CC: Hiring competition for creator tools, plus NYC's new salary transparency law

CC: (“Career Connections”) is a new, collaborative editorial vertical about the future of work in the music business. On a biweekly basis, our research team highlights the most interesting jobs emerging in music — “interesting” defined as involving new technologies, skill sets, strategic priorities, and cross-industry synergies like in gaming, fitness, and podcasts — as a vector for charting potential futures for the music industry as a whole. We compile the jobs we feature in a spreadsheet, which you can view here.

Why look at jobs as a source of data? By watching employment activity, we can uncover the strategic directions and macro-level trends behind a variety of companies around music and tech. Sometimes we spot new departments and verticals for music companies, and other times we see new music- and audio-related job postings for companies not historically associated with these areas. This view offers a unique glimpse into what is coming ahead for the music and tech industries at large, while also offering actionable guidance around the kinds of skills and experiences that are increasingly in demand for music/tech careers.

As a community benefit, CC: will also round up new opportunities for work, collaboration, and funding being shared within the Water & Music network of music/tech innovators and entrepreneurs. You can view the full feed of our community-curated opportunities in the #asks and #jobs-funding channels in our Discord server, and/or suggest interesting hiring trends for us to highlight in this planning thread in Discord.

Help us with this newsletter! We are seeking Water & Music community members to help this series in various ways. If you have any interest in helping to write this newsletter,curating the interesting jobs database, or in supporting a sponsored jobs board, please reach out to Cherie Hu or Brooke Jackson on our team!

Relevant roles:

• BandLab is hiring a A&R Scout (Mexico) and a Content Strategy Manager (Remote)
• Apple is hiring a Product Manager, Creative Apps – Collaboration
• Native Instruments is hiring a Partnership Manager (Berlin)

As the barriers to music creation and distribution continue to fall, we’re seeing a wide range of music/tech companies continue to hire in key creator-facing roles to stay competitive on product development and user adoption.

For instance, Apple is hiring a Product Manager role where the individual will “research and synthesize technology trends, the competitive landscape, and user feedback to identify new product opportunities in the creative apps space.” Celebrities are leaning into Apple’s creator tools expansion as well: In August 2022, Apple’s Garageband added an update that included remix sessions featuring songs from Katy Perry and the Korean band SEVENTEEN.

BandLab continues to establish itself as a “must-use” tool in cross-platform audio workstation collaborations, across one-shots, loops, samples, plugins, and more. Their newly-listed Content Strategy Manager role will be required to “run regular analysis on the BandLab Sounds library to evaluate strengths and weaknesses, ensure competitiveness and develop best practices.” In April 2022, BandLab raised a $65 million Series B round, at a post-money valuation of $315 million; later in September, the company partnered with Billboard on  a new initiative to help underrepresented artists reach a global audience with their music. This initiative, “Bringing BandLab to Billboard,” gives an emerging artist the opportunity to earn an editorial feature in the magazine.

BandLab is also being proactive in the search for artists in underrepresented markets with the open A&R Scout position based in Mexico. This A&R executive’s primary role will be to “develop a process for data discovery, evaluating music industry insights and identifying emerging and trending artists while analyzing the market potential of trending and emerging talent.” Treating A&R as part of a product expansion strategy for creator tools is a stance we’ve seen other tech companies take in the past, including ByteDance (which we covered in the last issue of CC).
Our ongoing Season 3 research on creative AI — including this regularly updated database of 70+ AI tools for music — will continue to chart the growth in creative tools at artists’ disposal, across DAW plugins, songwriting/ideation apps, and more.

Relevant roles:

• Warner Bros. Discovery is hiring a Director, Sustainability – Operations
• Night Time Economy Solutions is hiring a Fundraising Team and Creative Business Administrator

Policies around climate change and the environment continue to gain steam, moving sustainability higher up on the priority list of numerous entertainment companies.

Industry concern about the environment has been building momentum over the last year, with Spotify catching the attention of the US Securities & Exchange Commission regarding streaming’s negative impact on the environment. Live music is also a central focal point for sustainability-focused discussions, with the 2023 festival planning season well underway. A recent survey stated that live music produces 405,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year; issues range from the flight schedules of talent on tour, to plastic waste at outdoor venues, to diesel generators being used to power massive shows across the world. Artists who are focused on reducing their carbon footprints on the road such as Billie Eilish, Dave Matthews Band, and Jack Johnson have partnered with nonprofits like REVERB, which has been working since 2004 to make tour events more “earth-friendly.”

We could be witnessing the beginning of a perfect storm in music and entertainment with regard to taking sustainability seriously. In a previous CC issue, we reported that AEG was hiring a Senior Manager to look after sustainability initiatives, and we’ve since seen similar roles pop up across different entertainment companies. Warner Brothers (WB) is looking for talent that can “collect, analyze and manage greenhouse inventory and data for operations across the company, including facilities and production” in their Director, Sustainability – Operations description. The regulatory complexity of this role is further exemplified in the mention of requirements to “serve as a partner to and thought leader with WB Government Affairs to strategically local government sustainability initiatives with implications to production (ex. Tax incentives) and operations.” The focus on tax incentives is an interesting requirement that is one to watch to determine the impact of sustainability on the finances of WB.

Night Time Economy Solutions’ open position of Fundraising Team and Creative Business Sustainability Administrator highlights a trend of collaborations between nightlife representatives and local government to benefit the music industry, by stating the ideal candidate will “be working with the Fundraising Manager and Fundraising Team to support the administration and project management tasks as they work with clients to raise money for Arts, Culture, Music, and Festival Projects.” This focus on grant research and writing has the primary goal of assisting the nightlife in the UK to thrive at night. Similar consultancies that have focused on nightlife’s positive impact on sustaining local economies include BOP Consulting and VibeLab.

Have any thoughts on sustainability in the music industry? Join us in #sustainability to continue the conversation!

Relevant roles:

• ByteDance is hiring for a Podcast Business Development (Los Angeles)
• Wall Street Journal is hiring an Editorial Director, Podcasts, and Head of Audio (New York)
• Hello Sunshine is hiring a Senior Vice President, Hello Sunshine Music (Los Angeles)

In early September 2022, our Career Connections newsletter highlighted labels and streaming services chasing Spotify’s podcast dominance. This trend continues as more companies are assembling teams to maintain leverage in the fast-evolving podcast landscape, especially on content development and acquisition.

In May 2022, ByteDance applied for a “TikTok Music” trademark which would allow users to “livestream audio and video.” In early October 2022, TikTok was then tracked as the source of a new bot harvesting podcast feeds. This month, ByteDance has officially taken the next step in building out a podcast team with the Podcast Business Development opportunity. This position will combine a mixture of internal work and public-facing responsibilities, as it states that the individual will “establish relationships with key stakeholders in the podcast community to represent the interests of ByteDance externally.” TikTok is creating a potentially serious competitor to Spotify and YouTube by developing a new app focused on livestreaming audio and video. The new music app is rumored to use the existing framework as Resso, which is already popular in India, Indonesia, and Brazil.

On the content development front, Hello Sunshine, a media brand founded by Reese Witherspoon, is hiring an SVP position to “oversee the creation of original music for promotional and in-show use across Hello Sunshine properties,” including podcasts, films, and TV shows. Similarly, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) currently has twelve podcasts in production that vary among briefings, single-subject, and opinion-based shows. Their Editorial Director, Podcast position will be in collaboration with the head of audio and will “create, develop and launch new daily and weekly features and deeply reported narrative podcasts.” An additional opening for the Head of News Audio will report to the Editor in Chief and will set the publication’s audio strategy across platforms.

An interesting side note is the fact that both of these WSJ postings have shared salary ranges which coincide with the new transparency law that went into effect in New York last week (more on that in the last section below). The Head of Audio position has a salary range of $140K -$450K and the Editorial Director position has a salary range of $100K – $250K.

CAA is hiring a Strategic Development – Executive Counsel, Web3 and Metaverse Legal and Business Affairs in Los Angeles. This role is a mix of business affairs and legal, with the ideal candidate providing “legal counsel and guidance to agents, clients, managers, and other reps for NFT, web3, crypto, and Metaverse matters.” In addition, this candidate would “partner with the Chief Legal Officer and legal team in addressing emerging IP and legal standards issues as they relate to web3.”

• While Web3 and the metaverse are not the same thing (as we’ve explained in our Season 3 research), this CAA role is an interesting instance of a music company that sees the two areas as interlinked on a strategic level. Recently, Michael Yanover, CAA’s head of business development, has predicted that NFTs are “going to be incredibly impactful to the world of entertainment, to the world of anything that is IP-based.” CAA Chief Metaverse Officer, Joanna Popper, recently celebrated Anthony Hopkins’ first NFT drop selling out in seven minutes and signing the owners of Bored Ape Yacht Clubs’ Jenkins the valet. She stated that the metaverse “is the next wave of the internet that will be more interactive, more immersive, more 3D, and more real-time.” (Catch up on W&M’s Season 2 research on the metaverse here.)

The National Music Publishing Association (NMPA) is an industry affairs association that is hiring a VP of Research and Industry Analysis based in Washington, DC. The mission of the NMPA is to protect, promote, and advance the interest of music’s creators. Outside of a continuous effort of collecting music industry revenue statistics and analysis, this role will “work with economists to measure the impact of music publishing and songwriting on US GDP to support efforts on content protection, trade, and other issues.”

• It has been over a year since the NMPA and Roblox announced an industry-wide agreement that was designed to offer songwriters new ways to monetize their songs and catalogs in emerging digital environments such as virtual worlds. It will be interesting to see the overall impact of music publishing and songwriting on the US GDP.

YouTube is hiring a hybrid music journalism/programming contract role. The genre focus for this position is country, Alt/Indie, R&B, or Rock/Metal, and there is a desire for the ideal candidate to be “comfortable with short-form video platforms and have the ability to analyze and identify trends before they go viral.”This role highlights not only YouTube’s wider strategic shift in priorities towards their Shorts feature to compete with TikTok, but also the dynamic of music journalists joining streaming services’ in-house editorial staff, a personnel migration that has been happening for several years.

This month has seen the much-discussed salary transparency law come into effect in New York, with interesting results and implications for entertainment jobs.

The new law does allow companies a grace period of 30 days to comply after a complaint is registered before facing penalties. The expectation is that companies make a “good faith” estimate on the salary range — but the extent of the salary ranges being posted in some cases do little to help with clarity. Both of the audio postings at the Wall Street Journal discussed above shared salary ranges: The Head of News Audio position has a salary range of $140K -$450K and the Editorial Director position has a salary range of $100K – $250K. An old posting for a Client Service Officer position at Citi cited a range of $0 – $2,000,000 (it has since been removed)!!

Companies face fines of up to $250,000 from The New York City Commission on Human Rights for non-compliance. Spotify has yet to adjust its NYC job descriptions to include salary ranges, and they continue to share that “This role is not eligible for hire in Colorado, USA” in their descriptions after a similar law went into effect in Colorado in January 2021. Warner Music Group (WMG) and Sony have made the required adjustments to their job listings whereas Universal Music Group has yet to comply with the new law.

Overall, this is a positive step in enabling underrepresented categories of professionals — especially women, who remain underpaid compared to their male counterparts in the music industry, per several reports — to understand the pay range for a job and what to ask for during negotiations. The key will be to hold companies accountable as sharing accurate salary ranges becomes the norm.

Join us in our #career-connections as we continue to discuss salary transparency trends we are observing.

The following job opportunities were posted by Water & Music members in the #asks and #jobs-funding channels in our Discord server from Oct 24 – Nov 10, 2022. If you’d like to share a job opportunity with our community, please hop into that channel and we’ll make sure to include it in our next digest.

If you’re not in our Discord server, please connect your membership account here, which should automatically give you access.

(Please note this is NOT sponsored — just community members helping each other out!)

• @enicole is hiring a Community Cultivator at Seed Club (remote).
• @90tapes_mayk.it is hiring a marketer/creative content growth hacker at mayk.it. DMs open!
• @miguellacorte is organizing an audio lab hackathon with CTM Festival in Berlin in late November. Interested artists can register to participate here.
• @freshbreakfast is leading a project at Beacons.ai about how creators and artists utilize email marketing. He is looking to do a 30 minute interview with artists and/or their team who have 500 newsletter subscribers or more. Interviewees will receive a $20 Amazon gift card for their time. Email bryan@beacons.ai for more info!
• @magisformagic is hiring a Discord moderator for a major hip-hop artist client with a release on EVEN.
• @FelixBarros is hiring for developers, designers, and product managers at Neural DSP (remote or in Helsinki).
• @Kat | Community Ops signal-boosted this paid PHD place available at the University of Sheffield, looking into the role of virtual influencers in the UK marketing ecology.
• @Kat | Community Ops also signal-boosted that shesaid.so is looking to hire someone to guide them on strategy.
• @cheriehu signal-boosted that Bandcamp is accepting pitches for RESONANCE, exploring our emotional relationship to music. Pay is $375 per piece.

Read more and join the discussion

• Check out our interesting music/tech jobs database.
• Catch up on posts and discussions in the #jobs-funding channel in our Discord server.
• Join our CC: planning thread in Discord, and let us know what new and open positions you encounter that may tell an interesting story about the future of work in music & tech.