We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Adam Mason a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Adam, thanks for joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea
Creating my own business in the music industry was an organic growth from the career I already held over years as an instrumentalist and musical director in New York City. I am a born perfectionist – though nothing is perfect about me or my life; I have an innate need to find perfection in everything I experience. I have come to know that there is a duality in me between my artistic creativity and my need for organization and structure. I was dissatisfied in many music performance scenarios because I felt the talent was all there but the leadership was missing and things felt sloppy onstage, and the music underserved. I wanted to do better, and this drove me to become a bandleader, to take the reins of many of my gigs in town or on tour backing artists. I enjoyed having the control to select the players in an ensemble and curate a team with total synergy, to arrange the music with the utmost organizational sense and fluidity, compose my own intros and endings and segues or medleys and mashups, and direct the band onstage from the rhythm section in a discreet yet clear manner, bass guitar in hand. I felt that I was growing as a musician through this opportunity, enjoying my gigs much more, and serving the audience or clients, as well as my fellow musicians, in a much better way. I also wanted to earn a normal income as I became older and stop piecing together freelance gigs to pay rent every month. Security was needed. Between my now-developed skillset as a musical director, a huge network of musicians and industry colleagues built over decades of performing, and a vision for better longevity in my career, I decided it was time to start my own company. I simply brought together everything I had learned in my tenure in NYC as a musician, and all of my resources I had acquired during that time, and unified it under a fresh and distinct brand which was 45 Riots. Now came the hard work – tireless hours over years to nurture this brand, network, build, promote, and learn, before it was able to thrive. It started with a vision and a strong brand identity and then step by step I reinvested from each contract back into the company to grow. Eventually I brought on administrative employees to assist me, rented prime office spaces in Midtown Manhattan to host our team and clients, expanded our brand from a single band born in the NYC nightclubs to a full-service live-music entertainment company with full production resources servicing 150 private and corporate events per year, and then launched an independent record label within the brand to produce, release, and promote original music recordings and creative arts projects that highlight the musician talent from within our 45 Riots family.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a bassist and musical director who went on to become a business owner. My company, 45 Riots, is a boutique live music entertainment company and independent record label based in NYC. We perform up to 150 private parties and corporate events per year, in addition to backing music artists in concert. Our record label produces, releases, and promotes original music and creative projects which highlight the talented musicians from our team.
I fell in love with music during middle school and high school. I started on trombone and then moved to electric and upright bass. My parents listened to classic rock, Motown and soul, blues, and 60s and 70s folk music in our house while I was growing up. I listened primarily to hard rock and heavy metal and then alternative rock during my youth. My exposure to jazz came from more modern music and worked backwards. My love for rock and blues helped me better connect with fusion jazz, and then during my music conservancy years I went deeper into hard bop, bebop, Latin jazz, and studied all the masters of those bygone eras. Later, when I was finished with school and embarking on my career as a freelance musician, I primarily played soul, neo-soul, funk, and R&B, and I spent years digesting all of that history and learning a huge repertoire in those idioms. I also studied and played a lot of world music with African roots, from West African genres to various Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Cuban, and Brazilian music styles. I spent seven years also playing in a Gospel church most weekends learning through a lot of failure to perfect my ear-training and hear chord movement with a ton of harmonic substitutions and bass note movement that was rarely the tonic of the chord. That was an amazing experience! In earlier days I played classical music on the double bass in an orchestral setting and straight-ahead jazz in big bands and small jazz ensembles, though I didn’t stick with that instrument after college. I’ve done Broadway orchestra pit shows, cruise ship showbands, recording studio sessions, and thousands of NYC nightclub performances and private events playing pop music for packed dance floors. This great musical journey helped me widen my vision and bring a lot of knowledge to the table when I started my own company in the music industry, along with my experience as a bandleader and arranger.
The thing that gives my brand distinction in our industry is also what I’m most proud of, and that is the sincerity of the music;
we bring a genuine concert experience to private events with top-tier talent, palpable synergy, great diversity, and a unique style and sound. The artistic expression that we nurture onstage with 45 Riots lifts the music for both the musicians and our audiences, who are are quite discerning of the quality and often involved in the industry themselves. I am also proud to have cultivated a vision from our inception to take revenue from the private events industry and reinvest in the local music arts community, which we have done through our in-house record label. Right now, though I am profoundly busy managing the events side of the brand, the record label holds my creative attention and offers so many new opportunities in a completely different realm of the music business. It is a huge learning experience, a vehicle for my music passion, and a path forward in my career. Now I can say that I’ve grown from a freelance bassist to a musical director, to a business owner, and now a producer.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
When I first launched 45 Riots no one on the client or vendor side of the industry knew who we were. It was an enormous leap of faith to leave my career as a freelance musician and the gigs with other bands I worked very hard to earn and maintain, and then drop it all to create my own brand and in essence become a competitor of everyone I worked for previously. It was a head-first dive into the unknown.
The main ingredient for my success was my motivation to succeed! I worked tirelessly, day and night, in those first few years to create the business, launch it, network like crazy to generate leads, run down everyone in the industry and follow up over and over again with tenacity until one or two vendors actually replied and took me under their wing, and work with those first few clients. If I got an inquiry through my website for an event at 10PM I’d call the client on the spot. Looking back, that probably freaked them out a bit, but I wanted them to know how prompt I could be and how ready I was to rock for them. If a client had a hesitation in signing with us for their event because of a concern, I spend countless hours crafting passionate and thorough email responses to reassure them, or in-person meetings or calls to speak to their concerns, anytime, day or night. I went to dozens and dozens and dozens of networking events, which I am absolutely not suited for as I’m a bit shy and reserved when speaking to new people, but I went out there anyway with my business cards and walked up to everyone and jumped in. I forced myself to do it and in the end it yielded results and helped pave our way.
When I was getting ready to launch the business I did not actually plan to give up my other gigs and make this my career. I just wanted to pick up some extra income to help support my life in NYC as a musician – a constant struggle. But as each piece fell into place the vision for the future became wider and clearer and my excitement rose, and step by step my motivation increased and I saw the full potential of what was in front of me. And later, for every vendor I met who replied back to me to bring our businesses together, and for every client who inquired about our brand because they found it refreshing and distinct as they were shopping around, and for every client who booked us and with whom I established a very close rapport, I was utterly inspired. I wanted to do more, build bigger, start new projects, go huge. And now twelve years has passed and we’ve built a very impactful brand at the top of the industry with a huge portfolio, a huge roster of artistic talent, and an amazing team of employees. We’ve also seen our business leads over the years go from paid advertising to almost exclusively referrals and recommendations, for which we’re very grateful.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
The year before I launched my business I was working as a freelance musician and I had a very busy calendar but times were still tight. I had to sell some beloved musical instruments one winter just to make my rent. The volume of gigs were there but they just weren’t paying enough and stringing an income together gig to gig each month was becoming overwhelmingly frustrating.
I had been training in Tae Kwon Do for a couple years and fairly serious about fitness and health, working out at the gym most days and attending as many martial arts classes as possible each week. One day I mentioned that I would be interested to help out at the Tae Kwon Do school (dojang) to earn some extra money since I was there all the time anyway. They took me on and paid me a very minimal cash amount per week but had me there 56 hours a week. In addition, I was still playing seven nights a week most weeks in the music scene. I was not sleeping very much though I was in amazing shape with all the physical training and running around between the day job and the nighttime gigs.
The dojang saw my potential as a leader and wanted me to open a new school for them after some months. They taught me how to do client sales and run the business. I watched the huge investment the owner made in his schools. He came out of the gate swinging hard! He created a new brand of his own from wherever he had been before I started there (the dojang was new in town), set up three schools within months of each other, filled them with students, and spared no expense to have the best equipment and technology for the clients. He held staff meetings constantly and really worked with the team to inspire moral and a sense of purpose and connectivity. He taught confidence when working with the students as well as in sales, which was not something that came naturally to me. I don’t like to ask for anything or talk about money with people. He forced me to get over it, to be aware of my body language, to use vocabulary in a very nuanced way to best convey the value of the product in a sales meeting, and so much more. I took a great deal of inspiration from this experience, and my fit lifestyle and martial arts training combined with some extreme sport hobbies I was and am still into, really gave me the confidence I needed to start my own business and see it through with longevity.
In the end, I decided to continue with my music career which I was already decades invested in and with a great skillset, but training at this dojang and working with the students and their families, and watching the owner create an amazing business with all of his attention, pride, and total investment, really inspired me when I decided to build my own business.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.45riots.com
- Instagram: @45riots
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3FCZBH5irzNg8SQ29utlEw/videos