The Power of Putting The Artist First – Innovo Management’s Sam Saideman

Sam Saideman, Co-Founder and CEO of Innovo Management, LLC, directly manages acts such as YONAS, Zak Downtown, and Sam Johnston, driving the company’s vision and success since its inception. With experience that ranges from performance and booking to publishing and marketing for a global distribution company, Sam has a wealth of experience that he leverages in his daily management strategies. Innovo Management now employs 8 staff members, all of whom handle digital marketing and release strategy for the company’s project management services, leaving Sam to fully focus on the artist management roster and general business growth. A three time college dropout who believes in a sink or swim mentality with low barrier to entry businesses, Sam Saideman believes in empowering artists to create sustainable careers.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Sam to learn more about his workflow and the journey leading up to where he is with Innovo Management today.

The inspiration to launch Innovo was bred from a negative experience that you had when you were an artist. Can you expand on that as well as how your personal experience gives you an empathetic advantage in artist management?

I think as humans the things we’re passionate about are built on the experiences we’ve had. I loved being an Artist but it wasn’t for me long term. I’m not built for the frequent introspection of pouring feelings onto paper and all that comes along with constantly being in the spotlight. I signed a licensing deal for an album with a “label” based in Philadelphia and after the marketing dollars never came, I consulted law firms. By the end of it, I had lived on friends couches, worked a real estate job, and bummed it around NY for months just to get the project finished all for the end result to not be there. I was defeated. After leaving NY with my tail between my legs, I moved to Atlanta and spent some time working general business jobs until I figured out what I wanted to do. Quickly I realized that I was better at the business than the music. I moved to Nashville, transferred to Belmont University for Music Business and Entrepreneurship and with the push from my then-roommate Ian Rodriguez, launched Innovo Management. I think that through Ian’s experiences and my own, we’ve made it the companies entire mission to put artists first.

Since its launch, Innovo has experienced over 200% year over year growth and now employs 8 staff members. Can you tell us more about some of Innovo’s highlightable accomplishments thus far as well as the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

Sure! As far as biggest challenges go, we never took a single $1 from anyone and didn’t have any money of our own at the start. I think I had $300 to my name and we used it to file an LLC, get a logo created, and get a website built. I wrote our contracts and bootstrapped polishing them with Lawyers as well as anything else we needed. Taking that to a self-sustaining business was extremely hard because we had things we wanted to do and people we wanted to join the team but didn’t have the income to make it happen. We had to celebrate the small wins such as selling a piece of merch or booking a local show that sold out and continuously stack the bricks until the foundation was evident enough to get a business line of credit and take risks. Some highlightable accomplishments include having clients headline tours in Europe, the states, playing Rolling Loud, have songs done with artists such as Logic, Travie McCoy, Roscoe Dash, and more. I heard the homie Patrick Corcoran once say something along the lines of “You should always feel like you need to work harder to catch up with how hard your artists are working.” We’ve been blessed to work with some amazing talent who constantly make us feel like we have to push harder and pull more all nighters just to catch up to how hard they’re working.

Your accomplishments and accolades are incredibly impressive. But these were not just handed to you – the road to where you are now is full of life lessons. What is one highlightable lesson you’ve taken from this experience that has proven super valuable on your journey forward?

Be yourself. I know that sounds super lame but it’s proven to be the single most useful thing in my life. There are ALWAYS outside factors telling you you can’t do something or putting you down for trying to be positive. Being able to mute all of the negativity in the world and just focus on why I’m on this earth has helped me significantly. I’m here to be an umbrella for artists from all of the crap raining down on them. Nothing anyone says to me negatively will affect how I do business or how I act.

You say that the Hip Hop culture in NYC is what influenced you to take a step away from general business and toward the music industry as an artist. Can you describe what you find unique about NYC’s Hip Hop scene and how it inspired you to change course? What venues were you hanging out at and what NYC-based rappers were you influenced by?

I grew up in a community where you drank 40’s in parks at night and freestyle rapped. That culture of being yourself, joking with friends, and being 100% authentic made me fall in love with the craft. I’d practice at home and truly became obsessed with working that part of my brain out. Of course there are other awesome Hip-Hop communities in the world, but none like NY. The grittiness, the authenticity, just nothing like it. Back then I wasn’t hanging at many venues, the real culture was in parks and at parties. I was heavily influenced by NY acts such as Big L, Jadakiss, and Nas.

You’ve dropped out of college three times – while you were experiencing these moments, did you receive a lot of societal push back? How did you deal with this? And would you give any advice to young people who might be going through the same thing right now?

Mute it all out. Ideate what’s on your heart/mind and execute on it. Put an actionable plan together and make constant strides to pursue that. College isn’t for everyone. I think society is starting to accept that. When I left school I knew what I wanted to do and was already doing it so there wasn’t any massive societal push back on me. The people in my life knew I wasn’t built for that kind of rigid learning. I’m someone who has always learned from doing.

You often go on the road with your artists when they tour – do you have any hilarious tour stories that you feel comfortable sharing?

O boy, haha! Recently, two of my clients got booked for some Canadian dates supporting a bigger Canadian Hip-Hop duo. To make it financially feasible we took 3 gigs in the same night! This included going to sound check 1, sound check 2, back to show 1, to sound check 3, back to show 2, and then back to show 3. We did a frat house party, a major festival’s after party, and a nightclubs late night party all in the same night. The next day we were supposed to fly to Edmonton for another big college festival but the school broke out in a Norovirus epidemic and had to cancel the festival. We couldn’t change our flights that late so we just booked a hotel at a Native American Casino/Hotel and gambled for 24 hours straight, haha.

What is one piece of advice that you have for musicians that you wish someone had given you when you were a young Hip Hop artist?

DON’T SIGN ANYTHING WITHOUT CONSULTING AN EXPERIENCED LAWYER. Even then, don’t sign anything purely on the basis of an exposure play UNLESS it’s so incredibly worth it, a trusted company, and the paperwork is fair.

I’d love to know more about your opinions on today’s industry climate. What platforms are you really paying attention to right now? What is happening that you don’t agree with and what are you ecstatic about?

Been paying a lot of attention to Spotify for the past couple years. Starting to pay attention to Tik Tok pretty heavily as well. I think that people often will focus on one release strategy and think it’s the key to success. Every service you implement on a release should be a piece of a broader strategy. For the most part, PR isn’t going to solely blow you up just like Spotify promo isn’t. Doing an influencer campaign, Spotify promo, video content, digital ad spends, PR campaign, etc as one built out plan is the key. That and consistency. We’re in an age where people get distracted non-stop. One piece of content isn’t going to engage a massive audience. Rolling content out frequently on a structured schedule gives you the best chance of feeding fans and potential audiences nuggets enough to be engaging them without pause.

What does your daily routine look like? And are there any disciplined practices you incorporate into your everyday life?

Wake up, get ready, feed my dog, go to work, shout at my employees, bother my artists, answer emails, answer calls, go to soccer, feed my dog, sleep. That’s about it these days, haha. As far as disciplined practices I incorporate into my daily life, I play soccer twice a week after work in a league. That’s my mental rehab from the murkiness that is the music industry. My team and clients know that’s the one time I’m offline.

Ultimately, what do you see for Innovo in 5 years? Even 10? And what sort of impact do you want it to have on the music industry long-term?

I think we’ll likely have two divisions of the business (much like we do now, but more complex.) We’ll have the management side which is headed by me with a team of managers and then we’ll have a digital marketing side which does what we do now (Spotify promo, roll out strategy, etc) but will also offer content creation, ad buying, influencer marketing, and more. We’ll be able to cross-pollinate artists on both sides to build more unique campaigns and pull services from each side to assist in bigger projects. As far as impact, just continuing to show (at a bigger capacity) that there are companies who care about the core of the industry: the music. The rest will figure itself out, but if we don’t feed that core, the industry will cease to exist.

You can follow Sam on Instagram as well as Innovo Management on both Instagram and Facebook. Learn more by visiting their website at https://www.innovomanagement.com/