We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jason Howard a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jason, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.

The underserved community that we serve is not one that’s typically thought of as an underserved community, but in the music industry – the independent artist sector is a really underserved community! That’s something we at JoyJam will change. We see other industries treat the next professionals in their field with optimism and hope, they invest in them and show them in a high-class light. All members of an NBA draft class will not go on to be Hall of Famers, will not go on to be All-NBA, will not go on to be All-Stars, and will not go on to be franchise players of their team. However, they are still treated in a favorable light because of their talent and the potential that they possess, even if a large percentage of them will not be the league in a few years.

We at JoyJam feel that independent musicians who are aspiring to be professionals should be looked at in the same light, we want to highlight them, tell their stories and most importantly put them in front of a fan base that wants to see them and discover them. Looking back at the era of MTV TRL live and BET 106 and Park, the thing I think that is missing for today’s music lovers is that these platforms were curated, and they were music discovery platforms. The sound of music in the 90s and 2000s was very regional, if you were not living in Seattle and Pacific Northwest area you may not have known of the grunge rock scene but once Nirvana was placed onto MTV it allowed a lot of fans outside of their location to be exposed to them and to become fans. The social media platforms that we have today are becoming heavily populated with content from all kinds of creators. In the case of TikTok, they’re becoming more inundated with product-based content. This devalues music-based content exponentially on these platforms, even though music-based content is what made these platforms so popular. Musicians have to fight against a lot of different types of content and also fight against the millions of independent and established artists that want to put their content in front of fans.

JoyJam will be content from only music related creatives. We will bring fans to the site using various strategic initiatives. As soon as fans log into the site, they will see content of artists from genres that they like, be able to search live music in their area, engage with music related content. Artists will be able to post content to music genres they feel the music fits instead of being ruled by an algorithm.

Artists will receive other perks from being members of the app, they will get opportunities to be featured and paid on live shows. In addition to this, our biggest wish is for artists to become owners of the JoyJam platform. We will have a crowdfunding campaign that starts each share at a relatively low price for artists to have an opportunity to own shares of the platform, we want to be an artist and creative owned platform. While other platforms are pushing them away and devaluing them, we want to include them, highlight them and have them share in the success of the platform. JoyJam is a creator owned platform, for music content creators. I’m thankful to Howie and Howard Conyack for believing in my talent to work with the company.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’ve spent the last five to six years in the music business doing a various number of things. I got my introduction to the Atlanta music scene around 2018 after being exposed to the music industry as a teenager in Philadelphia, I was more on the engineering and recording side at first. After spending so much time in the studio I begin recording songs with friends of mines, it was just something fun for us to do to pass the time, we really did not take it seriously. I embarked on a number of business ventures with music after that, making and selling a mixtape to kids I went to High School with, recording local artists, making copies of CDs for local artists etc.

When I came back to Atlanta in 2018, I was introduced to a group of artists who were getting booked heavily around the Atlanta area, after accompanying them for some months around to different shows I begin to think that it had to be a better way for them to market themselves. That begin my journey into learning playlisting via Yaquan Hunter. I learned digital and social media marketing, the intricacies of DSP platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and so on. I first started my own music marketing company Next Level Sounds with my business partner Jamal Davis in mid 2019. This company focused primarily on playlisting through Spotify’s third-party playlist format, and social media marketing primarily on Instagram and Facebook. This grew to a music distribution company; we did 1.5 million streams via distribution our first 12 months in business. We garnered over 9 million streams for our playlisting clients since 2018.

This evolved into me stepping into the artist management space, as I was getting hundreds of submissions per week for artists wanting to get on my playlists, I started to really like the music of some of these artists. Wanting to work with them more on a one-on-one basis I started M37 Management as a way that I could work with individual artists on a rollout tailored to fit their individual look style and more importantly their sub-genre of music. Music has morphed into a lot of sub genres over the past 10 years and not enough attention is paid to it. With playlisting, you have primarily rap or hip-hop playlist but throughout rap you have multiple sub genres such as trap, traditional boom bap rap, conscious rap, emo, alt rap and there’s so many others to name. Playlisting does not take that into account. With artist management I wanted to market the artist to their specific fans of that subgenre. This led to throwing a number of live events in multiple cities and also creating content creator events which featured photo shoots, video shoots, and interviews so the artist could further tell their story.

With the marketing and management companies both doing pretty well, I set out to build some platforms around these companies that I could use to bring in new artists and that my clients could use to showcase their skills or tell their story. Throughout the years this initiative turned into the Valuable Information Podcast, the Next Level Hip Hop Blog and most recently The Chrd Magazine. The Chrd Magazine is my shining gem from these platforms that were created, The Chrd was born to be the intersection between music, fashion, pop culture and sports.

In today’s world of microwave artists whose songs come and go every 60 seconds, not enough emphasis is being put on the story of these artists, and very few artists are even making music with a story behind it. This is where I believe we have the biggest opportunity to increase fan and artists relationships by getting back to telling stories. The superstars of yesterday became superstars because people felt they knew the story and the person behind the superstardom. Media did a great job of painting a picture of an artist for the world to see, that kind of journalism and media has gone away. We are now more focused on the “reality” caricatures that some artists feel they have to be in order to gain attention, rather than as an audience understanding who the person is and why they make the music that they do.

Joining JoyJam will involve me putting the culmination of music and personal experience to the test. I’ve spent years in corporate America in Project Management and Operations leadership positions. Long term my goal is to assume COO responsibilities for JoyJam, but at this moment with us being a start-up and me having so many years of experience at the ground level with thousands of artists, and creatives. I am well suited to kickstart our operations business development at this beginning phases.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I’ve never thought about it as being a difference of non-creatives and creatives, but that really might be the difference in people with the entrepreneurial spirit and the non-entrepreneurial spirit. A lot of non-creatives, aside from not having the creative imagination – also don’t have the full view of creating value. Many non-creatives are kind of stuck in the rigid world of, “I have to be paid per hour for work I am producing”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about making money for your work. However, I feel a lot of creatives understand that the value at the end of the road is more important than short term dollars.

True entrepreneurs have a large long-term vision of what their business and or product will be. The impact that they feel this idea can have is often not diminished by instant gratification. Noncreative people want instant gratification for their time spent or services rendered, when if they invested some sweat equity (as many creatives have to do) they would receive a far larger payment in the long term.

As my uncle taught me. “You should provide value before you provide an invoice”

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I don’t often speak of my transition from just marketing to also a management company as a pivot, but that is exactly what it was. Two years into our playlisting success with the marketing company Next Level Sounds we had to pivot. After multiple years bringing in great revenue and beginning to see the possibility of some profit for all of our efforts. I was sent a letter from Spotify that my account was being disabled do to us taking money from artists to be placed on a playlist. Spotify said this violated the terms and conditions of my account. Just in that quick moment a near 6 figure annual business was halted.

We built ourselves to do so well because we had a global base of customers and listeners. We would often wake up to submissions from artists in Russia, London, Switzerland, Sweden, South Africa and many other European and African Countries. This allowed me to not have to build a lot of relationships with local or Atlanta based artists because my clientele was from all over the US and all over the world. Once this playlisting income stream was shut down, I had to make a hard pivot toward building deeper, meaningful relationships working with local and Atlanta based artists for management purposes.

Working with artists on getting one song playlisted with slight marketing is a world of difference from planning and strategizing a rollout while building a relationship and trust with the artist. Aside from being their manager I was also their account representative, having to understand their goals and manage their expectations. The scope of work was entirely different, but this experience helped me tremendously once we got into live events and had to build the same relationship and trust with event sponsors.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.joyjam.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m37_jase/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-howard-m37-nls/
• Twitter: https://x.com/M37Mgmt
• Other: https://m37mgmt.com/

Image Credits

Photo credits: https://www.instagram.com/__gotdamnsam/