Stanford | Warner Music Group Leadership Initiative Fellows 2015
Alexandria Arrieta
BA English
Ally is a singer-songwriter who worked on a comprehensive strategy to develop, market and release her music. In addition to releasing covers and engaging on social media, she wrote and completed studio recordings for a series of original songs for her debut EP. She culminated the year with a college tour, performing her music at universities throughout California and Arizona in Spring 2016.
Savina Hawkins
BA English
Savi built a web-based, cloud-enabled data visualization app built using human-centric design to meet the needs of music industry leaders. The app is designed to supply music industry leaders with a simple, aesthetic, and fun way to get insight on their artists. Its interface integrates disparate sources, filters out the irrelevant information, and presents information using storytelling—making insight easy and fun to come by.
Giordano Jacuzzi
BA Music, Minor in Computer Science
MultiMIDI reimagines the way modern musicians physically interact with music. It is a new interactive tool that makes creation and expression more efficient and intuitive than ever before, by collapsing the functionality of a standard DJ controller into a single device operable with one hand. The device combines the functionality of multiple buttons, knobs, and faders found on typical audio controllers into one compact interactive device. The device provides musicions with new opportunities to interact with their music in a more nuanced and human manner. With MultiMIDI, the music is quite literally in your hands.
Michael Longoria
BS Management Science and Engineering, Minor in Economics
Michael’s capstone provides a methodology that allows Artist & Repertoire (A&R) departments to meaningfully utilize the expanding presence of social data to help discover emerging talent. Through working with partners in the music technology space and consulting with data scientists, analysis was conducted on social media data from a sample group of WMG artists in order to predict and forecast artist revenue and growth. Through adding these new tools to the artist evaluation process A&R teams should be able to discover the most promising artists on the rise.
Zachary Ostroff
BS Earth Systems
Vote For Home is the first web video series to feature well-known musicians and artists discussing the impact of climate change in the United States. Zach’s capstone project involved producing the pilot episode featuring Los Angeles-based artist Taryn Manning (star of Orange is the New Black, singer-songwriter) and a town called East Porterville in California's Central Valley. Thousands of Americans in East Porterville are surviving off of bottled water due to the severe impact of climate change on the California drought.
Sohaib Shaikh
MS/BS Electrical Engineering
Figuring out how to monetize content in areas where record labels have struggled to hold any major presence has always been a challenge. Most of the solutions have led to licensing deals with telcos or local partners within those regions. While licensing has allowed record labels to gain some revenue in emerging territories, they are far from participating in the upside that cracking these markets could bring. Sohaib’s project involves proposing and examining a framework of development that a record label could potentially use when trying to create a platform to monetize their content and maximize revenues in emerging territories, such as Brazil and India.
Hailey Spelman
BS Symbolic Systems
While big music labels have come a long way in terms of embracing new technologies, they still lack a lot of the innovation that is commonly found within the tech industry. Hailey’s capstone involved partnering with startup TapTape to launch a campaign for a Warner Music Group artist. TapTape is a platform that lets fans invest in their favorite artists, allowing them to share in the success of projects they support.
Photography: Alex Tamkin
