Day In The Life: James Vorres, Digital & Label Marketing Manager at Juno
Blog by Michelle Lloyd under Music Training & Careers, Record Labels, Selling & Distributing Your Music
Hello there. My name is James and I am the Digital & Label Marketing Manager for Juno Records & Juno Download. We are a Dance music focused online music retailer and have been around since 1997. I also run a couple of record labels imaginatively entitled Sccucci Manucci and Manucci’s Mistress.
I am a vinyl addict and should be banned from discogs.com for the sake of my bank account. I also DJ and produce under various aliases and this is a typical day in my life:
8:30am - Woken up by my cat, who has found out the best way to turf me out of bed is to stand on my head in the morning. I feed her, grab a shower, get dressed, out of the door by 9:15am. Onto the dreaded and overcrowded overland, where if I have space to move my arms I will attempt to check my emails on my phone and fire off any quick responses where possible, creating the illusion in my own head that I am already ahead on the day (winning). Today, I can just about manage to move my arms, although the angry African lady stood next to me seems to think otherwise so a couple of emails are sent, but now I know how many are waiting for me when I arrive at the office.
10:00am - I arrive at the office which is based in Camden, swerving the alcoholic and often angry clientele of the Spectrum Centre which is just opposite the office. I turn my computer on and start checking through my emails (again!). The emails I get over the weekend are often from labels or distributors requesting features on our website for their forthcoming releases. I also get a lot of digital promos and this morning I have a couple of emails offering me mail-order Russian brides, I do like variety. Around 100 emails in the inbox, which is quiet, but a reflection of the time of year (everything winds down over the festive period).
11:00am - With the majority of my emails replied to, or flagged for me to action later, I begin checking the schedule for forthcoming releases due out today and the rest of this week. I’m basically looking for releases that we will be featuring on the website and within all our other marketing ‘outlets’ which include off-site banners (advertising releases on external sites), reviews and features in our newsletters (segmented by genre), on-site banners for the homepage and genre pages, social network posts etc. This is an enjoyable part of my job as I get to spend a couple of hours listening to a lot of music, have a chuckle at some incredibly poorly written press releases, ascertain that Richie Hawtin must be doing 236 hour DJ sets by the amount of times I see his name on the DJ Feedback forms and have a good old read of some music blogs.
I have a lot of internal tools and sales information to help me make my decisions, but a good understanding of the trends within the various genres is the most important thing. With my selections made, I raise the relevant design jobs for banners and send my selections to the guys who run Juno Plus (our online magazine) for them to send out to our army of music reviewers, ready for the mailouts on Friday.
1:00pm - Now I have my weekly meeting with my little team, Nathan and James, who handle the marketing for specific genres on the site. We discuss some targets which have been outlined from the senior management, what the targets are and how we are going to achieve them. It’s a good chance to have a catch up, see where everyone is with their various projects, see if we can help each other out with anything and find out what the big releases are this week. It is also an opportunity to relay what is happening within the rest of the company. We also discuss ways in which we can increase traffic to the site, which I think is a staple of any e-commerce marketing team.
1:45pm - Meeting over, I return to my desk to a minor shit storm, our music player that users embed into their Facebook posts is no longer linking back to the product pages which means anyone clicking to buy the music is just being redirected to our homepage. I have to raise a job with our IT department to fix the bug as soon as possible, dead links are big no no! Luckily it’s a quick job and the bug is fixed.
2:00pm – Lunch consists of a quick jaunt over to Prét A Manger for a fist fight over the last posh cheddar & pickle sandwich, whilst battling a barrage of over polite continental staff screaming ‘CAN I HELP YOU?’ at anything that moves within a metre of the counter! Back to the office, where I can I pick up some of my label work for 45 minutes or so. Today I’ve had an amazing demo submission from an artist I have been chasing for a while so I hastily send over a Heads of Agreement to secure the tracks for the label. I do some shameless plugging on the label’s social network profiles to help promote our latest releases and reply to any messages and emails the labels have received over the weekend.
2:45pm - Back to work for me and this afternoon I am setting up a remix competition for a German Techno label. I have to collate all the relevant content needed for the remix competition, remix stems, artist press-shots, label logos, hi-res release artwork etc. Usually labels use remix competitions to help promote an upcoming release or shift some back catalogue, but in this instance the label is using the remix competition as an A&R exercise, following the success of a previous competition which turned out some incredible remixes from artists they later signed. With all the content collated I raise a job with our design team to create the remix competition landing page to my specifications. Design job raised, I upload the remix stems and create a product on our site, sit back and see what the design team come up with later in the week.
4:00pm - I have a meeting here in the office with one of the distributors we work with. This is an opportunity to discuss their label roster and potential marketing campaigns we can run with their priority release. It also gives me a chance to let them know about any projects we have coming up that might be of interest to them. It’s also nice to meet people face to face, who you communicate with on almost a daily basis; it helps to build the relationship and leads to a better understanding of each others needs (I sound like a marriage counsellor now!). I’m happy to hear about some of the labels the distributor has signed up and we agree to roll out some extra promotion around their forthcoming releases.
5:00pm - Meeting adjourned and I am off to another meeting, this time in a pub, which means things are looking up. The meeting is with one of the company directors regarding business strategy and internal development projects. Basically looking at Juno as a whole and looking at ways we can improve and grow. This is an aspect of the company I am getting more and more involved with and is of real interest to me. The meeting overruns and turns into dinner in another pub, surrounded by a lot of people called Rupert, Oscar and Sasha, which practically guarantees top notch food! I drew for the sea bass FYI!
8:00pm - And I am home, a little tipsy it must be said, but I still have a bit of work to do. I check my emails… AGAIN…and then sit down and listen to any demos which have been sent in to my labels. I try and listen to everything, but we are getting more and more demos sent every week which means things have been backing up a little. This is followed by some more shameless plugging of the new release via the labels social networks, a couple more glasses of wine, a terrible film and bed, safe in the knowledge my head is going to be hurting tomorrow.
Tags
digital marketing, music marketing, juno records, juno download, label marketing, record label, music distributor, record distributor, record company, music career
