Switching industry gears, Noam Halberstadt set out to combine his passion for music with his digital marketing skillset. Applying what he's learnt from his past, Noam is ready to impact the field of marketing with keen awareness and dedication.
Coming from the music industry with 5 years in the business, my biggest realization was figuring out how to market music after it was created – it was and still is the most difficult part for most independent musicians. Life in the digital space changes so fast that sometimes we miss the signs and find ourselves behind the curve. This led me to enroll at Seneca for Social Media Marketing which really fostered my love for marketing.
One of my first jobs after my first stint at Seneca was an internship with the prestigious Revolution Recording where I had the privilege to work with some of the biggest names in the business including the amazing Alexisonfire. This job brought me face to face with the back end of the recording industry and the harsh reality that working for a studio wasn’t for me. The position that I thought would be glamourous turned out to be a glorified hospitality job and I found I was wasting my creativity.
It was a hard realization because I had worked so hard to get to this point and I struggled to accept it at first. As I delved into my own music career, I found that I was really great at building awareness and creating audience engagement. For instance, in the last 4 months, I released a new song and increased my followers by over 200%. I eventually wanted to do this for other musicians as well.
Without CD sales, artists tend to rely on streams from services like Spotify who only pay about $0.003 per stream which is nowhere close to a livable wage. This makes the digital marketing aspect the most important aspect (aside from the music) of the independent musician’s business model.
My dream job is to become a social media strategist for one of the massive music labels. I love to dive deep into niche audiences and create robust strategies to really help artists sell the work that they have poured their lives into.
I have been looking into NFT’s (non-fungible token) and that could very well be the next step in the music industry’s evolution. To have the ability to set your own value to the work you have created will be a huge blow to the streaming industry and allow musicians and other artists to start making an income on their art once again.
My aim is to figure out how to market this to individuals who don’t quite understand the blockchain technology. If musicians can fully utilize this, it will completely upend the streaming industry and put earnings in the pockets of hard-working artists.
In terms of marketing, it’s hard to do better than Ryan Reynolds right now. He writes, directs, and acts in his commercials and is always creating viral hits. The best part about his story is that when the studio wouldn’t put up money for marketing, he said, “I’m just going to do it myself then!” and he absolutely ran with it!
Now he has his own marketing agency. This is tremendously inspiring, and I hope to take his example and apply it to my own marketing efforts.
