founders note

Founder's Note: 10 Years Of shesaid.so

Dear community,

As we take a brief moment to celebrate our decade-long anniversary, I feel compelled to deeply reflect on our past achievements and take our time contemplating the future.

Before I dive into explaining this further, I wanted to get a bit personal first. And the reason I’m doing this is because I’ve always been afraid of putting too much of “myself” out here as the face and voice of shesaid.so. Alas, as I dove deeper into coaching over the last couple of years (thank you, my guides!), the more apparent it became that shesaid.so is very much a reflection of my own personality and understanding of the world - until I finally accepted this. 

A little about me, then. I was born in the Eastern part of Romania in 1989, 11 months before communism officially ended. My parents were very young when I came about although, at that time, raising a family at a young age was something to be applauded. They didn’t have much and would probably be labeled as low income in most Western countries. My father was a little stern and taught me about the importance of integrity, being on time and, most importantly, working hard. I learned compassion, kindness and treating others how you want to be treated from my mother.

I remember growing up worried about having enough money. For further context, it’s important to note that Romanian history is filled with wars and corruption. As a nation, we are known to be hard workers, plus whatever other stereotypes about Eastern Europeans are out there. Also important to note that we are the only (Ancient) Latin country in Eastern Europe, culture and language are about 70% Romance (same as Italian, French and so on), and only 20% Slavic

My entire childhood I was a good student and graduated high school amongst the high ranks of students in my city. If I wasn’t doing homework, studying for student olympics in physics and literature, I was probably dreaming of becoming a judge or working at NASA. I was a major nerd throughout my life in Romania but really started to dream about boyfriends and other things in high school, like most of us did. Even though I worked hard to prepare for Law school, one month before the big exam I quit everything and eventually ended up studying in the UK.

Westminster University in London accepted my student application as a part of their Bachelors in Media Studies - the type of higher education you sign up for when you don’t really know what you want to do in life. Except I did and then pulled a 360 on it. Why I did that is something I’m still investigating. I’m glad I did because my life took the most unexpected, fun and challenging turns I hadn’t even dreamt to be possible at the time. One of those unimaginable outcomes was landing a job in the music industry.

Before getting my start in music about a year after graduation, I was very much obsessed with Silicon Valley and the concept of startups. I had landed an internship with one of the biggest marketing companies in the UK at the time and pretty much hated it for the three months I worked there. While innovative, my role there felt insular: like I was a cog in the machine that wouldn’t notice if I weren’t there any longer. I would be given a very specific set of information that I had very specific results to draw from. I was hired to scan a blog that was populated by a fictional character; a bot I would program with certain keywords given to me by the market research division in order to impersonate the client’s ideal customer.

I would then spend two thirds of my day scanning through the content pulled by the bot into the blog in order to spot patterns: the type of music and artists this person would be listening to, the type of YouTube videos they would watch and news articles they would read. I would then compile this data and present a set of identifiable patterns to my manager. What happened beyond this stage was never clear to me but I had a sense that it would be a whole lot of journeying in order to translate this information into tangible results. I didn’t like that. I knew that there must be a faster, more efficient, creative and disruptive way to build and ship things. That’s what startups embodied to me and what led me to my first music industry job a year later.

I had become so obsessed with startup culture that I was out of the house pretty much every day of the week, attending all the networking events I could find. One evening at one of these events, I met a couple of startup founders of a streaming platform who ended up offering me a Community Manager position. Worth mentioning that this was in fact my second role as a Community Manager in tech. Not only that, but my dissertation thesis was a study on early online communities. It felt like things were aligning for me in the right direction. I soft launched shesaid.so, my biggest Community endeavor to date, two years into my Mixcloud job, in August 2014.

We've learned and achieved so much over the last nine and a half years together with our shesaid.so members and partners. From countless events and online sessions, through to mentoring programs and editorial content that strived to educate and bring the community closer together. shesaid.so didn’t just bring people together - it forged friendships, enabled business deals, helped entrepreneurs find funding, supported up and coming artists, empowered women mid way through their careers and so much more. Since shesaid.so's launch as a passion project back almost a decade ago, our community has seen and played a part in key moments for the music business and the diversity and inclusion movement - including a pandemic, #metoo, BLM, streaming, the rise (and lows) of the creator economy, web3 and AI to name a few. While some of the wider milestones in our society feel like setbacks, we cannot help but move towards the future with a deep sense of hope. 

We are still here and we are standing strong. 15k+ people strong all around the world (actual community members), dispersed across 20 or so local chapters. While we work to put together a report that captures our impact over the past decade, one thing I can say already: we’re tired and excited all at the same time.

As we look towards the future in a sustainable way, we plan to take a long term and deep thinking approach. Since our launch, our goal was two-fold:

  1. Internal: nurture a community that encourages women to help each other out and reject the competitive industry standard - online and offline.

  2. External: create awareness & drive conversation of our mission & goals via the online community and events. 

The global shift to the digital space rocked the music business and forced our community to find new ways of connecting and collaborating with one another. In some cases, it was forced to embrace new technologies that are once again reshaping how we produce, distribute and consume online outputs (such as AI and web3). Not only that, but our community has evolved from a group of mostly female music executives to include people of all genders who work in music both in a creative and business capacity; we have been welcoming more and more US-based members while maintaining our presence across Europe; more artists than ever before have been joining us in the past five years; we started expanding our programming beyond the gender conversation and developing our own educational content focused on the music business. We’ve had many highs and many lows and we’ve learned so much from all of it. The most important thing, we’ve stuck together through this all.

New questions around identity, community, economic value, inflation, governance, privacy and ownership have emerged, pushing the music & creative industries to reimagine their place in the world and on the internet. shesaid.so is no stranger to these questions. As a community, it feels that we, and the entire DEI movement, have arrived at a crossroads: on one hand, we have accomplished our mission to drive awareness of diversity and inclusion, and, on the other, it feels as if this newfound social awareness has created more polarization than ever before. If conversation & awareness were our goals thus far, where do we go from here? What is our place in the music business today and moving forward? Who are we and how do we capture this ever evolving communal agency that makes us, authentically us?

These are, truthfully, the questions that often linger on my mind.

Asking ourselves these questions doesn’t mean we cannot celebrate what got us here in the first place, however. This year is a special one and we are planning to commemorate it in special ways.

First off, a series of 10 events and digital experiences that celebrate 10 years of shesaid.so online and offline. Some of these will take place in popular shesaid.so chapter locations, while others are in completely new territories for our community to explore. Want a shesaid.so event in your city or corner of the internet? Drop us a note at hello@shesaid.so

One of our main goals is to empower our members to get ahead in their career and this year we’re putting our money where our mouths are. We can’t really say more at this stage but rest assured we will soon reveal our plans to financially support our community members around the world and enable you to bring your ideas to life. Stay tuned for updates!

Plus, more of what we do best: mentoring programs, educational content, networking and career development. Watch out for news filled with opportunities from our usual partners, and a heap of new ones.

I'm filled with gratitude as I write this. The 19 year-old me who left Romania to be a student in London would have never thought that, 10 years later, a small act of registering a new domain name with an unusual tld would lead to what shesaid.so is today. While we are working on clarifying what it will be, I think we can all look back with pride on what it has been. When I sat down to create the very first shesaid.so community platform (the same google group we still use today), I knew we may never reach the ultimate destination in my lifetime. To embark on a journey whose terminus may never be found is a strange feeling for anyone. And yet, I've learned more about myself from the hidden backwoods that this path has taken me on than I would have from simply crossing the finish line. 

I'm so excited to continue getting lost together in new ways on the way there. If you’re interested in joining the adventure, please drop me a line at andreea@shesaid.so and who knows what other interesting places it might lead us to.

Yours,

/AM

Thin Lines: The Parasocial Artist-Fan Relationship

The artist’s relationship with their fans is a bit of an unspoken contract: fans power an artist’s success, and, as a result, the artist must do everything in their power to connect and, furthermore, please their fans. But where do you cross the line? At what point do you separate the art from the artist? If you work in the music business, you already know this: these lines are very blurry.

Doja Cat is someone who has very publicly attempted, more than once over the years, to keep her fans in check. In a since deleted Threads account, she recently retaliated at her fans over a variety of issues: criticizing her for who she chooses to date, calling themselves "kittenz" or supporting her “cash grabs” pop-leaning tracks like “Planet Her”. While her approach is definitely on the unorthodox side, she’s doing what most artists don't typically have the courage to do: draw a line with their fans. Doja Cat has always had a unique relationship with her fandom but things seem to have taken a more radical turn recently, as expressed in her recent “Attention” single. Whether that's her authentic approach to handling fans, or a tactic that leverages people's appetite for shock value content, this is not the first time Doja draws our attention to the concept of parasocial relationships. This intricate dynamic blurs the lines between reality and perception, leaving both artists and fans in an intricate dance of connection and detachment.

The term "parasocial relationship" was coined in the 1950s by psychologists Horton and Wohl to describe the illusion of a one-sided bond formed between media consumers and the personalities they see on screen. Over the years, this concept has evolved with the advent of social media, enabling fans to follow artists' personal lives, thoughts, and interactions more closely than ever before. Through behind-the-scenes content, spontaneous IG and TikTok lives, artists open up avenues for fans to perceive them beyond their creative output.

This transformation has allowed fans to feel intimately connected to the artists whose music they love. However, this intimacy is often an illusion. Fans may feel as though they know the artist on a personal level and demand the type of behavior that matches their expectation. This asymmetrical relationship typically leads to a sense of extreme attachment on the fan's part, which can often manifest in radical ways - as we've recently seen with Bebe Rexha's hospitalization after a fan threw his cellphone at her face back in June; Pink’s ash remains gift handed over by a fan on stage this summer; or Phoebe Bridgers' stalker from a few years back. Others, like Travis Scott, have built a reputation around intentionally engaging with fans in a way that encourages that type of behavior. When these types of boundaries are crossed, however,  the consequences can be harmful or even deadly.

Fame is a double-edged sword. Most artists struggle with maintaining the delicate balance between their true selves and the persona they project online. The pressure to consistently engage and share aspects of their lives can be overwhelming, as Tokimonsta pointed out on her IG the other day. The parasocial relationship raises important ethical considerations. Fans may feel entitled to opinions on an artist's personal life or decisions, sometimes crossing boundaries and invading privacy.

The artist-fan bond is a complex interplay of perception, connection, and detachment. It underscores the transformative power of digital media in shaping how we interact with public figures - whether it's in entertainment, politics or health & wellness. While this relationship can provide a sense of belonging and inspiration, it's crucial for both artists and fans to navigate its thin lines with delicate care.

Founders Note: Redefining Success

What does success mean to you? Is it a million streams, a record deal or an eight figure valuation for your business? If, like me, you’ve pivoted your ambitions once or twice or a bunch of times over the years, I’m here to tell you: it’s okay to change your mind.

I’m writing this from my hometown in Romania, a small city that’s nowhere near anyone’s radar. The teen version of me was so desperate to leave it all behind that each time I had to return to see my family I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I’m taking a step back in my journey. Until about a year ago. That’s when things started shifting in a major way for me from an internal compass perspective. Suddenly, the things that used to bring me the most joy were now making me feel indifferent at best, or close to giving me a panic attack at worst. Among them – inbox zero, traveling every other week, late night raves and drinking (I still love live music and some DJ nights though), packing 10 meetings into my day, IRL shopping. Over the past year, they have slowly but surely been getting replaced with new yearnings – stillness, spending 3h preparing a meal, patiently listening to my family stories that I’ve already heard a hundred times before, writing (more than just emails and decks), seasons (yes, you start missing that after spending almost a decade in LA).

Is it me or is boring the new cool? You might say I’m getting old but, oddly enough, I feel younger than ever before. I’m just really enjoying my festina lente era, and it’s okay if you are too. Worked for the likes of Napoleon and Augustus, I guess, and it’s all the rave with personal development gurus out there today (even more proof that LA got to me). Was I losing touch with the same ambition that got me here, I thought? 

Turns out it’s quite the contrary. My intuition has slowly been pushing me to laser-focus the type of energy I was putting into things and reconsider how I was spending it. I instinctively knew that in order to bring my best self into anything required a balance between hard work and smart work. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t be putting in 16h work days anymore; it just meant that, when it did happen, I knew that I’d have to make it up with off days. It also means that I now have a much clearer, incremental process about achieving my wildest dreams. And contrary to what one may think, the dreams are getting more ambitious than ever before. I simply understood that, in order to reach the high mountaintop, you must break down the journey into smaller steps and be as consistent as possible with your commitment.

And since we’re all music people here, it doesn’t necessarily mean waking up at 6am every day and grinding out the perfect schedule on a daily basis. It does, however imply, that you put in some work daily – and work can sometimes mean taking half a day to clean your house, 1h to go for a walk, 2h to talk to your mentor or 4h to volunteer at our local charity. Or maybe you do need that daily structure. You do you and find whatever helps enter your flow state. And if two months or two years later you change course, that’s absolutely fine. In fact, it’s most likely a positive thing. The amount of time it takes doesn’t really matter as it’s proportional with the depth of the task at hand.

This is why most music marketer’s advice for independent artists nowadays says that you should focus on your 1000 true fans first. It doesn’t mean you should stop at 1000 fans, it simply breaks down the daunting task of becoming a successful artist into a systematic process. The first step in that process is developing a strong relationship with this early group of people because they will unlock an initial level of financial support in addition to providing you with feedback that will help you finetune your music and your identity as a creative. This applies to music entrepreneurs and executives alike - whether it means focusing on your first 100 customers or your first mentor. 

In other words, take it slow and enjoy the process. The more present you are with the journey, the more likely it is that it will take you to more and more interesting places, pushing you to redefine what success means to you at every corner.

Living In A Barbie World

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Are you tired of living in a Barbie world? Too bad and sorry, not sorry for adding yet another Barbie commentary to your digital desk. The iconic doll has pervaded our lives to such an extent this year that I couldn’t help myself. I will aim to keep it music related.

The extent: A total of 20 artists are involved in the soundtrack (including Ryan Gosling whose music career runs deep, and yes I’m also counting Mark Ronson). Mattel’s licensing team locked in 100+ deals with brands spanning fashion, gaming, hospitality, food & more 🥵The movie is expected to gross $100M = Warner’s total marketing spend (it does not include Mattel budget).

The why: Inspired by Marvel’s resurrection, Mattel sees opportunity in exponentially reviving Barbie’s IP through franchising beyond the toy aisle. The campaign’s snowballing effect has been so effective that other businesses around the world hopped on the trend to include pink variations of their offerings. Jealous.

The music takeaway: Much can be learned from a marketing & branding angle - check out this IG post or Twitter thread we did for those insights; before you ask, yes we did mention the massive marketing budget most of us don’t have but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn there.

What I’ll add is this: music wasn’t an afterthought but a similarly strategic tool that was leveraged in an incredibly smart way. Whilst the Barbie marketing strategy had a nostalgic focus, Mark Ronson and team carefully curated a diverse lineup of (mostly) young talent with a fresh sound.

If you're a legacy artist, there are many opportunities for you to tap into a younger audience with the right type of partnership (think Kate Bush x Stranger Things although you’re not limited to film & tv; in fact, it’s better to think outside the box here and go to places others aren’t thinking of). For younger talent that’s struggling with TikTok, remember that 30+ year-olds have deep pockets (2bn people still use Facebook daily) and parents, in particular, would do anything to invest in their children’s happiness and education. Something to think about.

Andreea Magdalina, Founder at shesaid.so