An artist development agency in Fishtown just launched a music industry how-to platform

Taste Creators know how hard it can be to build a career in music, especially if you’re not based in a city with as thriving a scene as Philly’s.

So on Monday, the Fishtown-based artist development agency launched its online subscription platform built to help artists navigate careers in the industry.

Music Business How To (MBHT), which can be found also on music sharing service Audiomack under its Artist Services section offers guidance for artists to establish their platforms, build their brands and actually make money.

The platform will essentially take what Taste Creators offers to in-person clients and scales it to the masses, COO Lawrence Watling said.

“There’s a lot of information out there about what to do when you’re building a music career,” he said, “but very little that actually tells you step-by-step how to do it.”

The educational platform — which users can subscribe to for either $99 a month, $349 a month or $999 a year, depending on services they want — hosts online courses on topics such as how to book a tour, how to release music and how to communicate with the media.

The platform also has information about the Taste Creators team’s favorite merch printers, design platforms, analytics tools and any other resource they use in-person with clients. With the launch Monday, MBHT has more than 50 how-to guides and courses ready to access, as well as downloadable budget and press release templates and marketing tools.

For CEO Brianna DeMayo, this project has been a long time coming: She initially wrote a book about how to navigate the music industry, but realized it wasn’t fulfilling the needs of an ever-changing industry.

“I can’t embed links in a book. I can’t update a book every week. This needs to be a work in progress,” she said. “This is something that needs to grow over time.”

Let’s gooooo https://t.co/OAPQ5ioj9Z

— Brianna DeMayo (@Breezyb215) November 18, 2019

With an online platform, the information can be spread to a wider audience and updated as industry trends and resources change.

“Music Business How To is another valuable resource we can’t wait to offer to the hundreds of thousands of artists using our platform to share music with millions of listeners,” said Dave Macli, CEO and cofounder of Audiomack.

Taste Creators has existed as a services agency for musicians since early 2018, but DeMayo initially started the company as a music media blog around 2015. In about the last two years, the team has grown to about 10 people in Philadelphia and about just as many scattered across the country working with artists in other cities.

The team offers a wide range of services to its clients, including website design, recording, music video production and marketing plans. The hope, Watling said, is that folks who sign up for the platform will be able to do for themselves what the Taste Creators team has been doing for clients for the past few years.

About 15 clients have tested out the MBHT platform as the team has been tweaking it, Watling said. Both he and DeMayo emphasized that the project has been about bringing transparency to the music industry.

“You see artists pop up essentially out of nowhere all the time, but you don’t see the years of hard work and the strategies that went into it,” DeMayo said. “We want to help even the playing field and give all artists an equal shot at success.”