We were lucky to catch up with Derrick Hernandez recently and have shared our conversation below.

Derrick, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

The story behind our mission starts with friendship. A group of talented individuals who were more so music producers were friends of mines that I felt needed to get the proper attention to shine. After being blessed with the opportunity to put on a monthly event after doing a couple album release parties, I focused to highlight each of my friends on multiple stages to where it grew bigger than the friendships but to focus on bringing a bigger light to the DJ and producer community of tampa fl.

Derrick, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am an artist first and I’m sensitive about my sh- (nah I’m just playing lol). But yes I am artist who loves hiphop and everything about it. Today I am someone who has become a resource for the up&coming indie artist looking for an outlet to be heard or seen to help build an audience from curating events and local festivals to creating podcasts and interview series.

What sets me apart from others I feel is my willingness to fail or take an L by just trying something and also how I go about connecting and building relationships with artists.

Moving forward I want to inspire more artists to be honest with their gifts and be proud in being able to help one another and serve their communities with all of their talents. That’s what really makes this thing worth it.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

One of the biggest lessons I had to unlearn was to stop thinking like someone owes me something regardless of my artistic past. And that starting this new journey on the other side of entertainment would require more and more sweat equity and thought put into these ideas to focus on my audience and much less myself and others.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Still a work in progress, but building my audience on social media took a lot of studying of the differences of each of these platforms and where I wanted to focus my attention on. The major 3 that I worked with initially was Facebook, IG and Twitter/X. Realizing that these 3 platforms have way different online cultures in how they operate, I wanted to make sure that I could use one as a “home” base to host or premiere most of our content and that was IG.

Facebook felt more like going outside in the neighborhood because a lot of the community built on that platform was based on proximity. Twitter feels like going into work on Wall Street. It’s very fast paced and the conversation moves faster than anything you can imagine. However, the benefit of it is that it typically runs or cycles the convo first and quicker than the other platforms. IG is more of a like a visual resume that allows you to premiere content, communicate with your audience and basically become an extension of your direct website.

Contact Info:

• Website: Beatsnchill.com
• Instagram: @Beatsnchill813
• Facebook: Facebook.com/Beatsnchill
• Twitter: @Iamhmtwn
• Youtube: YouTube.com/Beatsnchill