We recently connected with Jason Howard and have shared our conversation below.

Jason , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Everything started from a single idea of exposure. As in, what’s the best way to get exposure for a independent rap artist. We had done the club performing thing for years and it was running its course, I was looking for a new strategy. After a consultation with an area A&R, going the digital route seemed like the best route. I started learning what I could about the DSPs, how they were alike, how they were different. That led to the creation of a Spotify playlist, I had a childhood friend of mine curating the playlist – choose the songs and order. I focused on the marketing. I did everything, social media ads, internet ads, which was trial by fire. I had no clue what I was doing, I learned over time. I connected with popular people on local college campuses, my newer playlists became their playlist. We utilized oversees influencers, online portals like Dailyplaylist and SoundPlate and many more. We gave artists free trials, then asked them to give a donation towards promotion to renew their placement, this drove up the income and scale. Rinse, wash, repeat some of these practices, tweak here and there and we had a good formula. Fast forward some time, networking, cold calling, I met a large group of other curators that had been doing this far longer than we had, this accelerated everything. I build off brands of my playlists, which no one knew were mind, those were my constants. I stuck to proven formulas with them, no new methods or tricks. I’m a year and a half in at this point and I look around at all of my playlists, all of the playlists of my peers and I think with our 5 -7 million combined followers, I could really distribute an artist to a wide range of people. So the Distribution side of the business was formed, they rest was based off of those seeds,

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m Jason Howard, also known as M37 Jase. M37 is the more flashy and prominent brand by my core and roots are my work with my NLS brand, it’s bread winner. I provide Management, A&R, Distribution and PR services to music artists to keep it short. We are results driven, our biggest weapon is consistency, we thrive off building off of our past foundational work.

Artists, if you are interested please reach out to me, I’m on all social media sites. My team conducts 5 free consultations a week. They are 20 minutes, anything larger has a price, that’s mainly to make sure the potential client is serious about a potential partnership,

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

It’s hard for me to recollect a large period of time before I met Jamal Davis. He moved on to the street I grew up on and we’ve been friends ever since. We always had, sports, video games and music as something that bonded our friendship together. We turned music into something we could profit with as adults. It’s been a rough journey, I’ve made a lot of mistake, tried too many different things, but we’ve come out still intact.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

It was savings and sacrifice. Me and Jamal had a number that we invested for our first year, that money was put directly into start up costs and social media marketing. I cut out a lot of wants and luxuries to invest consistently. Once the money started coming in I immediately used it to expand (thus the birth of M37) and to push hard with ads. We received a 5k loan during Covid that helped float us as artists were being less consistent with promotional spending. All in all we ended up spending 40k more than we made our first year in business.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.m37mgmt.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m37_jase/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100082818450594
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-howard-m37-nls/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/M37Mgmt

Image Credits
Samuel McKnight