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MuSample is a music accelerator program that provides artists with skill sets and resources to ensure that they see a return on their financial investments. It was founded in 2019 by Aichelle White, who has been known for her work around the Milwaukee music scene with Isharai Artist Management. This year, MuSample was selected for the Black Independent Music Accelerator (BIMA) Fellowship.
White explains that she originally started MuSample to help artists with the process of sample clearance.
“As I navigated the sample clearance space, I began to understand that artists didn’t have the foundational principles of how they’d receive money, so I pivoted and now MuSample is a content and consulting-based platform that provides artists with the directions on how to properly monetize what they do.”
Her work with MuSample deviates from Isharai Artist Management but has a fundamentally similar mission. “MuSample heads into the music tech space,” White said. “We’re working on NFTs and Web3 and the Metaverse. That’s all part of the next iteration of where music is going. Isharai Artist Management was more focused on live booking. But this is focused more on every post an artist posts, every time they’re in front of a camera, and everything they do where they’re entitled to money. Artists should be aware of what goes into monetization.”
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Aichelle White
Aichelle White
White is a music creative herself and contends that many emerging artists simply don’t know where to look when it comes to monetary opportunities. While their instinct may be to spend money on clout, she believes that it’s far more beneficial to start small.
“Everyone’s trying to get on the major playlists and spend money doing that. But I’m more for fan activation; if you have ten fans and they put your song on their 10 playlists, you are now on 10 playlists that people play three to six times a day. You’re getting regular streams. Fan activation is about the foundational ways of securing something lifelong; you could make a song today and then five years from now, somebody might want to sample it or put it in a movie. You own the rights to it and have everything you need.”
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Think of MuSample’s work like the proverb, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
“If artists knew how valuable they were to the music industry they would walk in it differently,” White said.
When an artist signs up for MuSample, they are provided for free an e-book about the seven things they should know when they go to the studio, such as having performance tracks and clean versions of their songs. “If you want to have your music played at Bucks games, you’ve got to have clean tracks,” White gave as an example.
She explains how the pandemic and its effects on the industry caused artists to rethink their strategies. “It made music creatives take the business side of it because they weren’t able to perform or be out and mingle, so they had to find alternative ways to get themselves out there. Artists were doing Facebook and Instagram performances but then there’s also Twitch and YouTube for in-home concerts. Integrating fans into artists’ everyday lives—what are you eating, what are you cooking, what are you watching—was the main thing I suggested to artists.”
Currently, White is operating MuSample solo but is looking for industry and tech-savvy folks to join her team. To sign up, visit MuSample’s website: musample.com.
