If you had asked music manager Emily Rosenblum, back when she was attending Southwestern University, about the music industry, she would have replied with curiosity: “There is a music industry?!”
“I had this idea that if someone made good music that it somehow reached the right people,” says Emily as she breaks into a laugh. “Of course, now I realize that it does not quite happen that way.”
In Café Grumpy, the 28-year-old manager of artists drinks tea while dressed in calm gray jeans and a traffic-light-green sweater, which is the type of attire you can catch Emily sporting in her office.
Being a young music manager in New York City, Emily loves that, “There’s always some fun event happening and interesting people to meet.”
Furthermore, she also enjoys that, “Managers interact with just about everyone in the industry, from the person working the door at the club to lawyers and record executives,” says Emily.
She notes that, “Out of any the jobs in the industry, I would argue that it is the most personal [and] the most one-on-one.” Her reasoning is based on the closeness, she feels, that must be maintained between an artist and manager.
The Southwestern alumna discusses everything with her artists, from the album cover to how was their week.
As a result of the industry’s fast pace, Emily is always planning her next move, which you can see based on how often she checks her blackberry cell phone. While majoring in biology with a minor in chemistry, she realized she wanted a career that involved music because it was something she had a passion for since her youth and was something that would give her mobility.
“The idea of having to be in one city [attending medical school] for several years, or not being able to travel, which is a huge deal to me, or not having time to go see that new show, just seems like a life sentence,” says the petite Texas native.
Emily, who gets excited by [established] indie artists and also loves listening to [long-established] country artists, graduated without changing her major, as she tried to determine a way to get her foot in the door of the music industry.
After being enticed by a family friend, Emily decided to try to become a promoter while living in London and gave her resume to one of the top promoters in Austin, Texas, when she moved back. She called the promoter every day after she submitted her resume to see if an intern position had opened up; one day, a current intern answered her phone call and told her that no other intern positions would be available for months.
“I was so frustrated at that point that I asked him if I could ask him some questions about his experience as an intern, and he said, ‘sure’,” says Emily. “He turned out to be a singer/songwriter… and he ended up being my first management client. It was really random, so I never did end up going down the promoter route … I probably would not like it very much actually.”
Trying her hand at management was, at first, supposed to help find a role in the industry that appealed to her, yet, after joining forces with her first client out of his frustration of not being able to set himself apart in the competitive industry, Emily found out that the role most appealing to her was the one she had.
“I love management because you get to do a little bit of everything… It’s never boring,” says Emily.
Since falling in love with the versatility of a career in management, Emily, at the moment, is trying to come up with ways to get her artists recognized while working as part of the team at Tony Margherita Management in New York.
An acquaintance forwarded her resume to Margherita a few years ago, and Emily is still there. The thought of venturing off to start her own management company does not cross her mind.
“I have absolutely no desire to do that at this point in my life,” says Emily while laughing. Having said that, she does have one desire.
“I would love to be someone who thought of an idea that helped a lot of different artists, that kind changed the landscape,” she says.
Emily loves music as much as she did when she was 4 years old and listening to Julian Lennon’s Vallote album on her Fisher Price cassette player.
“I’m really lucky because since live music has always been the thing that I love, love, love, whenever I see a band live that just blows me away”, says Emily… “it makes me really excited again.”