Made It In Music: Interviews With Artists, Songwriters, And Music Industry Pros · Full Circle Music: A Nashville Recording Studio & Online Music Education Academy

AI, Music Promotion, and Digital Marketing Evolution in the Music Industry (Part 1)

·35 min·2 clips

Alex built Sound.me with AI before AI was hot and says it replaces slow influencer negotiations.

1. Made It In Music: Interviews With Artists, Songwriters, And Music Industry Pros focuses this episode on AI, music promotion, and digital marketing evolution in the music industry. 2. Riley Taylor is the host and community manager at Full Circle Music, and Alex Akimov is the guest because he built Simple Social, Advertising.me, and Sound.me. 3. The episode asks how a touring guitarist from Russia became a music marketer who uses analytics, social platforms, and AI to promote artists. 4. Alex says he moved to Los Angeles in 2006 after earning a BA in classical music in Russia and sending applications by mail with tapes. 5. He says he chose LA over Berklee College of Music in Boston because he wanted palm trees, the beach, and the U.S. music scene. 6. Alex says touring paid the bills after session work became scarce, and he would be gone for five or six months at a time. 7. He says buying a fixer-upper house in LA and leaving for a four-month tour made him realize he was missing his life. 8. He says a friend got him a boy-band management job, and he went from guitar player to manager within a month. 9. He says he grew that boy band’s YouTube channel to 100,000 subscribers and 600,000 followers by running ads and using Twitter. 10. He says the group was nominated for the Teen Choice Awards and toured with Fifth Harmony, Ruth B, Troye Sivan, and Bebe Rexha. 11. Alex says Randy Jackson introduced him to the record business by connecting him with Rob at Epic Records. 12. He says Mike Curb at APG was one of the most influential people in the industry for him because Curb was willing to experiment early. 13. He says he became one of the first in-house digital advertising hires at a label and learned how analytics worked by promoting APG records for a year. 14. He says he studied predictive analytics at MIT for a year and then applied that business training to music. 15. Alex says that training helped him understand how to scale, analyze data, and see where a record was going. 16. He says Sound.me started because an agency campaign spent $5,000, delivered only two creators, and posted too late to help the song. 17. He says Sound.me now has more than one million creators and uses AI to set creator pay between a minimum and a maximum bid. 18. He says the platform targets by city, genre, country, age, and cultural interests, and he wants creators to be honest instead of over-polished. 19. The conversation is a live, practical interview that moves quickly between career history, platform mechanics, and marketing tactics. 20. Listeners who work in independent music marketing or artist development will get the most from it, while people wanting a pure artist-story interview may skip it.

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