieces. My supervisor made some edits and comments and we are currently working on it still. I also made some more posts for the feed and created the new music Friday posts. I also made some updates to the quick reference guide which tracks our upcoming releases, and we had our weekly team meeting. The week ended on a super cool note. I was given two tickets to see one of our artists Lucero at the social in Orlando. A perk of this internship is if there is a show in the area by one of the artists in our company I can contact my supervisors and see if I can get a spot on the guest list. Lucero has become one of my favorite bands and it was super cool to see a band that is a part of the company live and in person. After the show, I was lucky enough to run into the guitar player and the singer and I introduced myself and told them I intern for Thirty Tigers, they were both super nice and thanked me and sang the company’s praises. Going to live shows is one of my favorite things and it is such a cool experience going as someone who works in the industry and being able to make these connections with people I admire.

the week of the 24 was the third week of my internship with thirty tigers. The main focus of the week was to edit videos for the band Nickel Creek. Nickel Creek is an American Bluegrass trio comprised of brother and sister Sara and Sean Watkins and their friend Chris Thile. This week the group announced their first record in nine years titled “Celebrants” which is out in March. With this big comeback, I was tasked with making cuts of their new video for their song “Strangers”. Thirty Tigers is working on making content for their artists that they can share on TikTok and Instagram Reels. A big job of mine is to help edit these existing videos and make them easy to upload to these platforms. My supervisor sent me a file of the video I needed to edit and requested I make a few videos. First I go into the premiere and change the aspect ratio of the video to make it vertical. Then I watch the video and cut it to the thirty seconds that I think will sound and look the best. After that, I add the text. I had to make a video with a text overlay adverting the song, one advertising that it is available on Spotify, and two advertising the album’s preorder. This was the bulk of my work this week and took a few edits and revisions until I got it approved and sent to management. In addition to editing videos we had our weekly team meeting, and I was tasked to make a social media excel sheet tracking artists’ engagements. I also worked on posting for New Music Friday on our story for Instagram and made a few main feed posts highlighting some recent releases. 

During the second week of my remote internship with Thirty Tigers, I learned a lot about how marketing in the music world works and how it is different than the other experiences I have had in marketing and advertising. The main thing I focused on this week was creating material for one of our artists, They are currently gearing up to release a new record he is a folk/Americana artist. Before this week I was unfamiliar with their work but I did learn quite a bit about them. On Tuesday I was invited to join the company-wide meeting to discuss Parker’s new album and how they are planning on marketing and distributing it. During this zoom meeting, I learned a lot. I never really thought about how much work and thought goes into advertising and marketing for a record. In the meeting, the artist’s manager broke down to everyone the theme and vibe of the new album. It was a big theme of environmentalism and nature and then the marketing team all gave suggestions on ways we can promote the record. What really stuck out to me about this meeting is how collaborative the process of album marketing and distribution is. The marketing team came up with so many different ideas to promote this recording including a lot of collaborations with businesses, streaming sites, environmental organizations, and more! It was so interesting to just listen and get an inside scoop on how the industry works. In addition to that I worked on editing serval videos for this artist. I cannot share these at the moment because these songs have not been released yet and I have been asked to keep this information confidential since this record has not been announced yet. In addition to that, I worked on making Instagram story posts for new music Friday, and I started google sheets where I track how certain artists are doing on social media. It was a very interesting week and I learned a whole lot!

On Thursday, January 12th I started my spring internship as a Digital Marketing Intern for the fNashville-based music marketing managing, and disruption group Thirty Tigers. I am a big fan of the Americana/alternative country/folk genre. I had an interest in the company when I saw that they work with a lot of my favorite musicians including, Jason Isbell.

I was very honored when I got offered this position, ever since I got into the design and marketing world I had hopes of doing work for the music industry and this position is perfect for me since covers a genre and area of music that I have great knowledge in. On Tuesday the 10th My two site supervisors Garrett and Caroline reached out to me over email and they sent me all the important documents I would need for this role. These documents included one detailing my job description, one outlining upcoming releases that I have to update weekly, and some other important info regarding artists’ plans for 2023.

On that Thursday I had a zoom meeting with Garret and Caroline, we discussed my schedule and my responsibilities, and they explained to me that a lot of my work will deal with “living in my email” and collecting all the necessary assets that their artists needs, editing and making overlays for promo. videos for artists, creating weekly “New Music Friday” posts for their Instagram stories, and more. The zoom meeting with my supervisors went super well, they were nice and informative and they answered all my questions. After that, I joined the company-wide weekly marketing meeting where they discussed a lot of future plans and I learned a lot. I also created my first set of “New Music Friday” Posts. Overall, it was a very good first week and I am very excited for what is to come. For more information on the company, here is their website, https://www.thirtytigers.com/