After college I started interning at Yoshitoshi Recordings, an amazing underground house/tech house label in Washington D.C.. I worked non-stop and came in on my days off the first month but it worked and they fired the current label assistant to hire me a few weeks in. When Cyrus Bader, the label manager at the time left a year or so in I got his gig.

Yoshitoshi was such an awesome place to start because it’s small enough that you can’t avoid having your hand in every part of the business. We did a lot of licensing to different labels and I was negotiating all of the single and remix deals which I really enjoyed, so when Tiësto’s label, Musical Freedom, needed another hand, part of the gig was to help with the mound of licensing requests going in and out and I was happy to jump into something I think a lot of people don’t like because it’s not the “glamorous” part of the industry.

After a year at Musical Freedom where we’d been working out of Complete Control Management’s office in NYC, who at the time were managing Tiësto, a position opened up doing day to day management for Dada Life, Tritonal and a couple other acts and I decided to try my hand at management because I was dying to learn from Toby Benson who managed them. Dada Life was just getting started at the time and Tritonal was transitioning to a more mainstream electro sound so over the next few years we didn’t sleep much but accomplished some amazing stuff, and I moved from NYC to LA. When Toby left to do his own thing I took over managing Dada Life. Complete Control had created a joint venture with some other management companies, so I also helped with the management of the Awful Records crew from Atlanta, 88rising’s first steps in artist management, to name a few.

But I was really missing the East Coast and mentioned it to my mentor, Cyrus Bader, who had hired me at Yoshitoshi and brought me to Musical Freedom, and as it turned out, a position had just opened up in Atlantic’s Digital Marketing department handling Big Beat’s roster. I had never imagined going to a major but when I talked to Paul Sinclair, the Executive Vice President of Digital Strategy & Innovation for Atlantic, and Blake Foster, the Head of Marketing for Big Beat it was a no brainer. I’ve been here for two years now.

Coming from management has been a massive help in the same way that going from indie labels into management was. I understand both sides and I think the artists and managers appreciate someone at the label who knows where they are coming from and maybe isn’t just saying they know to get something through the door. One manager we work with calls me after long weekly calls and goes “Shaw, you were a manager -- you know what I mean, help me explain it to them,” and I’m happy to do it because I know it helps them trust the label which somehow is still a problem with artist/manager/label relationships. If you signed with the right label you should be able to trust them; their interest is in your success.

I like things about both and think at those times at which I’ve done both, in my life they’ve been right. The high and lows in management are more extreme. That was amazing in my mid-20s when the mix of glamour and grind was super fun and fulfilling but I started feeling burnt out while living in LA. Not to say that’s the only way to be a manager but for better or worse, that’s how I did it.

I came to a major label at the perfect time in my life and I was ready to learn about the inner workings of things. There’s so much to this industry that unless you’re at a major label you really don’t get to see and since coming to Big Beat/Atlantic I’ve learned more than I could have imagined. Every day I’m here I learn something and think to myself “oh shit, had I known that 5 years ago I would have done everything differently.”