The Tower Nashville is a student-centered publishing company, blog, and promotional resource for all Nashville collegiate-level artists. The main focus of the organization is to promote student artists and create content to build their professional resumes, and since the week of starting it, we have had incredible success. The Tower was my COVID/quarantine project, starting from the ground up, designing the website, networking with artists, engaging a social media audience, going to every show I could, and interviewing everyone on my team led me to understand now more than ever that I had to work in the music industry. The Tower gave me the opportunity to do everything I could have ever wanted and more.

 

I started The Tower in September of 2021, we started with three (now twelve) up-and-coming bands, whom we see tons of potential in to follow their every move, we call them our top artists. This means we do the most to promote them from concerts, to press releases for single/EP/album drops, interviews, show write-ups, and more. As of early December of the same year, we were working with 30 total artists promoting their live shows and new releases. The Tower started with just me networking, going around to shows and posting them on Instagram, and promoting the artists in any way I could. After writing the first blog post I realized I would need more help. I brought on my roommate, Madison Dawson as Director of Music Distribution and streaming, we created the foundation templates for our blog, the Spotify account, and the Instagram posts. As of late October of 2022, we had over 50 applicants and now have a team of 20 more people who are eager to be engaged in the music industry. 

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Shows would be put up on our website's homepage with information of who's playing, when and where, as well as, ticketing links for each concert. However, Instagram is the main platform for The Tower as it's the most common app used by Gen Z to learn about what's going on in their sphere of influence. Each week, we post twice with our 'show lineup'. The first post covers who's playing Monday-Thursday, when, and where the show takes on top of any requirements needed for the show like tickets, vaccination card/negative COVID test information, and if there is an age requirement to get into the venue. The second post covers the same information but about the Friday-Sunday shows. The shows are either sent to us by the band or by their managers through email or Instagram DMs. These posts are then added to our Daily Instagram Stories to remind our followers what shows are happening that day and the next. Shows our team is able to attend are then recorded and posted to our shared Google Drive and the next day, the social media team goes through the highlights of each night's shows and posts them on our story as our 'Nightly Recap'. 

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I designed our blog, 'The Write Up', to act as an online music industry magazine. I remember watching Almost Famous in my Survey of Music Business class my freshman year and the thrill of the journalist going on tour with the artist in the film, it had opened my eyes to a whole new part of the music industry I forgot had existed. Giving our top artists a place for show reviews, press releases for new singles and EP/album drops, and a place to showcase members of our time who are interested in music journalism. The journalism team started out with me reaching out to those first three bands to ask if they would want a review of their live show, they said yes. I started by going to a show one of the bands would be headlining and writing down notes on each song, marking up different musical components of each song, who played a solo in which song, which member of the bands wrote the songs, and how they performed and interacted with the crowd. The first time I recognized that The Tower was going to be more impactful than I could ever imagine, was when The PitchPockets reached out to me. I had heard whispers about them and had been wanting to see them for a little over a month when they had reached out to me to do a Write Up on their headline show at The East Room. It was one of the best shows I have ever been to and writing a review for them was difficult but it sparked crazy feedback. In one week after the review, 3 more bands reached out asking for future Write-Ups for their shows.

 

Using Spotify to our full advantage, we focused on promoting student music within genre and mood playlists. With our Spotify, people can listen to curated playlists made by our Music Directors and A&R teams. These teams were picked by me and are made of some of the most diverse music listeners there are. The amazing team of 16 total A&R members has designed each playlist for their favorite genres so you get what you're looking for. These playlists are then promoted on our website and our Instagram. 

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Over the summer of 2022, The Tower Nashville was launched into the public eye by becoming a full-fledge non-profit organization. This meant that our signed artists are able to receive 100% of their streaming, performance, and other income. From there we also became a registered publisher in ASCAP. Over the summer, The Tower Nashville established a network of college and independent radio stations willing to work with us to promote our collegiate-level artists to the rest of their age group across the nation. Shortly after, The Tower Music launched as my own personal management company, furthering the networking and music industry pipeline. The goal is for collegiate-level artists to continue their education while growing their career, then once they graduate, The Tower Management will begin managing them, same goes for our team. After being apart of The Tower as a non-profit throughout college, graduates have the opportunity to interview into the company by pitching their band/s.

 

One of my highlighting moments has to be managing Keep the Eleven after 6 months of working closely with them and two weeks of straight promotion, they played Brooklyn Bowl for Summer Camp Music Festival in February 2023. Keep the Eleven had the largest crowd and had numerous big ticket music companies extend their business invitations.

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