Managing musicians in the Big Apple

By Brian Litwin ‘11 - Music Business major

I knew no one in New York City. Adding to my fear of living alone in Manhattan, I was an intern at the legendary Atlantic Records. The flight from O’Hare to LaGuardia felt like one of the longest of my life.

My fear immediately changed to excitement when I stood in front of my office building on 6^th Avenue, just up the street from Radio City Music Hall, for the first time. It hit me -  I am about step into one of the most powerful record labels in the world. Atlantic Records was once home to legendary artists such as Led Zeppelin, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Cream, John Coltrane, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aaliyah, and many more. They currently have Jason Mraz, T.I., Flo Rida, Rob Thomas, Staind, Kid Rock, Sean Paul, Death Cab For Cutie, Diddy, O.A.R, Rush, and many more.

I was an intern in the Artist Development Department at Atlantic. The job was a very interesting and challenging one - a dream for me. One day I would be adding tour dates to a system that would be blasted to millions of people, another day I could be leading James Blunt’s touring guitar player to meet with our department head (He was really cool and we ended up talking a bit about Chicago because he was recently there). I did many different things and learned how the business works.

One of the bigger projects I had was to develop ideas for a band to promote their tour. The director for the band wanted to focus on a college crowd in the markets where they were touring, and to find ways to promote during the day for their shows at night. I tried to find bigger public events and I didn’t shy away from crazy ideas.

I did the normal intern “go-fer” stuff, but this allowed me to meet people in other departments, and made me realize that half of this internship was networking. I met people from legal, A&R, finance, radio promotion, and many other departments. Through this, I learned the basic structure of a record label and gained knowledge from everyone I talked to.

Another great part of the internship was seeing and meeting with some artists (Corba Starship, Jason Castro, Paulo Nutini, Uncle Kracker and Robert Francis), seeing shows for free, and realizing that working at a record label would be my dream job.

During my time at Atlantic and in New York I made a number of friends, connections, and memories that I will never forget. As you can imagine, it is not cheap to live in Manhattan, but I was able to find a dorm room at NYU in Greenwich Village. I became close friends with some of the other residents who were also alone in NYC and doing internships at companies like JP Morgan, American Girl Doll and Google. They were from all over the world, so I was really able to expand my horizons.

I am truly grateful to have had an incredible opportunity to learn about the industry I am going into. I will miss everything about living and working in New York.