Realizations

So back a few days ago at the Cardoner speaker event with John Deveny when he was talking about how he found his way into Public Relations I sat there listening and thinking to myself "if only it was only that easy"; sometimes, as it turns out, like has a sick sense of humor in regards to the sarcastic remarks I make to myself.

This past weekend, I volunteered at The Voodoo Experience music festival working in artist relations for the main stage artists. My boss told me that my role was going to be to assist her and it turns out the way in which she needed assistance was for me to be the point person for most of the headliners and filtering the situations which she'd be called over to handle. In this capacity, I got to have a lot of interactions with the artists' management. I got to talk to these people a great amount of the day and had a chance to really get to know what they do, and it all sounded like tasks I would not only enjoy but excel at. I also got to take a problem, try to find a solution while calling in my boss as little as possible, and disperse tasks between myself and others to accomplish a goal or accommodate a need; a process which I found I was very good at and enjoyed very much.

I've always seen myself probably working at a label or possibly at my own company providing services that I always believed were in the best interest of the artist, but also at the expense of the artist (in the form of taking a commission regardless of what the artist would make) and never really saw very much of a problem with that, after all, I would be providing them a service, it they didn't want to pay, they could just try to provide that service for themselves. After talking to all of these people all weekend though and hearing their stories, I realized it would be more morally appealing to me to work directly with the artist, on the artist's behalf, and only profit from the money they make because of me. I think I finally realized that I want to be a tour manager or at the very least an artist relations person. This volunteer position encompassed things I normally hate like waking up early, being on my feet all day, manual labor, working 16 hour days while not getting paid, etc., but every morning I could not wait to wake up and get there. I genuinely liked what I was doing and was sad to have to stop doing it, something I never thought would happen.

Now the big question I have is "how?". How can I get from where I am now to getting to do that for a living? What are those steps? Where do I go from here? I was invited to work at Essence Fest in July (the same people who do Voodoo also plan Essence), but July is too far away. I've had a taste of something great and now I need it again, and soon. There's always the chance of trying to do this at Jazz Fest, but even April is far away, and all of these answers and festivals are all temporary fixes. I want to do this permanently, full-time. Now that it seems as if I've had the "eureka!" moment, it is time for me to start a new journey, and for once, I'm not scared at all.