Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Mark Pratt. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Mark, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

As the Creative Director of Soundry, a company that curates playlists for businesses, I’m regularly asked ‘why don’t restaurants and hotels just use Pandora, Spotify, satellite radio or even their cell phone?’ Why do the best hotels and restaurants in the world still universally use human-crafted playlists, while Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolutionizes every other aspect of life and work?

The basis of audio branding is that music can trigger emotional connections unlike anything else. Most people will have stories of how they discovered their favorite record or the exact moment they heard seminal tracks; a lot of my peers distinctly remember hearing songs like ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ or ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ for the first time. Everyone reading this will have songs which trigger memories of adolescence, past relationships and emotional times, both good and bad. Since music is intrinsically linked to emotional connection, memory and individual identity – then brands can harness its power and communicate with their guests in a surprisingly powerful way through a distinct and cohesive musical identity.

AI and machine learning has actually been in the commercial music space for a while. The basis of Pandora was a focus on recommendations based on the Music Genome Project – an attempt to capture the essence of sound at a fundamental level by classifying individual songs by musical traits. Spotify has extended this principle with more focus on your listening habits. However, while useful in many ways these algorithms have also neutered the individualized feel of music and taken away the human touch that can often make a sonic experience so special.

To counter this we ensure every single playlist is handcrafted specifically to each individual property or brand, and then nuanced and blended until perfect. It’s impossible for any algorithm to serve up badly matched tracks, because we only have humans programming music and don’t own or control any robots.

Mark, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I was born in Birkenhead, Merseyside in September 1981 – after being brought up in a variety of places I studied English at the University of Cambridge, then lived in London during my 20s. I relocated to North America in 2008, first Vancouver, and then quite randomly arriving in Miami in the summer of 2009. My brother had recently left the British Army and moved here after marrying his wife Deb, who he met while on holiday, and since we were both at somewhat of an impasse in life, decided to start a music consultancy together.

Soundry is a music consultancy – we make playlists for businesses and design/install AV systems. Some of our landmark clients include Ball & Chain, Komodo, Swan, Michael’s Genuine, Anatomy, E11EVEN, Planta, Yardbird, Pubbelly Sushi, Lost Boy, Fox’s Lounge, Stubborn Seed, Time Out Markets, Pura Vida, Vista and Tobacco Road – we also work with restaurant groups like Groot Hospitality, 50 Eggs, Grove Bay, Goat and Kush Hospitality and service global hospitality brands such as Four Seasons.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

It’s a Miami cliché, but you really can get a long way in this city by working hard, being reliable and responsive, and just always striving to be a good professional who can be trusted. I also think you need to be utterly committed to the craft of what you are doing and realizing this will involve time, patience, resilience and some road-blocks along the way. Lots of people want to get into the curation game because they think it’s just doing what you love doing – listening to music and making playlists – as a job. There’s certainly an element of this, but you build your reputation by being an impeccable vendor to a business and always setting the highest possible standards.

Ultimately this involves fixing soundcards at 5am on a Tuesday morning or programming last minute New Years Eve playlists less than an hour before the ball drops, more than anything creatively driven. The people in charge of the best restaurants and hotels tend to be obsessive detail-oriented workaholics and if you want to curate music for the most interesting properties in the world, then you have to actively want to reciprocate.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Word-of-mouth – we’re based in a very interwoven city (Miami) and operate in an even more interconnected industry (hospitality). I regularly analyze how we’ve gained certain clients and it can be surreal tracing the chain of connections, relationships and slips of fortune which lead to big opportunities.

We’ve worked on huge projects in the Caribbean based on chance meetings over a decade ago and we regularly get referrals and introductions from the most random and surprising sources. A lot of the time it’s simply, ‘I was having dinner at Swan in the Design District and enjoyed the music so much, I had to find you…’ and this is always very satisfying. Also, there’s never any excuse for not providing the best customer service around and people will remember this.

If you genuinely believe in what you do and are committed to setting high standards, constant improvement, learning from your mistakes and being humble in the process – and don’t have a massive ego – then opportunities will come your way. Or maybe in more grandiose terms, as Marcus Aurelius said over two thousand years ago “Echo nostra facta in vita clamat in Erebo” [What we do now echoes in eternity].

Contact Info:

• Website: https://soundrymusic.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markandrewpratt/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/soundrymusic
• Linkedin: https://lu.linkedin.com/company/soundrymusic
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/soundrymusic