Symphonic’s Year in Review: 2020

A message from our CEO:

2020.

Twenty Twenty.

As I think about how to describe this year, I find it easier to describe it with the number alone given how the year has been.

As you read this, you may be going through a difficult time due to the pandemic. You may have even lost a loved one, a friend, a colleague, a business partner, and more…

Before I say anything else, on behalf of Symphonic, I’d like to share our thoughts, condolences, and support to you. Throughout it all, we haven’t lost sight of how difficult things are and have been.

Every year, I have the opportunity to share a brief message to those who are interested in reading.

This year, I couldn’t bring myself to write a message about how great things were this year within Symphonic. Personally, I don’t want to write about that here.

We, as a company and as individuals, were all challenged this year as we are every year, but it is nowhere near what many others have experienced. So, if I had to come up with a theme or topic for this year’s “message”, it’s really just about being thankful and reflective.

Quite often, we’ve witnessed stories and people that, despite the negativity in the world, have continued to be resilient, inspiring, and uplifting even when they don’t have to be.

Seeing what people are going through and how people refuse to give up is an incredibly powerful thing to witness. It’s one of the things that makes us especially motivated to do what we can to help out as much as we can.

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, even though it may be difficult, who you are and what you are doing every day matters. It’s hard to put into words how impressed and driven we are by the actions of many to help us be better people who want to do the best we can to improve every day.

After this message, you will see a lot of what we did this year in the form of a recap to remind you of who we are. This will continue next year and beyond, and we greatly appreciate the support you have shown us this year. It means more than you can imagine.

Thank you for being brave, courageous, and part of our journey….

It is truly an honor to be part of yours.

——

Let’s Recap:

We started off with great momentum. In January, we hosted Creative Connections to help connect and empower creative industries in the Tampa Bay Area.

In February, we hosted our Music Industry Sessions Puerto Rico. The event was aimed at artists, producers, and songwriters from the independent music community. The panels included artists, managers, lawyers and producers from companies such as Songtrust, ASCAP Latino, Duars Entertainment, Buena Vibra Group, Sound Royalties, and more.

Then, the pandemic hit and everything went virtual. So, we held a ton of Live Q&A’s in both English and Spanish to help spread our knowledge in the hopes of helping the independent community continue to thrive. Not only that, our Virtual Music Industry Sessions went off with a bang and featured an impressive lineup of panelists from Spotify, YouTube, Pandora, SiriusXM, Beatport, FeatureFM, Songtrust, and ASCAP. // Check out the recap below…

For our 6th year in a row, we held our annual Vibes of the Bay (virtually), and used this year to raise money for Tampa Bay’s iconic music venue, Crowbar, and the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), who had major parts in the #SaveOurStages campaign to help save independent music venues.

We expanded our team.

After almost 2 years of setting down roots in Nashville, we announced the expansion of our offices in Nashville’s Historic Orbison Building. Named after the legendary Roy Orbison, the Historic Orbison Building is right in the heart of the music city. Along with our new office expansion, we continued this growth with multiple new hires. — As of our newest expansion, these hires include departmental heads in Youtube/User Generated Content, Client Marketing, and Rights Administration professionals.

Now, Melissa Barber, formerly of ole/Anthem, has joined as Sr. Manager, Rights Administration & Business Affairs, and Wyatt Thomas, whose former posts include Sandbox Entertainment, Ground (ctrl), and Thinkswell, has also joined as Client Marketing and Streaming Promotions Manager.

Speaking of new team members, with his extensive knowledge from his time as an A&R at Universal Records, we welcomed Ocatvius Crouch, as our Sr. Client Manager & A&R (Hip-Hop/R&B). He has assisted with the development and management of some incredible projects for multi-platinum selling artists, from Lil Wayne, Drake and Nicki Minaj to Chamillionaire and Nelly.

Speaking of clients, we welcomed some new ones.

We had some amazing new artists join our team this year. We teamed up with legendary producer, Infiniti aka Scott Christina, signed the catalog of iconic Brazillian artist, Sabotage, and welcomed artists like, Mack 10, Schoolly D, Ida Maria, Juan Luis Guerra, Don Omar, Genevieve Stokes, Kolohe Kai, Molly Moore, Fortunate Youth, Maggie Szabo, Eric Bazilian, Rachel Bradshaw , Them Vibes , animal years , Tyler Joe Miller, Jess Moskaluke, Olivia lane, Ness heads, Meg Toohey, Jojo Haley, Yonas, and many more. // Listen to all of them in our Best of 2020 Spotify Playlist below…

We made some new partnerships and enhancements to our Symphonic Management System.

Everything we do, we do for the #SymFam. The new partnerships we have made over the past year have helped expose us to newer expanding markets and the latest innovative tech to help us do what we do even better. In 2020, we partnered up with LyricFind, CoSynd, ACRCloud, TrackLib, Triller, Trebel Music, Moodagent, Resso, AGD Entertainment, and BandCamp, and also set up our own Support Independent Music page to help collect donations to supplement the income of artists who were hit the hardest during the pandemic.

We launched our music industry podcast series, “NEXT UP” and finally released Symphonic for Production, a new alternative for production which puts producers at the forefront, offering sample packs, mastering services, STEMs, and so much more, all in one place.

We also implemented new features into our SMS to streamline our services even further to offer the best experience for our clients.

To enhance our SMS, we added:

• Teams: Our Account memberships feature allows account owners to invite team members into their Symphonic account with designated roles. // Having this feature enables our clients to save more time and ensure security.
• Management of Multiple Accounts: If you are a manager managing multiple artists, you can now do so from one login and give transparency to every artist. If you are a label manager of multiple labels, you can also manage them from the same login. // Multiple account management made easy.
• Split Payments: Never bother with manual payouts again. Add split receivers when creating a release and offer full transparency to all your artists.

In Conclusion…

Throughout it all, our focus remained on how to support the independent sector of this industry we call home. In times like these, our community bands together. We support one another through thick and thin, and we’re incredibly proud to be a part of it.

❤️

Most importantly, we’d like to end this by saying THANK YOU.

You are the ones who matter most.

We appreciate every single one of you.

To show our appreciation, we’ve put together a small video featuring some of the amazing talents who we are fortunate enough to work with each and every day.

Cheers!