The Music Playground, New York, NY
This summer, I spent eight weeks interning remotely at the Music Playground, a music production, marketing, and licensing company. Within the company, there are various sectors: the Music Playground itself, which is a studio for independent artists to make music as well as in-house composers; the Diner, a musical catalog database that several reputable companies outsource for music in commercials, TV shows, movies, etc.; and Audigent, which is the marketing team who data mines and market researches several industries outside of music. I primarily worked with the Diner, as well as shadowed the composers in the Music Playground and helped with a PowerPoint project for Audigent. Overall, this was a truly interesting experience as I try to dip my toes into the music industry; and I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to do so, not only this past Winter Study through SPEC 21, but also now this summer with ASIP. I also took a class called Music and Corporeality, with Associate Professor of Music Corinna S. Campbell, and it further solidified that I can continue pursuing music in different ways. Now, after this internship, I feel like I’ve gotten the support I needed to make it.
I attended several virtual training sessions to get a lay of the land at the Music Playground. I learned even more intricacies in the music industry, especially on the publishing and licensing side, that clarified my previously shoddier understanding of the business. I searched through several databases, social media websites, and the general Internet to find infringements of licensing cases involving the Diner’s music catalog, which has over 30,000 tracks that any person or company can acquire the rights for to use in their commercials. I also input several new or newly acquired tracks into publishing databases, ensuring that the publishers (meaning the Diner and any other entity), as well as the composers (both in-house and freelance), get properly compensated. I also created Spotify playlists that included a mix of songs from the Diner’s catalog and from the general music industry. It was a personal favorite of mine because I really enjoy making playlists on my own time, and so doing it for my internship made an already fun activity all the more rewarding and fulfilling.
All in all, I really enjoyed my time with the Music Playground. Thanks to the amazing support from the ’68 Center for Career Exploration, SPEC 21, and especially ASIP, I was able to intern at a great place and had a great time. After the summer, I feel like I’ve gained the confidence to pursue my passions and dreams for the future as I gear up for what life will look like post-graduation.
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