We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Vince Martellacci a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Vince, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.
I’m really proud that, as a bisexual business owner, I am able to bring other bisexual people on as clients and into my organization. This really matters. I got to see one of my clients, who had previously introduced himself as a proudly feminine straight man, come out as bisexual, and I get to help him find a record label to support him. I am working with him only because I believe in his music and who he is as a person. I’m taking on some risk and I might lose money,, but I want to see him succeed. I also got to mentor a pansexual intern, who taught me so much about pansexuality as well as other parts of her identity. They even shared their experience as an immigrant, and it was beautiful to bond over what we had in common instead of our many differences.
People don’t realize how lonely bisexuality and pansexuality can be. We don’t fit neatly into the LGBTQ community, and in fact face a lot of animosity from gay men and lesbians. Bisexual people are not allowed to fully grow into their identity like monosexual people. And in music? It’s barely acceptable to be gay. We’re making progress, but bisexuality in music hasn’t been a thing since Bowie’s heyday. Women in music, black people in music, it’s a nightmare for all of us. And I always get to work with some of the most talented black, female, and black female artists that come my way. I’m so lucky that my drive to work with music that inspires me has led me to people who also find their identity makes breaking through in music complicated at best and impossible at worst. I look at my experience as a bisexual man and then I look at theirs, and while there are vast differences, I’ve come to really appreciate what I think of as a common struggle between all marginalized identities.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
In simplest terms, 4AM Indie Publicity gets musicians on blogs/magazines, playlists, podcasts, influencer posts, and radio. I started out in tech marketing and, to put it simply, I hated it. One day I took my marketing skills to my musician friends and someone took a chance on me. From a brief stint growing artist Instagrams, I found my strengths were in media relationship-building. What I do is reach out to these bloggers, playlisters, etc, and frame my clients in the best possible light. I tell their story completely and succinctly, and then their music drives everything home. This all works by keeping at it. If you get in the media enough, streams come in consistently. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved for my clients, in presence and in streams, and I’m proud of the one-man agency I built. I’m proud that I’ve built my business by building relationships and that I have good friends on my side all across the state. And I’m so thrilled to have brought on amazing help in the form of excellent contractors I get to mentor.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I firmly believed you could not build a business without throwing a ton of money at it. I was very into the “spend money to make money” mindset. And what’s worse, I didn’t know what to spend my money on, so I spread it around too much and never invested in just one thing that was working. Finally, a year in, I learned all about bootstrapping, cash flow, and money management. Now I’m properly bootstrapped and I focus any monetary investment on client campaigns, because their success is my success.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
All I have to do to gain clients consistently is always, always, always acts like a human. I’d say I’m “authentic”, but “authentic” has become a marketing ploy. Instead, I take every opportunity to build relationships. I am currently good friends with three separate groups of music business experts and musicians. We are all working together. For example, I owe a lot to Jeanne Rice at Artist Network Agency. She sends me people constantly who are always sincere about and ready to work. And in return, I work on her publicity for, among other things, her new sync agency. Local to me is Kyle at Family Tie Records, which I think of as an incubator that builds musicians on several business and marketing levels. We all make money, of course, but at the heart of what we do is the desire to help, doing some of it just for the love of music and the biz, and because of our shared passion.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://4amindiepublicity.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/4amindie
Image Credits
Vince Martellacci