Jesse Kirshbaum

Should it be Cardi B, Should it be Chance the rapper. We landed on DJ Khalid. It tested very well, family friendly, big songs, international, multicultural, and we started with just a television commercial which was him and the bunny and kind of interaction and it did really, really well, and it was at gas stations and it was being played on different channels and it got some pretty good traction. And at that point Neslei said, should we think about launching

a flavor? And so I'm sitting with Dj Khaled in Miami at his house and we're tasting different samples and he's explaining to me, I want the cinnamon to be the star. I want this to be a cinnamon forward drink, and he's like, I want to call it cinnabun and we couldn't clear cinnabuon. Neslee pretty quickly hit me on the side and said we could clear cinnamon Bun, and collectively we thought it would be a lot more creative to call it another Bun, and so we launched Another

Bun in October. And the power of working with a brand like Nesle is you've got massive distribution. We're in Target, We're in obviously now Walmart in seven to eleven, uh Kroger's and Publics and Amazon, and you know yesterday we you know, did this kind of pop up experience last minute to shooting some content. Nobody knew it was happening.

Kind of created a frenzy in the stores, but very well controlled, and we opened up four hundred more stores through this type of partnership with walmartin with seven to eleven and just put this product even more on the map. And it's a it's a really exciting case study that we're working on. We have three projects in market right now and it.

the years and supported her with different initiatives. And then as time went on and conversations kept going, she eventually said, I got something here at Nesley that might make sense. We've got a brand that wants to do something in music and I thought of you guys. So that led to a brief and then a pretty quick process of doing this talent search and.

So it was a relationship that we both had. You know, a lot of the conversations we have come from things that I might have done, or artists I might have represented, or my newsletter beats and bites. But we're full on partners and he really doesn't mind following up, and he's really good at it, and to be honest, a lot of these executives, especially on the brand side, where there's a million people emailing them every single day asking them for stuff, they don't mind you following up with them.

They don't mind hearing from you, especially from us with the right you know, conversation starters or updates or invites to events. It's a long, long, long game sometimes to put these projects together. Sometimes they just happen overnight. But for the most part, you want to work with, especially an agency like Nestlie or a company, a massive corporation like Nestley with a not doing much in this space.

It's an international corporation. They really want to work with trusted experts, and after many years of a relationship, lots of conversations follow up, the right opportunity presented itself and we were down to sprint to get this over the phone.

in my newsletter. They might have met a friend that spoke about us. It could have been word of mouth. Eventually, the right opportunity came to mind, and Alex capped her, and she gave him a kind of a hook, so to speak. She said, I think I got something for you. Stay close and that's enough for I guess three more months of tracking something like this to then finally us it being revealed that this is the obscure idea.

what that brand wants. That's who our clients are. At this stage in my career, we work on behalf of the brands, so we're going to help them try to find the best artist with the best path to get to that artist at and be able to utilize what's authentic to that artist, what's important to that artist, so that we can create something that is going to resonate with both the artists fan base, the brands folks, and receive all sorts of earned media press and you know,

ultimately hopefully hijack the airwaves and become a really big pop culture moment.

and started to source options who would be big. We know it needed to be a big artist, and we know it needed to have a certain family friendly, multi genre, multi demo reach, and we knew that it needed to be you know, not the biggest in the world, but at a certain level where we could shift culture with this artist and really impact but also you know, not

totally destroy the bank. Right We're not booking Rihanna, Beyonce, jay Z, but we're getting the opening act for that tour or that circuit, and we're getting somebody that really understands how to move products. So we then ended up you know, pulling demos on different artists. Again, there was five artists or so that we present. We kind of come with our top three.

and how you got to what you're saying. So POV is you know, twenty plus years of being in the trenches, in the street, in the suites of the music business, really understanding it, plus all the other characteristics that I have, the other things I've read, the places I've studied, the things I've gone through, the traveling the shows, The touring all of the different experiences forms my POV and then my team's POV collectively really informs how this decision is

made with the data and the insider information.

really know availability interest. You know, there's different things, but usually we want to have a confirmation of intent from a brand before we start going too deep onto this brand is interested. Potentially, it just kind of stirs up a lot of feelings and also it's a waste of time. So we want a commitment from the brand to say, yes, this is a direction that we'd be comfortable and going. Here's some parameters around budget, here's some use case needs.

Then you can go to an artist and say, hey, this is what it's looking like before I send you a formal offer. But we would want that before we're talking to a artist, just because you know, it's like, do you want to do this thing? Well? What is this thing? Right? It's too amorphous without more parameters, so we would kind of boil down what the parameters are. It puts the ball back in Nesley's court, where it's okay, let's figure out what we want to do.

we're presenting it and then a POV. Right, this artist we think will work with this in this budget during this time period. Here's the reasons why let us know in this situation because it was our first time in particular working with Nesley, they did a whole background check on these artists as well. It was another series of vetting. We do the vetting. We make sure that there's no

complicated things, there's no conflicts of interest there. You know, there could be things that come up, right then there are always so you always have to kind of know, all right, this is a minefield, this is a clause that we have to be careful of. And in this situation, there were those situations that we had to kind of sidestep and iron out and work through. But after everything was said and done, their vetting and our vetting process, it allowed them to say it tests well, we want

to give this a shot. We're not going all the way to start, but we want the options to unrail, to take this to television, to potentially release a flavor, you know, and and continue to extend on from there.

How how many service days is this? All of those are going to be factors when an artist and their team decides on if the project is right.

Do we license music? Do we tack on an event? Do we take the event off? Like all of those components will then help us to kind of formulate what the idea is and how it's going to work. We've got a long history with rock Nation with DJ Khaled, you know, there's years and years of successes together and wins and trust, so they will understand that this is going to be done right, this is going to be cool, This is going to have elements that they're looking for them.

They're dealing with somebody that used to represent artists, that understands the artist's lens, that was with them on this and been in the trenches with their artists from their side of the table, so they know that they're getting

that level of appreciative I guess understanding. And then they're looking at this and saying wow, like this has potential to be in hundreds of stores, like we're going to be in all of these amazing places, Like this is going to be on television potentially, like it's one day shoot and and he's gonna be able to be associated with such a classic brand that is like we all grew up on it's iconic, and they're gonna remix the brand and allow the DJ Khaled, this producer extraordinaire empresario,

to be able to put his stamp on what the bunny looks like, that's pretty amazing, and what the bunny does and sounds like that's a big opportunity. I you know, smart managers realize that the co sign of a brand is so valuable. Like Oreo is bigger than any artists in the world. They have way more distribution. They are

way more well known than Bruce Springsteen. So if an Oreo has infinite options of who they want to work with it they could pick anybody they If not this artist, it could be this artist, and the idea could switch around. So you got to have an artist or a team that understands that these brand partnerships are in many ways a gift from a creative source.

and a half figure out where you belong. Get the right artists, get the right venues, get the right festival partnerships, get the kind of where you belong in the landscape. If you're a new brand to this, then from there ideally will execute the strategy. And that's what's been happening more and more is once we write the strategy, we're in the unique position to make that strategy come to life.

And then that would be unlocking a different budget, and then from that budget we could be charging hourly, we could be charging project based, we could be charging a royalty. In this scenario, you know, we're in a position where Nesley pays us a fee to on each layer of the campaign.

constantly keeping the core really really tight. And then when we land the project or we need to put different components of it around it in order to service. Because a brand expects really really good service, then we just bring in the team to do that, and we know who they are and we tap them on a regular basis, and it allows us to keep the agency lights on on a regular basis. Because you know, when these deals they yacht, they don't allow you to scale as well

as making money while you sleep. It's a different business model.

That's why we've kind of started investing in companies and doing more out of the box thinking, because we want to have equity beyond just the agency in projects so that we can make money while we sleep and not just be tied to the model of the agency where you win accounts, you hire people to service, the accounts, you bring more people in to win more accounts your service, and it's just it's great and it's exciting and it's fun, but it can feel a little exhausting the agency side

of things, so we've mixed it up. But yeah, I mean the team that we work with on an everyday basis, on an everyday call, it feels like a family restaurant. It's really awesome, and we service amazing brands and work with people that we love that are all extremely passionate about music. It's my brother who again has been with me on this journey for since we were representing artists, and it's just a really gifted salesperson and creative and

passionate about the elements of the New Frontiers. He's the guy that will go chase down a deal for China or you know, work in blockchain or in all sorts of New frontiers esports and gambling and cannabis like and tying that all to the music side of things, because that's our business. Where there's like our chief strategy officer, Nikki,

who remembers you when you came in. She was in the flom Era and she's just so bright and so wise, and she remembers you when you used to fact your newsletter and you came in during the Flom era when she was working for Jason Flammer and are in the record side of things, and you did a whole speech and a whole conversation to help them. They hired you to figure out how the digital landscape worked. And I just loved that story, Like, so, it's just folks on

our team. We've got I taught a class last year at American University. I speak at a lot of colleges, a lot of the thesis of New Agency when we first started, it was to focus on the college market, to find artists, to break artists. Just felt like a competitive edge that the bigger agencies weren't thinking about at

the time. And so I taught a class last year at American University's business school, the co God School of Business, And through that I get amazing interns and really bright folks, fright kids coming in that we end up hiring or bringing in US interns. And so we just hired this assistant from American University who's just fantastic, and you know she's she's here in Miami with me. We've got Sam

who's our GM. She started like as a friend of her father's and she has been now with us for over a decade and she's climbed the ranks from interning at different companies that I helped her get internships at to really being the clue of the operation. Our GM are like our partner and.

get it really spelled out. It might just be as an email, but essentially what they do is commit to a budget, some parameters, some constraints, and we have a soft sound conversation. Right, we'll call up Kallu's longtime manager Lenny s he's you know, jay Z's A and R. He's tried and true, full on industry legend and have a long standing relationship with him, a lot of trust and we'll talk to him about this, and he knows.

He knows when things sound good, and he knows when things sound decent, and he knows when they're coming from people he wants to work with versus not. So he's pretty selective on how things get through the filter, and most people are in this business. And ultimately he was excited by this and passed it along to Kalid's internal team, which is a whole crew of really interesting, smart, bright folks from the kind of we the best side of things that we've now known for a long time and

also had a lot of hits with. And so collectively we're talking about the offer legal is looped in. We're pushing it through back and forth with their legal with Nestley's Legal until it gets to a place where we're so close it's just about there. Everybody in theories confirmed we've got to shoot this in a couple of days. And at that point we put everybody on the phone right like, let's there's three things that you need to talk about because we can't keep going back and forth.

It's time to just you know, commence the deal or and so we'll we'll kind of bring everybody on a call and in this situation. And at that point it was magic, right, Like all of the tough stances of the different sides and the hard lines, everybody came together. You could see this was something everybody wanted to do. And that was just the It was a long weekend, right, This was one of those deals where we're all all

working through the weekend. Because you put a parameter, you got to have the creator all creation and creativity needs those kind of constraints to really happen. And so there's a shoot date, and there's a drop dead date, and

there's a move on date. And Nesley doesn't need to do a commercial with the music artists, right, like as quick as fine, their business is going to be booming no matter what, and like they know that there's just a great touch point and they can age in a different way and they can be in conversations that they would never be in like when would Ness Quick be in Rolling Stone or in hype Beasts during People Magazine, Like that's the power of doing a smart partnership and

telling a really good story with it. So the whole thing kind of ultimately comes together with.

a pretty positive person. I see the power and I see the opportunity, and I think people know that if I'm bringing them something, it's gonna be cool, it's gonna have a certain level of vanesse to it. It's gonna have a really good sensibility of how they should be positioned. It's going to lead to more opportunities. Right, Having me in your orbit, who works with one hundred brands on a pretty regular basis or at least has their ear, I can see more dots to connect.

So it was originally we're not sure we want to shoot something on a global scale with content, and then we snapped into linear and kind of had to double back a little bit to figure out how to cover all those fees.

let's do that. We want to do that. It's working, it's tracking that way, And you know, it was always kind of presented to Kalid in that vein of this is going to potentially be a television company.

he works really well with brands. He's almost his own kind of super format like snoop where you can bring him into different scenarios and it works because we get it. We know that the shtick can be moved to different platforms pretty easily. And you know, he's a very positive person. He's a very uplifting person. He's very family oriented, and his team is very tough, right, they get it. And he's a very shrewd business guy too, and he's not going to do anything that's not in his best interest

at all. And he totally understands his brand and he's calling the shots himself in real time. And you know, this is not an artist that's not present with every component of this deal. So he wants it to be a television commercial, but also wants to not be overextended when it comes to service days when it comes to so we kept it the one day, one day in and out.

spending that kind of money brands? I mean, I think I'm talking about purely production. Purely production, they show up, you know, are they spending four hundred thousand dollars in a day or twenty five thousands?

objectives are. I think the majority of the money gets spent on in this situation the talent, right like, and the storytelling and the being able to I don't think that they They brought in a great director and it was you know, we shot at in Miami to make it easy for Kalid, which you know, was able to save on some costs and for them, and that made sense. But for the most part, I you know, again, we'll do these campaigns for one hundred thousand, We'll do these

campaigns for you know, infinite numbers. It's it's really about the brand, what the brand's trying to sell or market.

good eye for his brand and what he's doing. So he's the hands on But again, like his team, they know what they want. He knows what he wants. They're going to see storyboards, everything's scripted out, everything's you know, mapped to the t and then he's going to get there and he's gonna call shot, says the You know, the tape is rolling because that's the right way to

do it. You want to be free flowing. It's it feels almost like a Larry David's Curb your Enthusiasm, Like everything's tight and then you show up and you do what you need to do and you have the images you want, but you want to bottle the magic if there could be a chance for that serendipity.

It all works well for his brand. He understands his brand so well, knows that these type of fan love moments help usher in more excitement around what he's doing. It's like a brand in some ways, is like a feature on his latest hit. So he will post about it with the brand's permission. He'll post about it. Behind the scenes, he'll post his own take on it. He'll tell the story in real time. He'll allow the brand to tell the story, and then he'll come back over it.

So like a great partnership, Like most great partnerships, you want to have the guardrails. You want to have the parameters of this is what you need to post. But you don't want to be managing this to the letter of the law. Like that's not the spirit of a successful partnership where everybody is winning. You want this to be something that all sides are excited about, that is a mutual win, has good legs to go on. Is a feeling like this is actually good for me to post this and to share this.

certain instances it will be completely controlled. Like the first shooting the commercial, there was no ability to post. Everything was behind the scenes, everything was dark. The brand's going to lead the story. When the brand leads the story, that's when everything starts to unfold. So that would be

normally how this would work. But now that things have gotten a little free flowing, Kala just understands that if ness Quick, the CEO of Nesley is doing a sampling at their office and they tag him in it because his bottle's in it, it becomes exciting and he just knows how to make these moments in his voice, in his pov Okay.

I want to thank Covid for that. I want to thank so many reasons why this paradigm has shifted a lot. Because the influencer market has just made it so much easier to do. But brand partnerships have become a very good source of marketing attention for artists, and I just think that it's been very, very helpful and it doesn't have to.

And now we're twenty twenty four. Could you believe that Bob Dylan's launching a whiskey and Bruce Springsteen's and multiple Super Bowl commercials like this didn't exist five years ago, eight years ago. How we got here is a series of steps. Partly it's because of the digital transformation and record labels not being able to give tour support and not being able to support artists, the artists looking for

new revenue streams. Then it was really about the entrepreneurial spirit of hip hop, and you know the big run DMC Adidas moment, and then so many artists being able to talk the brand language and be able to get the attention of brands. And then it was about artists launching their own brands, which is I think the biggest story in music from twenty ten to twenty twenty, which is Beats, Andre Rihanna and Empty Dare I Say, Kanye and Yeasy like these are billion dollar stories which were

way bigger than these big artists music. But now what's happened is through COVID. I look at it as like a different error, right, it's pre COVID, in post COVID. After COVID, when the music business stopped and you could no longer tour, how were you getting paid? These brand partnerships, made a lot of sets, and there is a marketplace.

There is a very frothy marketplace for influencers, for creators, for people with vice eyelashes that go out and we'll post about brands and talk about them for paid promotion. Now that is not what musicians are. Musicians are the ultimate influencers. They're creating product. They can put them in so many different rooms and like their art is just

so much bigger than what an influencers are. And now that there's a marketplace and there's a status quo and it's easier to do these deals and there's every brand is now comfortable working with celebrities, influencers, artists, the marketplace is a lot easier and really like it helps an artist, especially if you tie it into a big promotional moment,

like that's the cosign, that's the lift. Like it's almost like having a Diplo remix your song is having Nestley put out your your products, your flavor.

yielded a lot. I think you can't look at it as a one off plan. I think you got to look at it strategically, as a holistic situation. How does this fit? If you're just trying to get as much money as possible, you're probably not going to get the deal. I just want to be honest, Like, if you how much ten million? Right? Like, you know, you'll email some of these managers. You know what it is. You talk to them and it's just like I don't edge the photo list. It's two million dollars, Okay, so now we

know what the bottom line is. I don't think that's the right way to think about it, because I wouldn't be bringing you something just for the money. Look at the opportunity, hear it, consider it and if it might be worth more than the two million dollars in other opportunities or other exposure or fill category that you don't

you need, or open up doors that you want. But I think probably in that range, like starting place a million dollars is probably what you want to think about if you're like wanting to do a television commercial with multiple social posts in a big service day and all these different asks for an artist in the fortune you know in the bottom half of the Spotify fifty. Again, it's not about that number. It's okay, I got that, I guess.

as an artist. So that is like one thing. Also authenticity, Like if you're out here talking about a brand that doesn't really align with your interests or how you're known, or there's no story or connectivity to it, it's context is so important right now, and just doing a brand partnership if it's not a success or if it doesn't connect,

is bad for your brand as an artist. Even if you got paid, like I guess, you got to weigh the option and how long you want to be around, and how you want to treat your fans, and how much money you want to squeeze out of brands. But if you're thinking about this the right way, which you know, in the right conversation I think most people would, then

you shouldn't hurt your brand. It should help. But you should also be thinking about doing the right partnerships at the right times, with the right partners, with the right conduits in between, to make these things come to life, because otherwise it'll fail and that'll be.

Like he's very intertwined with family, with multicultural, with a global reach, with being a big pop superstar with understanding brands, with being very like you know, like probably looks like he could you know, eat drink, nest quick protein shakes. You know. It's just it's it fit for him in a way that the exposure was good exposure.

it might be creating an original song. There's so many ways for a brand to work in music. It might be sampling at a festival, it might be product placement in a music video. There's just so many ways to play that game right now for a brand. So our thinking is what's the brand, What are they trying to achieve? What kind of budgets are they looking at with their consumers?

How do we create a program for them that is going to essentially hijack the airwaves and put them in a place where it's a lot more interesting than seeing it as a Facebook ad or seeing it as an Instagram ad, or you know, flipping through it in a magazine like or whatever. However they're marketing their brand right now in this really data focused world of blandivity like it's changed and now you want new ways to cut through the noise, and music is a great way to

create a connection with a consumer. It sells products, it might not sell politics, like we saw that.

Why are acts you mean, why are companies more interested in brand partnerships today, assuming they are.

of companies. And my thinking is that we're in this similar thing Host covid, everybody came out of it, and this creator economy just exploded. And also you mix that with the AI boom and all of these new technologies coming in, and all of a sudden, there's all of these opportunities for creators to connect with brands. And really what fuels the creator economy in which why I love where we sit right now, is that brand partnerships are

so important for all of these different elements. So brands know that they can harder with creators in unorthodox ways orthodox ways and get massive lift and credibility. And artists are looking at the creator economy and saying, if all these other people are doing this. Let's find the right fits for us. We've got we love certain kinds of brands.

We can tell, storytell, and so it just when I look at the influencer pay for Playworld, or I look at it as like, this is a big opportunity for musicians because they're gonna wipe the floor with the influencers in terms of authenticity, in terms of creativity, in terms of reach, in terms of viability, in terms of earned media,

in terms of getting pressed. So it just it's a world where more and more artists want to do brand partnerships, and more and more brands want to work with creators, and I just think it's going to continue to grow as if as long as these are done right.

component of how it works. You know, I think a lot of these older school music executives are you still looking for the hit and and really pure to that side of things. And that's great. That was a business that really worked back in the day when hits were the only thing that mattered. But I think that the labels still hold a really solid seat at the table.

There's really good brand marketers. There's a lot of these deals come from labels, but the labels hold one important thing when it comes to these brand partnerships, and that's why they're invaluable. If you want the music and you want to work with a major artist, you have to involve the label for the clearances. So the labels have a seat at every table. Of these partnerships. I wouldn't

think that a lot of them originate. Some probably do, but you know, the labels are not direct with the artists, so it's complicated.

tickets for the show. They'll call you when they say you want to go. I said, yeah, well they have a buye we bought eight tickets. Doesn't make any difference to me. I can get it from the promoter. Where it used to be, they would have an unlimited budget for this. Okay. So in your world, has the artist in management become so powerful that it is driven by them and the label is more in the back seat. What does it look like?

I think that's actually one of the parts of this business that makes it very complicated, because you got to get all the writers and all the publishing, and it's just not set up in a way that it's still super archaic, like when I look at the blue sky. In this business, there's so much opportunity, like somebody could disrupt how clearing songs works. I mean, now Meta and TikTok. You can do a blanket deal, but you can't really use the music the right way, and brands don't know

how to do that. It's complicated. But if you want to clear music, you need the label, and you need the publisher, and you need the artists and you need the songwriter. And that's the bottom line. So the labels have a seat at every table that involves original music being used in a commercial. And the labels have teams, although I don't think they give those teams enough respect, but they have teams that are actively pitching that are in the inner circle of an album rollout that know, Okay,

I have the control of this product. The album is still very much in control of the artist. It's just like you said, album is such a superfluous part of what makes that artist big right now. It's a spokes it's a multiple streams of income, multiple streams of attention economy. So the album is important and it's a big marketing moment, and it can make a lot of money and can bring a lot of open a lot of doors. But the label is just really focused on selling albums, like

whereas the manager and really the artist. But the artists know what's right for them, and then the managers are guiding that and in a lot of ways can open up doors and see things. But it's going to come down to an artist's decision. And every time I bring it off for I say, what did the artists say?

But like, I don't think that's the path of least resistance when it comes to getting a deal, especially knowing that a lot of these people running these record labels have very little understanding or respect or appreciation for the brand partnerships or creating products with artists world. It's just not their business. They were selling records and they were selling them by the you know, CDs, and now they're in a different business. They're banks, and they're investors, and

they're you know, IP holders, and they're brilliant marketers. But I just don't think they understand the brand partnership space as well as they could. And so I would probably say if I had an opportunity for an artist, again it's case by case, and I do have friends at labels that would bring me thoughts and I would jump at them, But probably the decisions are going to be made with the artists, so you want to be as close to the artists as possible.

We built a strategy for them called Music for Good, where we supported artists missions that were making the world a better place that were on the road, and with certain artists we did certain partnerships. So with Tierra Wack,

who is an artist that is on Interscope. She's really creative and colorful and amazing rapper and just a force of nature in terms of her creativity, and she gravitated towards the brand and really is a think uh think local, but you know, think big but act local type of person. So she was really passionate about Philadelphia and the Philadelphia

school system. And we helped her to create a merch item, a pack that she is gonna tour with while a while doing chows and selling on her merch booths and selling at her her on her website as well, and the brand is going to create it. It's going to be way higher end than anybody else. This brand is going to make in terms of a pack. It's sustainable, it's triple bottom line, it's got a brand push, there's

an endorsement component. We've already done something together where we told her story and we elevated her voice through the original partnership, and it's just a natural progression. As she tour, she's going to make more money selling more of these packs and have something really cool for her audience. So yeah, I mean, there's ways that brands could integrate into the artist's show. It could be just we want to be in your green room, right Like sometimes when we do

a deal with an artist. We launched the agency when we rebranded the company from representing artists to representing brands. Our first project was this thing called the Patch House, and sour Patch was our client, and we had all of these different We took over these different houses and we outfitted them with all this different style and panache, and it was this place where artists would stay while

they were touring. Instead of in a white wall hotel where after their band is sleeping on couches, they could all stay in this beautiful brownstone in Brooklyn, and in exchange, they would create content and eventually we would be put

on artists, writers, and we would be supporting artists. Hey, I want to do a Papa, I want to do a meet and greet experience at the show, and we would do a sour Patch Kids support in that regard, or we would you know, give away sour Patch Kids, or we would help the all sorts of different ways. So like if you're a touring artist, there's infinitment ways

that brands can be involved. Now, if you're smart, you know that the five hundred, ten thousand people in the room are cool, But what really could matter is the ten million people online that could see this or the even more if you target these posts once they're done right, you can retarget it to even more people. So it's I think sponsoring an artist on the road would be a small component of the way that an artist and a brand should work together.

are companies that are doing this really well. And then there's a lot of brand partnership agencies, and then there's a lot of brand partnerships divisions, and then there's a lot of brand partnerships folks. So I think that there's a lot of people that do this. I mean and then I don't know if they do it the same way I do it. I have my own unique way of doing things, and that our company does it its own way. Like we're new agency, we want to do

things different. We've always tried to focus on what's next, and you know, we're really driven by creativity and opportunity and entrepreneurial spirit, and we just look at it our way. We have our own format to what works and what doesn't. And really what the difference between us, I think in most is that we're really into the trends we eat like.

That's something that I love about you. I remember all the times I would, you know, bring you to Internet Week or bring you to sound control events, or have you at music gaming content. It was because I just couldn't understand how you were so on the pulse of culture. It was so inspiring, and you still are. Your opinion pieces just rock my world. And so I am now a avid understander of the trends. I you know, my newsletter I read. I scan a thousand articles every week,

I read one hundred I select ten. It's a love letter to the music business. You know. I really try to share my insights and what I think is going to be valuable.

this is not in the real world anymore. So much of this is what's going on online and how you're able to disseminate information and formulate POV. And then it's a serendipity bomb. Every week it goes out to thousands, tens of thousands of people in the music business, and you never know who's it's coming back to. It's music business, it's brand marketers, it's music aficionados, it's passionate fans, it's become it's people that I know from all walks of

my life. It's it's a whole marketing bomb. Plus it keeps me top of mind every single week. It's my gift to everybody. You want to know what's going on in music, it's this is what I'm seeing. And then on top of it, it's because of LinkedIn, it's become the biggest music newsletter and music and brand newsletter on LinkedIn. So that's a whole other audience that's got all sorts

of other scalability potential. But it's just also allows me to kind of be able to put forecasts together, to build trend reports for clients, to build our own trend reports that we think is happening. It's just it's it's a great exercise. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of fun. And all of a sudden, the culture has changed. It's become a newsletter world. Like the folks that are doing these newsletters are all of a sudden, in some ways more powerful than the publications. Like you

know this firsthand. You greatly benefited from being one of the most influential voices in music as a newsletter and bucking the system and doing it on your terms, in your way. And now all of a sudden, everybody's in this substack culture. And I don't even think they understand how to read the trends. I don't even understand they understand some.

coming into us just based on our conversation. And then Alex's hand to hand combat and he's also a relationships person. My brother's a lot more fun than I am. You know, he's the he's the life of the party, and he's just a really solid guy. Like he's just one of these people that prides himself on his word is what he's going to do, and that's how he operates. And so I think people like working with them, and I

think people like like taking his call. So I might meet somebody and then he'll know what to do with it. Or he might meet somebody and we'll both have a conversation and then he'll stay in touch. And so a lot of my thinking at this point is the news is scaling is like I can't you know, I'm more trying to attract versus go after one by one. If I'm working on like I'm trying to work my to do list and not my inbox, and I'm really focused on what i want to achieve as the CEO of

the company. It's about vision, it's about recruiting, but he's a very good salesperson. I mean, how many of these clients can we handle? We still, you know, we're servicing big fortune one hundred brand clients and conglomerates, so these take a lot of effort, They take a lot of bandwidth. We're not like, you know, trying to over subscribe us. Like, we want to work with great clients that want to do great things, and we want to do great business

for them. And you know, I think the dream would be, now we've been independent for a long time and we've really built a good, good system, would be it would

be nice to have a bigger stage. It would you know, obviously there's some downside with that, but it would be nice to have more impact, to have more clients, to have the ability to grow this company alongside of somebody that really knows how to grow a company like this, because our strength is in making these pop culture moments and storytelling and creating these opportunities and really being on the pust of the trends and seeing where things are going.

Like that's what gets me excited, right, like talking about the blue sky of like you know, people think that this doom and gloom I'm like, do you know what this music business looks like right now? This is an amazing place. Like everything is, there's just so much opportunity.

I could study business and actually be in the business of music. So I ended up pivoting to being in the business school at my college and then learning learning music on the side, doing internships and climbing those ranks. I started representing artists and that was was a totally different bag. As an indie agency, finding and developing talent

and had a lot of success in that. After I stopped that business model about seven years in, I started to look at what I thought was next, which was there was a big opportunity with brands, and so we went deep into the brand marketing space and we ended up working with more and more brands, and ultimately it led to a really solid run until the pandemic happened. And then I looked at what was going on and I realized, we're no longer in an office. I can no longer go shake hands, I can no longer go

see people at conferences. Everything is on clubhouse. The world was changing and we needed to be savvy. We needed to be smart about what was going on. And I was just looking for something fresh, a new experience, something that wasn't running a small boutique agency every week trying to keep the lights on. So I saw the NFT world, I saw the live streaming space, I saw the brand partnerships world, and I started to say, Okay, there's a

big opportunity. A headhunter called me Cia had hunting right, because when I sit now, I work with all the agencies, I work with all the labels. When I was an agent, I didn't sleep well at night let's just say I looked a lot older at thirty five than I do at forty five. Everybody was out to get me because it was such a doggy dog world. This is a very creative, collaborative world. So CIA started calling me, bringing

me opportunities. Hey, would you want to look at you know, one job was the chief entertainment officer at Barclay Center. They just were considering new ownership. They wanted to be really innovative. They knew I was tech forward. I'd always be friend of the tech industry. I really believe tech was the savior of the music business. Smart bet it's

worked out. But then my dream Stage called, and dream Stage just received this funding and they had these really seasoned artists and see, and they were looking for somebody that could immediately come in and be the CMO. And I'm in a world of cmos. Those are my clients, those are my peers, those are my people. It's nice to be on the brand side, right, Like I'm now cutting checks at dream Stage, right we have two million dollars to spend on artists and shows, Like, let's go

figure out what artists we should book. Let's be innovative on our process, let's try to sell tickets to people online. Ultimately, the live streaming world wasn't that great for these indie live streaming companies, and I think a lot of them took it on the chin. I was the larger shareholder

of the company besides the founders. But like they sold, they sold, they merged, and they sold, and you know, a year and a half in like their investors stopped paying and it just became a really hard situation during the pandemic to to be at a agent at a a live stream company that you know, has no staff and it can it's having a hard time pulling off these events. So they ended up selling to Drift, which really creative team that we'd been partnering with and doing

these amazing shows. Like you know, sixty thousand people were coming to some of these shows, but less and less people after the pandemic stopped, a lot of people stopped wanting to go to the live stream show. Who wants to go to a show right when you're coming out of the pandemic, you want to be outside. Everybody was outside,

So it was a hard sell. We did a couple of brand deals, We did a couple of artist deals, but ultimately I ended up calling my brother and saying, I need you to put me back on health insurance because I'm coming home. And that's the beauty of you know, still owning a company and having your brother operate it. And uh, I was able to make a pretty seamless transition when they sold and you know, shut down the doors and ended up using the dream stage technology to

to fall into drift into Deezer. The thesis worked out right, the plan was there. Just unfortunately live streaming the bed on these smaller companies. Just they couldn't compete with Amazon, they couldn't compete with YouTube, they couldn't compete with Apple. I still believe in in live streaming, and I thought it was fun to be the CMO of this company. I learned a lot, It was a good challenge and I was there for a year. But ultimately, you know, I kept a foot in the door and had a

carve out with New Agency. I was still writing my newsletter and pretty quickly I was able to transition back into New Agency, and and you know, it's a new world with the pandemic over and you know, live streaming being less interesting and Web three falling apart, and like you know, all that kind of hype of COVID, it's just like this little cottage industry. As we head into

what feels like again a whole new era. I feel like my thesis now is all changing again, right, Like I feel like what happens with the election now all of a sudden's created a whole new dynamic in the universe, and it's really hard to understand, like the exact clear

vision of what we're going into. And I know a lot of people are having a hard time with it, and you know, believe me, I it was a kick in the in the in the stomach, but like you know, you kind of have to look for the opportunities here to do what you do and find new lanes. So it's a fun time again because I feel like as much of a crazy world or we're in, it's also I think going to be a new world order where you know, who knows what's going to happen.

lot of perks to being in Miami. It's not it's obviously great weather, and it's a it's a really fun hospitality scene, and there are some great brands here you know that I've been able to connect with and you know, as of late, be able to do some shoots with. It's not New York. It's where as it sounds. It's a lot smaller a pond. You can definitely wrap your arms around it. But it is a city that feels like it's being built for the future. You go to

New York, which I love and I'm from. You go to Paris, you feel like these are classic cities that were built for an era. You come to Miami is just always moving and grooving. There's just so much new things popping up. Like I live in between the Design District and Wynwood. It is just so nice. Everything's walkable, the beach is fourteen minutes away, and there are really good people here. Like if you're in Miami, you know, you're probably evading taxes or you don't have to go

to an office. So it's a very high quality community of friends that I've made here. But I will say three years in that a lot of the people that came here have now left. It was a COVID haven in a lot of ways. And it's changing. Uh so you know, thank goodness for Art Basel and the winter I think is going to be fantastic, and it's a great place to visit. And it's definitely not the Miami of old. It's definitely a new Miami that's happened here

and and that's exciting. Uh It's just, you know, at one point, I was hoping this was going to be this like tech have in in this like it's just not that. It's uh it's a it's a it's a great hospitality place and and it's a great place to live and to recharge. But I feel like I gotta get on a plane every three to five days at this point to really be Do.

really easy, good quality of life. But the bigger opportunities if you're not in your office, which I love just working from here with my team strapped in and just kind of firing away, if you want to touch hands and see people and put people put things together. In that capacity, I think it's important to be. It's a it's a constant traveler.

And then you know Quotapox. He was a concept before it was even a product, and now it's starting to pick up more and more traction. We had a great debut in Billboard for this campaign. It was in complex and so we partnered with Danny, We parted with Tierra, We did some stuff with Global Citizen. We isolated a couple opportunities, and now it's you know, become this music for good. Is this innovative way to support artists instead

of sponsoring the artists again. At one time, I was working with Pharrell on a project and it was with Oreo, and he said to me, Jesse, I don't want to hold the cookie. I don't think that's cool. Like I want to work with this brand. I want to do something super innovative, Like I want to see where they make the Oreos. I want to turn every manhole in New York into an Oreo. I want to like do something epic. I want to design the uniforms for the workers.

But I don't want to hold the cookie. That's not cool and for I just it's stuck with me, like, that's an artist that's got a vision and that's the way a brand can support an artist in a way that's way more innovative. So with Koto Boxy, they get it and they're supporting artists missions like how do we help artists make the world a better place? And let's tell their story and help them with that. And so that's been a campaign that we launched and recently we

shot that in August and Miami and Philadelphia. And then we also we worked with Craig Doctor Pepper and so we did a coffee for their their Matcafe, their McDonald's collaboration that really was speaking to the young Latin audience. And we did a partnership with an artist named mun I is a reggaetome superstar, and we launched this kind of campaign to talk about the product. And then what

we did is we did something fun. We kind of we wanted to create an IRL experience, right, we got the artist, we got the content, and then we want to create this kind of hook, this moment, and so we had him playing where he was playing on tour, he was playing live and we did a sound check this elevated sound check experience for his fans where they could come to the soundcheck, watch him soundcheck, and have a cafecito with Lunai. And so we styled it out.

We put his image, you know, all the bells and whistles, his images in the currig. Doctor Pat Curry got mecafe coffee cup, and we had these one hundred fans and press right, you know, we had Page six, we had People Magazine, we had oh La, we had Telemundo there and he's doing interviews, he's making sure that the show is going to be right. A couple lucky fans got

to go to the show that night. And then also he is in the you know, giving these fans this intimate experience like being able to go see a sound check in this really nice way for an artist, and being able to connect with the artists in that way. Like it was just a really different spin on an artist's kind of partnership and collapse. And obviously there's social posts and all those different components to it, and it's you know, second year partnership, and it was it was fun.

We shot that also in Miami and we then did the you know, Club Live Dave Grutman Club partnership also to do the sound check all in Miami. So these were just like interesting Miami experiences. And then you know what I'm really excited about right now is Art Puzzle. So Art Possel kind of transformed Miami the same way that's south By Southwest transfer formed Austin, and it's become this monster pop culture moment. And you know that's spun

all these other different brands. But Art Puzzle Proper has now been purchased by James Murdock and has brought a whole new team of rock star executives in and they are kind of transforming what this brand could be because it's just so much bigger than the you know, bear itself now in terms of impact, and so we are working with them on brand partnerships, on strategy, on pop culture moments, and so this was it's gonna be this massive moment. We got our arms wrapped around all these

different events. There's all sorts of different brands sponsoring different things, and so working with Art Puzzle, working with the different brands coming into my home city, it's just going to be like a big end of the year extravaganza to kind of Close Out twenty twenty four in music and art in lifestyle, and so that should be exciting. And then, like you know, just recently, someone like Lin Manuel Miranda's team reached out to us, who he just released this

Warriors project. It's awesome. It's reimagining the movie Warriors, which he was the total love of. He was this total kind of nerd growing up watching Warriors. When he was four. He and his friend Lisa reimagined the lyrics to celebrate the forty fifth anniversary of Warriors into a rap album. But all the cast is female and it's just such

a cool project. So he put it out a couple of weeks ago, and now we're gonna be working with him to kind of do this experience where we're going to introduce him to a lot of brands and kind of create partnerships around this project and help him to make this album a real pop culture moment wherever it goes, if it ends up on Broadway, if it ends up, you know, winning Kleos, if it ends up at the

Grammys next year. It helps him tell the story by amplifying it with some great partners that wouldn't necessarily have access to Lin Manuel Monster playwright and super talent to be able to work with them in this kind of cool capacity on a passion project that's got a lot of legs. So that's coming up in the next couple of weeks. We've got a lot of these kind of fun things coming to finish out the year.

New York Times. Time. I almost at this point I feel like unsubscribing except on Sunday and the hard copy, just because it's just not necessarily giving you the most relevant information. Some of the reporters are, so I think, actually, like an article in the newspaper, people aren't going to read it. Sure it looks good and people share it, but the best way to reach people is really on social media through citizen journalists, and the best best way

to do it is through the podcasts. Podcasts are so personal, they're so intimate, you're in somebody's ear. You really feel like you have a relationship with these these people, these these thought leaders, these these people that are questioning or this discourse. So I feel like podcasts and newsletters are really the best place to get information, and I think the rest of it is in a lot of ways clickbait and biased and through corporations kind of with agendas.

So if I was going to put a message out, if I was going to release an artist, it seems pretty clear that what worked in the past is not what's going to work in the current. And I think there's a big opportunity to reinvent artists, rollouts, brand rollouts, storytelling, utilizing folks like yourself and myself that are just consistently create original ideas. Because what resonates more than anything right

now is authenticity. There is a strong move back to what is real, Like I feel like I know you. I've been reading your stuff for fifteen years. I, like so many of us, You're a treasure in this space. How much you've given to all of us of yourself. And I look up to you because of that. And you've been doing it. Before it was necessarily a hip and now like you're the you know, the granddaddy of

doing this. And I just think that this is the trend that more and more people want, they want authenticity and it works. Like I just to give an example, like I just did something with Read Hastings, founder of Netflix, and he, you know, he came and spoken at an event that and I brought him out for it. I knew the landscape and thought this would be a good person to have speak. He's launching Powder Mountain. He's got

his next invention, his next platform. He's he's taken this the Summit Mountain and he's turning it where I actually saw you there. I've got a great fireside. But he's now tricking this over and he's reinventing it for what he thinks is going to be one of the great ski experiences. But he needs to get the word out there so New York Times did an amazing piece. He's got a Terrell and art fair or art festival, like a live art exhibits in the ski track its or

just skiing. He's got all of that and that's fine. New York Times cool. What moved the needle for him and what really got him the results was a Tim Ferriss podcast, And I've thought about that when his publicist mentioned that to me, and I said, you know what, that's why I reached out to you, because I heard him on Tim Ferriss. The New York Times was fine, but that didn't move the culture. So having people on

platforms like podcasts, I think are way more powerful. Article and Rolling Stone that's behind a pay wall and it's got a political slant and it's just surrounded by ads. It just doesn't feel the same as directly talking to consumers with real intention.

Like I've discovered that the key to life in my mind is compounding, and that's compounding in all forms, compounding in relationships, compounding and wisdom, compounding in experience, in everything. So when you think about in love, like compounding is the great power and the only way to stop compounding is to give up. So I want to do this forever, like you said it on a podcast recently, like you

want to do this. You're going to do this to the day that you croak, And like I look at you, I look at Rupert Murdoch, I look at people in their eighties and just still in the game, and you know, warm Buffett, like these are people that are seeing the fruits of all of their work. So to me, it's not about a one hit wonder or greatest hit. It's about consistently showing up every day and giving it your best and taking the lumps and just trying to do

a little bit better. Across the board in every way, and to me, I feel like the sky, just like tomorrow should be better than today, and that's what keeps my energy so up.