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

Alright, Chrissy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

My underlying mission is to help serve females in the music industry. I realized quickly when I started my all female band over 10 years ago, that the music industry can be tricky to navigate for women. Specifically, finding stage opportunities for an all female bands, and dealing with ageism, sexism, from both male and females in the industry, impacted finding reliable work and higher pay scales for my business and my musicians. As a music teacher and school owner, my goals are to help young music students find confidence, gain skills, and continue their journey into the ranks of working musician. From a teaching perspective, I witnessed an alarming rate of female students quitting music as they got older, while their male counterparts continued on. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew I wanted to help them continue their journey with music.

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 been a student of music since I was 6 years old. Luckily, my mom made me play the piano, even though I wanted to take dance lessons. The piano helped me win scholarship money to help with college tuition. I went to USC but was too interested in taking dance classes in the trendy LA professional dance studios and auditioning for work as a dancer, so I ended up transferring after my freshman year. My underlying mission is to help serve females in the music industry. I realized quickly when I started my all female band over 10 years ago, that the music industry can be tricky to navigate for women. Specifically, finding stage opportunities for an all female bands, and dealing with ageism, sexism, from both male and females in the industry, impacted finding reliable work and higher pay scales for my business and my musicians. As a music teacher and school owner, my goals are to help young music students find confidence, gain skills, and continue their journey into the ranks of working musician. From a teaching perspective, I witnessed an alarming rate of female students quitting music as they got older, while their male counterparts continued on. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew I wanted to help them continue their journey with music.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The biggest pivots I’ve made have been due to the Pandemic of 2020. The music school I taught for shut down completely without any resources to continue lessons, so I had to go out on my own and learn how to navigate online lessons and build my lesson program while we were all stuck at home! My band lost 100% of our contracts for work, so we started performing live online for our followers, Donations from viewers kept us going for months!
I learned that with a little creativity, we could still set and accomplish goals to keep us moving forward, regardless of the situation.

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

The Social media storm had just begun with Facebook, so I immediately started a band page and began to share with our audience at large. We’ve grown to over 10k unique followers and fans online since then, but it’s been slow and steady. We don’t spend money on fake accounts or followers. We are only interested in genuine fans and friends that love what we do as much as we do. Many artists fall into the Ego-Trap of falsely increasing their numbers to gain attention. I advise against this practice, and recommend creating content consistently and interacting with your followers to gain more interest. There are many FREE resources out there to help you with your activity. Use them! Don’t be lazy. Do the work.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.pulpvixenband.com
• Instagram: IG:@pulpvixenband
• Facebook: @pulpvixn
• Linkedin: @chrissyras
• Twitter: @pulpvixenband
• Youtube: @pulpvixenband
• Other: TikTok: @pulpvixenrocks

Image Credits
IG: @with.the.band