Helping Musicians Through Lockdown with Charlotte Abroms

Welcome to Episode 6 of the Creative Disruption season of The 21st Century Creative, where we are hearing stories of creatives around the world who came up with a creative response to the challenges of the pandemic.

Today we are off to Australia in the company of Charlotte Abroms, a music manager based in Melbourne with a roster of successful clients and many years’ experience in the industry.

Music was one of the creative sectors that was hardest hit by the pandemic, with gigs and tours cancelled around the world, and artists cut off from their connection with fans as well as their income. In today’s interview Charlotte talks about the devastating impact of the virus and restrictions on the music industry.

But she’s an incredibly upbeat and resourceful person, so she also talks about the silver lining she discovered, when she had a lot of extra time on her hands, and used it to find new ways to support musicians as people as well as in their career.

In the intro to the show I talk about the video talk ‘Forget the Career Ladder, Start Creating Assets’, that I gave to Robert Vlach’s community at Freelancing.eu, and which you can watch for free on YouTube.

I also introduce some new projects from former guests on the podcast:

Christina Patterson’s beautiful, funny and wise family memoir, Outside, the Sky Is Blue.

Maria Bovin de Labbe’s debut album, SKIN.

Jarie Bolander’s new guide to email marketing, Story-Driven Outreach.

Charlotte Abroms

Charlotte Abroms is a music manager based in Melbourne, Australia, who when the pandemic struck, had years of experience to draw on, to help her and her musicians see it through.

As a manager, Charlotte guides the careers of artists such as Ainslie Wills and Haarlo, and producers Jonathan Steer and John Castle.

She is a recent recipient of Australian accolades the Lighthouse Award, the Fast Track Fellowship and the Outstanding Woman in Music Award. Charlotte comes from a background as a freelance digital strategist in creative agencies, working in some of Australia’s most highly regarded agencies.

In 2010 she co-founded the music blog Large Noises, a website dedicated to filming live bands in various locations around Melbourne. For the blog, Charlotte helped scout, film and edit over 50 local and international bands. Some of the videos went viral, with millions of plays, and were picked up by BBC radio and other media outlets around the world.

She became a campaign manager for music startup soundhalo, working on campaigns in London for Atoms for Peace (Thom Yorke, Nigel Goodrich, Flea), alt-j and Muse.

Driven by passion, belief and commitment, Charlotte has evolved a voluntary role in the music community into a full-time professional artist management and consultancy role.

Charlotte focuses on creativity, building international teams of likeminded people, creative strategy and finding innovative ways for music to connect to audiences.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Charlotte was about to book tickets for a major European tour. Instead, she found herself enduring one of the longest and strictest lockdowns in the world in Melbourne.

I was inspired to reach out to Charlotte when I read articles about her creative response to the pandemic on several fronts – helping musicians create virtual gigs and sell tickets, organising a fundraiser to help people in the music industry, and creating a new mentoring service for musicians as well as younger music managers.

I was really struck by the fact that, faced with such an overwhelmingly difficult situation, Charlotte responded by looking outward – to her musicians, her peers and the wider industry, to see what she could do to help.

In this interview, she talks about her own journey in the music business, from starting a blog and filming gigs in backyards and even bathrooms, to growing her passion project into a full time business. She also talks about the challenges and some unexpected benefits of lockdown.

Whether or not you’re a musician, you’ll likely recognise many of the challenges Charlotte describes. And I think we can all benefit from her upbeat attitude and creative responses to the challenges of the pandemic.

You can learn more about Charlotte on her website and follow her on Instagram.

Empty music stage photo by Santeri Viinamäki

Charlotte Abroms interview transcript

MARK: Charlotte, how did you get started in the music business?

CHARLOTTE: I think my story is quite common for a lot of people who are music managers where it, generally, starts out, and it did for me, in a voluntary position that, eventually, became a full-time role.

I started out working in the acting industry. That was just purely because my cousin works in the acting industry and I finished high school and he asked me if I wanted some part-time work. And that role that I did with him at an acting agency turned into like a junior agent role, which is equivalent to, what we would call, transferable skills to a music manager as well, managing the career of actors. That was a job that I was doing alongside studying film at university. I’ve always just been really, really passionate about music.

My entry into music was a combination of all of these things. I’d learned the skills to be a manager or an agent in my day job. I was studying film and I was really wanting to hone my skills as a filmmaker, an editor, a writer, a storyteller. While I was at university, it was partly a university project that my friend Eliza and I started. Her name’s Eliza Hull and we studied at university together. She’s also an artist in Melbourne and a disability advocate. We decided to start a blog that no one was really doing anything like this at the time, in Australia, but it was something that you see a little bit in the UK, they have Mahogany. And in France, they have Logitech, basically a blog that captures live music on film.

MARK: When was this, you started?

CHARLOTTE: This was in 2009, I’d say, 2010.

MARK: Okay, so, reasonably early.

CHARLOTTE: Yeah. We were scouting bands that we loved, we naturally went to gigs quite a lot. And we would see a band that we’d love, we would share it with each other, because we were so passionate about it, and then we decided to offer to film them, just on a voluntary basis. I was wanting to learn a little bit more about filming and editing. Eliza loves writing and she was getting really into the idea of producing this content, so, finding the bands and being the main communicator with the bands.

And then she onboarded a sound engineer who is actually my now partner, Jonathan Steer. The three of us co-founded this website together, the blog was called Large Noises. We ended up on a voluntary basis, filming about 50 plus bands, locally. The idea was that we would film these artists in locations around Melbourne to showcase a little bit of Melbourne but sometimes obscure locations in bathrooms and bathtubs.

MARK: Literally in bathtubs?!

CHARLOTTE: Yeah, we filmed a Melbourne band in a bathroom and we filmed a really amazing singer-songwriter named Oscar Lush in a bathtub just with his guitar and his harmonica. We branched out and filmed a few international bands as well, which was a highlight for us at the time. And that was my entry into working in music.

MARK: What was it about music, if it’s not a dumb question? But maybe it isn’t such a dumb question. I love music but I never ended up working in the industry.

What was it about actually working with