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

Merch, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

When I was 19 years old, I was fortunate enough to go into business with my mentor, TerryJosiah Sharpe. At the time, I was going into my sophomore year at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 6 months after we started our business, Anthem Music Enterprises (AME), the entire world shut down due to Covid, and I spent the next two years traveling between Colorado Springs and Boulder multiple times a week, juggling business operations, classwork, and a fleeting personal life. However, as graduation day came closer and closer, it appeared as though the stars were aligning. It was 2022: Covid was under control, we had signed the lease for our first studio space, and I was gearing up to jump into music full-time straight out of college.

The reality was far less glamorous than I had anticipated. Mentally, I had built up such high expectations for life after graduation. I had somehow convinced myself that the long nights were behind me, creating an incredibly dangerous sense of entitlement as I transitioned into adulthood.

9 months after graduation, I found myself completely broke. I began driving for Uber to pay for personal expenses, but I ended up totaling my car and breaking my ankle, rendering me completely immobile and unable to make money. I thought once I healed up, I’d be able to get back on my feet, but by the end of 2023, I still couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. In one pivotal conversation with my business partners at AME, it finally became apparent how my mindset was getting in the way. I had no problem putting in countless hours building AME, but I was foolish in believing that making money for the business and making money for myself were one in the same. I had to begin identifying and distinguishing my personal streams of revenue from the business’ streams of revenue.

This shift in my mindset has enabled me to win big in 2024. Financial stability in artistry can tend to feel oxymoronic because money is almost never a driving factor for the most successful artists around the world. Instead, creative industries tend to reward those who chase impact, community, and conversation. The enemy of art is indifference, and those who can best elicit emotional responses — whether good or bad — with their art tend to find the most success.

Merch, 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 am a producer, recording artist, and Co-Founder of Anthem Music Enterprises, a Colorado Springs-based international production company where we’ve been able to use music to combat the mental health crisis in the state of Colorado. Above all, I am a storyteller, and the work I do to help artists share their stories musically is a journey of deep self-healing and transformation.

When I was in middle school, I was the “therapy friend”. What starting as helping my friends navigate the natural complexities of middle school life gradually took a much darker turn. Several of my classmates struggled with very personal mental health battles, and I became the nightly first responder for my struggling piers. At just 12 years old, I would regularly stay up all night fighting to make sure my friends would wake up in the morning. This period of time greatly affected me for years to come, both in my own mental health battle and my future romantic partners. I developed a hero complex, constantly choosing partners who I felt I could fix. These relationships proved to be quite toxic and abusive, and it took years to learn what a healthy relationship looks like.

For myself and many of the clients I work with, music is often the only outlet we have. Music is nothing more than emotions out loud, and being able to provide an environment conducive to emotional release for our clients is crucial. I believe productivity and creativity live at opposite ends of a spectrum. When working on client projects, it’s my job to balance out wherever my clients fall on that spectrum. Some clients are used to coming into studios and completing as many songs as possible, in which case I challenge them to spend more time on each song, making each record as impactful as possible. Others often get lost in the creative landscape and are hesitant to ever call a product “finished”, in which case I help facilitate the creative choices they make to keep the process moving. Everyone is different, and every client project provides its own set of creative challenges. This is what keeps the work we do excited, and by meeting every client where they’re at in their own process, we’ve been able to produce some incredible results over the past 5 years.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

From a business standpoint, understanding valuation in creative industries can be an absolute nightmare. Even outside of Anthem Music Enterprises, it is a financial anomaly to for me operate as a business whose sole asset is a person, yet I know plenty of Grammy Award-winning artists and songwriters whose only business asset is themselves. Business gets even more complicated when you factor in intellectual property ownership and royalties. Because Arts & Entertainment simply don’t operate like most other industries, this lack of understanding creates a natural separation for non-creatives trying to understand the creative journey.

Because the barriers to access for music have been significantly reduced over the past 20 years, the valuation of music has also decreased. In my opinion, the extinction of physical sales (CD’s, Vinyl, etc.) is likely one of the worst things to have happened to the industry as of late. Even as a production company, we’ve shifted production focus to non-American genres like K-Pop, for example, because physical sales still dominate a lot of foreign countries, like South Korea. Royalty payouts for physical sales are astronomically higher than streaming, and the rise of streaming has dwindled what was once a significant stream of revenue for artists.

As a creative, I’m fortunate in saying my journey has been fairly linear thus far. However, in order to keep the journey linear, my work schedule is pretty intense. I am usually working every day of the week for around 12 hours per day, and I try to give myself at least one day off every two weeks. I don’t anticipate my schedule being like this for the rest of my life, but this is the schedule I need to stick to in order to get my business off the ground. Because this is the reality for the majority of full-time creatives in their 20’s, it’s important for peers outside of the industry to be understanding and supportive of those in the creative industry. This can be an incredibly lonely road at times. All we ask of non-creatives is to be supportive when possible and to consume art responsibly.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I think one of the most misleading quotes I’ve had to unlearn is “if you build it, they will come”. While building infrastructure is an incredibly important first step, the journey can’t stop there. Especially in a less saturated market like Colorado, I naively believed all we had to do was build our Artist Development system, and people would come out of the woodwork to work with us. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. Outreach is the oxygen of any successful business; if you’re not reaching out into the community, how can you expect the community to pour into your business?

Chasing impact returns far greater than chasing money ever could. We’ve built Anthem Music Enterprises on the principle of bettering the community we live in, and over the past 5 years, I can only say the impact is growing. By the end of this year, we’ll have provided over $100,000 to local creatives since our business’ inception in 2019. We’ve launched summer camps and an after-school program to provide afflicted youth a safe space to create and express themselves. We’ve hosted and served as panelists on multiple state-wide Creative Industry Conferences. The more we continue to pour into our community, the more our community has supported our business. Building infrastructure is important, but building your personal and company mission is what drives the impact you choose to make in your community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.merchmadeit.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/merchmadeit
• Other: Stream My Latest EP, “THE MERCH DROP”: https://song.link/themerchdrop

  For More Information on Anthem Music Enterprises: https://www.anthemmusicenterprises.com/

Image Credits

Quron “Q The Rebel” Witherspoon

Krys Fakir

Riccárdo “Cardo” Cyrus

Chris Opher

Jordan “J Angel” Johnson

Hannah Kahan