A Little Jaded - Music Industry Insights (Feat. Gen Admission)

Jade: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to a very special new episode of A Little Jaded. This is actually the first episode of our new structure of podcasts, under our new purpose for the company. So Jaded Productions, if you don't know, has just rebranded to Jaded Productions: Producing the Next Wave of Music Industry Professionals. And in this, we're going to shift from Artist Rec Friday, New Music Monday to Music Industry Insights for that content. Part of that is we invited a very special guest today for our podcast, and it is Gen Admission, but I will let Joanna introduce them right now. 

Joanna: Hello, guys. So today we have two members of the Gen Admission Team. Their team is huge, but we're lucky enough to be able to get two of them here. We have Louisa, who is the Founder of Gen Admission, and then we have Stef, who is the Head of Social Media on the team. So if you guys want to do little intros for yourself?

Lou: Yes, I can start. So Hi, my name is Lou. I'm the founder of Gen Admission. I'm originally from France. But I'm currently living in LA. And yeah, I don't know what to say other than that, but I'm very excited to be here today. 

Stef: Hi, everyone. I'm Stef. I'm from Germany. So Lou and I are both kind of on the international aspect, which is also really interesting. And I am one of the Co-Founders and the Head of Social Media for Gen Admission. And like you said, really excited to be here today. 

Jade: Awesome. We're excited to have you guys. I mean, if you don't know, go back and read our post, but basically Get Admission, we got together a couple of months ago when I first came up with this idea and I was talking to Joanna actually, and I said, “how can we teach students the most possible through Jaded University? We can give them as much hands-on experience as we can provide. But how are they going to know about the other positions in the music industry?” So that's when we got on the phone with the Gen Admission team and basically they've agreed to lend us their website as our textbook in quotes for Jaded University. So we're very excited to have them as our first guest for the new structure of the podcast! 

Joanna: Yeah. And I guess for anybody who is just like, “what is Gen Admission?” And for anybody who doesn't know you guys actually had a name change, you had your own rebrand also. So I guess just explain to everybody what is Gen Admission? How did it get started? Just, all that.

Lou: So what is Gen Admission? That's a great question. I think if we had to summarize it in a couple of words, we're an innovative and unconventional educational resource for the music industry. And so what does that mean? Because that's a little fancy. Well, we just started from not having a lot of resources online that responded to the current need of industry professionals. We would go online as students having questions. And there is no Wikipedia for the music business. There is no official textbook. There isn't a place where you can find all the answers. So we kind of decided to create that place. And the way we're doing it is by creating our own resources through a very thorough research process. And so we have two main platforms. We have a website that has volumes and chapters, kind of like a textbook, but in a more engaging, and I would say efficient way, targeted at Gen Z because we don't want to read thousands and thousands of pages without getting to the point. And then we also have an Instagram that provides music industry news, fun facts, and additional educational content, but that's kind of like what we are providing educational resources for the new generation through fun, engaging, and cool ways. And then maybe Stef wants to go over how we got started?

Stef: Yeah, sure. So basically we kind of all met over the span of a week last year, in February, in 2021, and Lou and Fish were the first ones that met. They went to a First Act podcast event and just connected over the fact that they're both international students that want to work in the music industry. And then a few days after that, Lou and I met, for example, at the Next Gen U: Create Your Own Opportunities event. And soon, other co-founders joined the project. And we all bonded over the fact that we want to work in the music industry. And we were going to a lot of events which resulted in us having a lot of questions because as beginners, we didn't understand a lot of the things that some of the speakers were talking about. And because there really isn't a lot of basic information on the music industry on the Internet, we kind of decided to just do it ourselves and find the answers to our own questions. Like Lou said, we have a website which is separated into volumes, which are different launches of our educational material that we release. And so our first volume, for example, was the record label. And we gathered information on the different positions and the departments that a record label has. And that is really what makes us different because we're not redirecting others to other resources, but are really creating our own. 

Joanna: Yeah, I love that. And I remember when I saw you guys were creating this and I was like, “that is the best idea ever,” especially for me at the time. It's funny. Me and Lou actually also met at, what was it, Next Gen U! We also met there! And I remember I was also at the same point where I was just like, “I need information. I feel like I don't know anything,” especially for people who can't afford to go to the best music industry school, or maybe they're not even in University anymore, and they still want to learn. Like, how can people learn? And I love that you guys did that. And we were going to ask you, what was your goal? But you kind of already touched on that, which was just kind of like to educate everybody and just make it kind of like a one-stop shop, which I love. 

Lou: Yeah, definitely. And I also want to say one last thing is that we started with a different name. You mentioned that, we were called Coda for a while, but we recently changed our name. We rebranded ourselves into Gen Admission, because we're currently, and I think that's what our next goal is, we're becoming a nonprofit, which we never thought would happen, because we started this as like, “we'll try it out. We'll see what happens. We'll see if people even actually need it!” And our last year has shown that it is necessary and people want it and people need it. And so we're just going, like, more official now, which is really exciting. But yeah, we're becoming a non-profit called Gen Admission now, which is super exciting. 

Jade: Yeah. I absolutely love the site. I mean, Joanna pretty much took the words right out of my mouth. I love the site. I think it's amazing! But yeah, and Lou is actually really great at a lot of things. I remember when I met you. I forget what Facebook group we were in, but I saw that you were making a “Medicine”… You were making “Medicine” video.

Lou: Oh my God! I think we were in a Fan to Band group or something. It was a while ago. Wow.

Jade: Yeah, something like that.

Joanna: I completely forgot that that happened, but that was so good. I remember me and Lou literally bonded over Harry. We were just kind of going back and forth, and somehow he came up, obviously, he came up in the conversation. We're like, “oh, my God,” we're just going back and forth.

Jade: Yeah! Because then I called her and I was like, “how do I do this? Can I make one of these for, like, a Justin Bieber song that's unreleased that I love?” And she's like, “yeah!” So we just went through I think it was like Pro Tools. We went through the whole thing, and I was like, “wow, this is intricate. Oh, my God.” laughs

Lou: It was a while ago. I'm so shocked. It was so long ago. You're right. We started because you messaged me about this Justin Bieber song, and I was just like, “I mean, I guess we're going to go over it.” It was Logic. I taught you about Logic! We started with talking about producing! Who would’ve thought- that’s so crazy!

Jade: laughs Y’know! And here we are, maybe a year later, I don't even know. I don't even know. Probably a year or something later, but it's crazy. It's so cool. Like, you guys just have so many different skills on top of putting together an amazing website and just organizing an entire team that's all centered around one goal. It's spectacular. But can you guys explain the process of gaining all the information that is on the Gen Admission’s site? 

Lou: Yeah. So this process was developed progressively. We didn't start it. It wasn't perfect when we started. We kind of struggled to figure out how we were supposed to build these resources. But now we've developed kind of like this formula that works very well and that we're continuing to do on our next volumes that we're currently working on. It's basically this three weeks formula for the first week. So first of all, every team, we have an editorial team that is only focused on working on producing this content. The head of this team is called Ekse. She's been here since the start, and she's absolutely amazing. A little shout out to Ike, but so she's heading this team. And so when we start a new research round, she will assign topics to people, and every person will be in charge of one topic. And so the first week of research is about reading online research. Anything that they can do that is just already out there, like gathering all the information that is already out there about their topic and then building a list of questions that they have unanswered because as we know, there's not a lot of information online. So sometimes you just get stuck. You read one article that mentions one thing, and you're like, okay, I need to know more about that. And then the second week, they reach out to professionals and they interview professionals. So usually we have at least one interview per topic, usually more than that. But they talk with these professionals over like a 30 minutes to an hour interview where they ask all their questions and they take notes and they kind of complete their original research with these interviews. And then the third week is writing the actual final paper, the thing that's going to go on the website. And so it's like this three week process that has been working for us until now. And then once all of this is done, it goes into the editing part. So Ikay goes over everything. I also help her with that reading, making sure that there is no wrong information, false information. We also check with professionals, making sure that we don't have wrong information. But that's more of the editing process. After those three weeks, we've developed this kind of system, and now we work in rounds. So every three weeks there are new rounds, and it's been working pretty well. And we were really scared at first to write resources that were basically imperfect with mistakes. But the more professionals we've talked to, the more have told us that no, it's actually really true and really showing the reality of their jobs. I remember when we did the touring and live events Department, which is something that I even knew existed in a label when I showed it to the person that I interviewed after she was like, oh, my God, I'm going to send that to all of my interests when they're starting out. I always struggled to explain what I'm doing. I'm sending that to all of my interns now. So it's just like, great to see that it's actually helping people starting, and people, even the professionals really like it. So it's really nice. 

Joanna: Now that is so amazing. And when you were explaining everything, like, how you go through the rounds and everything, it's a lot of work that people might not understand that goes into these aesthetically nice looking but still informational web pages that you guys do. So this is kind of off script, but I just want to know because I know that Lou, I know that you're in school, Stephanie. I'm not sure if you're in school, but I know, like, a lot of people on your team, and, like, I'm in school, Jade's in school. How do you guys balance doing all of that while still going to school, while still doing other stuff that you might want to do, like in the music industry? 

Steph: It's a hard question, actually. I'm still trying to find some kind of balance or something on it. Sometimes I procrastinate on stuff, so I just do it on the last thing. But I still manage to always do everything that I need. But yeah, you just have to be aware of everything that you have to do, kind of like making a to do list for the week or something, and just being aware of when things are actually due, like the latest or by when you have to do things, especially, like, for example, with social media, there's a lot of deadlines, and you really have to be on time because there are so many people that you work with, like the people that research it. And then we have our graphic designers that have to create the post, and they need enough time to be able to create it as well before it goes up on social media and everything. So, yeah, just finding the balance by being aware of everything that you have to do and just figuring out how much time that is going to take you and which tasks have the priority because other people depend on you having it done on time. 

Lou: Yeah, it's definitely a lot of finding balance, and I think we all struggled a little bit at first, and I think 2022 is like we're starting to get the hang of it. We're starting to figure it out. But it was definitely, I think even as leaders or as the founder, it's a lot of time where you have three weeks where it's just 20 hours, 30 hours a week, and then three weeks where it's like 5 hours a week, I'm exaggerating it's never 5 hours a week. I wish, but there's a lot of inconsistency in terms of the workload. And so if you manage to balance. I will not work 30 hours during finals week. This is not happening. So we kind of all understand that. And so we kind of, like, also lean on each other to kind of balance when that is. I don't know how to explain it, but basically when I have finals, I will be a little less here, but then Steph is going to be here because she probably doesn't have finals and kind of the same when Eksay has a lot of finals and she can't handle the editorial team, we kind of help her out on that during those weeks. So that's the cool thing with being all from different schools and all around the world and with all different systems is that there's not one time where all of us are just overwhelmed. It's always in separate little things. And finding balance between schools is something that we're still figuring out. But for now, it seems to have been working. So I'm guessing we have that balance. I don't know. It's working, but it was a little hard at first. 

Jade: No, I totally relate to what you just said. It's like when you're the founder of something, you feel like everything. Like even though you have a team and they're there so that they can help and support each other and you but sometimes you're just like, no, it's all about balance. It's really a balance game. It's like sometimes I'm doing like a million things and redoing the whole website, which takes like 20 hours on a Saturday, or sometimes, you know what I mean? Or sometimes it's only like 5 hours of work putting together, like an application or something. It's different. It depends. I think you explained it perfectly because I totally understood what you're saying.

Joanna: As both of you move on to you're still in school, but as you move hopefully further and grow more in the music industry, what position can you kind of see yourself in in five years time? And was that the same position that you wanted before all of your research? 

Lou: I started this whole journey about the music industry wanting to work in touring, and I think there are two reasons for that. The first one is that at the time, Tour Management 101 was kind of the only resource that we had out there. And so, of course, if you know a lot about our certain jobs, you can more easily picture yourself doing that job. So it was the area of the industry I knew most about, and also because I kind of did that in College through event organization, concert organizations, I was like, you know what I've been doing? It seems fun. Why not? But the more I've been diving into this industry and the more I've learned through Coda, the more I realized that I can see myself doing a lot of things, like a lot of different things. I don't think I'll do one thing for the rest of my life. I will probably try different types of jobs, but the one thing that really feels like I have a little baby is artist management. It's weird to explain I've had a couple of internships and artist management, but I think it's the way I like the close relationship with the artist and the fact that you help them on their day to day. It's like you're there on everything and you need to know a bit about everything. You're not a specialist of marketing, but you need to know how the label works, how the touring industry works, how publishing works, because you need to coordinate all of that. And so it's knowing a little bit about everything and being very versatile. And I really like that while still helping an artist. And I think you can see the results from your work progressively over time because you're there every day with them. And so I don't know, I feel like artist management is something I really want to do, but it's probably in like five to ten years because I do think that before that I need to build my own career before bringing somebody else in because I feel like I need to know more things before tackling on this huge responsibility. That is like managing an artist. 

Steph: Yeah, this is definitely something that I discovered through Gen Admission, for sure. But also Gen Admissionshowed me what I didn't want to do too. Because sometimes I'm just listening to people talk about their job and I'm like, no, that is not going to work for me. So it's like the research really helped, but hopefully artist management. And then recently I've been considering law school too, but that's another topic and I know Jade is also interested in that, so we can talk about that after. But law school is also something. I mean, I think it's intertwined with artist management too. There's so many contracts and legal stuff intertwined that it kind of makes sense. So the way that I found my way into the music industry was because I've been going to concerts ever since I was 14, started as a fan loving music and everything, and that's kind of how I decided that I want to work in the music industry and especially in the touring and life events section. And for me, it was just I wanted to do anything. Touring, like mostly tour management in the future, is something that I still want to do, but I would rather start somewhere that's not as high stakes, just get some experience first. Merch selling has always been something that seemed very interesting to me as well. And for Gen Admissions, what I also kind of found is I learned more about sync and I found it to be quite interesting as well as marking just like the whole fan engagement aspect as well. And like you said, being in the music industry itself is just always being open to every opportunity, every job, because I do feel like every job has something interesting about it. And there's really so much that I kind of want to look into and figure out what it actually is or what it entails. 

Jade: I love that. And our next question was going to be on the terms of what advice do you have for people who are trying to get into the industry and everything? And I feel like what you guys just said is really good advice. And it's something that I've also learned along the way about the importance of not being afraid to try not to try everything, but literally try all of these different things that you might be interested in. You don't know if you're genuinely going to enjoy it until you do it. 

Joanna: And it's like what Lou said. You're hearing all of these different people talk about their jobs, and you're like, yeah, now I know that that's not what I want to do, but you wouldn't have known unless you put yourself in a position to find out. And I think that's something that's really important. And a lot of people kind of stray away from. They're just like, I want to do touring. I'm going to focus on touring, but you might end up hating it. And then from there, it's like, well, now where do I go? You're just kind of floating. So if an opportunity comes up for maybe a marketing internship and you never saw yourself in marketing, don't be afraid to just try it. You might end up loving it. So, yeah, I guess what other pieces of advice that you guys would also have for people? 

Steph: What I try to follow myself, what I've been trying to live by for a few years is just seeking discomfort and doing it scared. And it's what I tell all of my friends and everyone. When we started Gen Admission, and back then when it was Coda Collective, I always used to say it and tell it to everyone and just try to motivate everyone to really get out of their comfort zone. For example, right before the pandemic started, I tried to get another look into the music industry and into touring by reaching out to tour managers and seeing if I can get like a photo past to take pictures at concerts. And even though it's only been two or three because it was right before the pandemic hit, it really makes me happy when I think about it. And I remember really telling myself to do it scared when I was nervous, like going into the arena or something. And if you're willing to do it scared, it means that you care, and it means that it's worth it to try and to give it a shot and to go back on what Joanna said. I think my main advice would be to connect, reach out and talk to people. And that is both with the people around you and with the people ahead of you, people ahead of you. Because like I said, through conversations with these people, you can also understand what you like and what you don't like because school is great. If you manage to get a music business education, that's great. But all of this is very theoretical. And the actual job itself can be very different from what you learned in class. And it's great to have internships. And it's amazing if you can have an internship, but some people don't have that opportunity. And so I think that the second best thing is to talk with actual professionals, because through these simple 15 minutes or 30 minutes conversations, it can really help you understand if this is something that you can picture yourself doing or not. So connect with people ahead of you and then connect with people around you, because it's important to have a community. And I think what we created as Gen Admission is that community that I always needed to pursue in this industry because sometimes it can feel very lonely and very like, OK, what the hell am I doing? None of my friends understand what I'm trying to do. None of my parents, my family doesn't know anything about what I'm doing. And so if you're feeling alone like this, you need a community that supports you, that helps you, that works towards the same goal, and that kind of motivates each other each day. 

Lou: So I know that a lot of people say you should network, but I think you should connect with the people around you for that community and with the people ahead of you for the mentors. Both of those elements are really important, especially when you're starting out. Yeah, I cannot agree more, but I had something that popped into my head while you were talking that kind of goes along with the whole networking and don't be afraid to connect with people above you. Also, a lot of these people, like you said, there's not a lot of resources out there. So a lot of these people you kind of learn as you're doing the job. And something that I've learned from talking to people like one of the industries I'm interested in is touring also. And I've been able to meet so many amazing people. And so many people have said don't be afraid to ask questions because they didn't know what they were doing. And they know that they can't expect you to know what you're doing either, because there's only so much you can really know until you're doing the job. And they know that you have questions. So don't be afraid to ask a quote, unquote dumb question or that you're going to seem like you don't know anything. It's like you probably don't know. And that's fine. Just ask the question, because the more knowledge you have, just the better pretty much, yeah. And I think if I could actually combine both of your advice, that would be my advice because connect with people even though you're scared. Because I love what Joanna said. You know what I mean? Definitely ask questions. Don't be afraid. But also connect with people even when you're scared. Because like you said, Lou, you're connecting with people ahead of you and stuff like that. And that can be very scary sometimes because you're like, oh, my goodness, they're in the job that I want. But I mean, I always say and I'm sure that Joanna can recall that. I always say they just have a cool job, guys. It's just a cool job. Don't be afraid to talk to them. So work through that fear to really make these powerful and awesome connections. And I'm sure I speak for myself, but I'm sure that you guys are also open to anybody that's listening to this podcast to connect with us via the Gen Admissions website or the Jaded Production website. We're totally down to talk about all of our experiences. 

Jade: So one question that I'm excited to kind of bring into our structure into every podcast. You guys will be the first ones that we're trying this out on, but we're hoping to bring it into every single podcast. But in terms of your experience in the music industry, have you ever gotten A Little Jaded, as it were? And if so, how do you come back to yourself and the work that you love? 

Lou: Well, the biggest music industry experience I have, I'd say, is for general admission. So I'm going to talk about this because I really love the work that we do and all of the social media stuff as well. But I do have to say that social media, obviously itself can be really draining at some times. And last year I did feel very overwhelmed or kind of burnt out on my part. And what really helped me there was just the break that we took over Christmas and New Year because we've been working non stop since February on everything. And it's really important to give yourself a break where you can really relax without having to think about work in the back of your mind. Because before that, even when I was having some downtime, I was still thinking about all of the things that I had to do for Jenna Mitchell, for example. And over the break, I really had this free time to not think about anything and not have any tasks on my to do list. For that, I agree with what Steph said. Also, social media can be so draining because it feels like you can never stop, but you can't stop posting on Instagram for two weeks. That's not good for your statistics and engagement and all of that. And so I think all the teams that we've had, like editorial, can take a break because if they don't do research for three weeks, nobody's going to know about that. But social media can't really stop. And so, like, the job that Steph has been doing for the past year has been, like, incredible. And the whole social media team has been incredible. But it's really hard to take breaks sometimes. This Christmas break was really necessary for the whole team. 

Steph: Now on my side for the music industry in general. It's really funny because before finding out that I wanted to work in the music industry, I had little like, six months obsessions with other jobs. And I was like, okay, now I want to become an engineer, now I want to become this. Now I want to become that. And there was always this honeymoon phase of three months where I was just like, of course I want to do this. That's decided that I found my destiny, I found my job. And then I would be just, like, bored and tired, and I would just be like, no, this is not working out. This is not what I want to do. Goodbye. And so when I started getting interested in the music industry two years ago, I was like, well, that might be another passion of mine, another obsession. It might just disappear. It never did. I'm still here and still haven't disappeared. And the more the day passes and the more obsessed I become, the more I love what I've been doing and the more I want to work in this industry. And so I think that's really relevant. I think I found my thing. And it's so funny because if you had told Toulouse three years ago, she was, like, desperate to find something because all of her friends knew, but she didn't, it would be like, yeah, like music. 

Lou: Now that's your thing, you find it. So I don't think I've been jaded about this whole thing at all. Now, for general admission as similarly, to Steph, the end of last year was a little hard because we were kind of reaching this routine point where we were doing the same thing and not really knowing what would be next. For the first three months when we started, we had our goal of launching the website, and we all worked towards that. And it's easy when you have a goal because you know what you have to do. But then after the website was launched, we were kind of like, okay, what's next? Now we can continue releasing volumes, but what's next other than that? And so we had this little phase back in the fall where we were kind of stuck, all of us, we didn't really know where we were supposed to go, and that was a little, I would say, like, draining and tiring. And we were all kind of burnt out. But we just restarted again in 2022 in the sense that we have a new name, we have a new organization inside of, like, everything has changed. 

Steph: The team composition has changed. And it's like such a small thing to change team composition, but working with new people that you've never worked with in the past is so great Because you learn so much and you were in this safe space Doing the same thing for such a long time and then these new people bring new ideas and kind of disrupt the whole thing in the best way possible. And so yeah, I think the way we kind of break that little stagnant point is that we change the team composition. We gave more responsibility to people that didn't have as much before and so that completely changed the dynamic and we just sat down after new years for, like a three hour meeting and just defined what we wanted to do this year and now we have new goals and it's just great to have goals Because then you can work towards them as a team Rather than just working without really knowing where you're going. So yeah, this kind of like reset with the new year was definitely necessary and kind of helped us get out of that stagnant stage. I love that and I think that that's something that's so important for other people to hear about, like the importance of allowing change to happen Because a lot of times you're comfortable in the position that you're in but then that doesn't mean that you're content with the position that you're in and you guys were in a comfortable position but you're like we need something to respond that passion and especially like what Lou said, if this is your passion, Then it's going to be refueled. 

Lou: You just need moments like Steph said to sit down, whether it's with yourself, with your team, whoever just figures out where it is that you're going, what is it that you want to do? And if you feel like what you're doing is worth it, then keep going. 

Jade: Very well said it better. Couldn't have said it better myself. I love it. Well, this has been one of the best conversations that I feel like we've ever had. I'm so excited to see what jet admission does next and you can check out their website, www.gennadmission.org or their Instagram, which is popping right now at genadmission.org. So thank you so much to Louise and Steph for being here. We really appreciate it and we'll see you guys next time on another episode of A Little Jaded.

Transcribed By: Mai Vo

Edited By: Joanna Serrano