Alumni Spotlight: Shelby Scumitzky at Epic Records

What was your career path from UCLA to your current role? How did you get into digital marketing?

It all started kind of out of the blue. An opportunity came up when I was at UCLA to work with a company that was doing a college tour for HTC while they were rolling out a new VR system (the VIVE). I was their college rep for UCLA and helped them put on demos for students on campus. Essentially my job was to get people in the room. We created a Facebook group, put up flyers, we set up in front of Boelter with a pop-up to get people signed up and after the first day, we were booked for a week. The whole experience only lasted a month and I loved it. 

After that, I got an internship at Fullscreen. They are a multichannel network so they own a bunch of Youtube channels and they work with the creators of those channels to make the content on top of branded content and original series. I worked with the Executive Assistant to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and I had a really weird role there. Basically, they put me in a rotating position with a couple of weeks in each department. I worked with the events team and we went to VidCon. After that, I did a couple of weeks with their video team then their scripts people and a couple of weeks with their brand team. The comprehensive experience at Fullscreen really allowed me to figure out what I liked and what I didn’t like. What I learned was that I really didn’t like anything I did there except for social media marketing. This was almost more valuable than having an experience where I was neutral. I had the awareness to say  ‘Wow, I really do not want to do this’ then I was free to pursue something else. 

In between those internships, I joined Bruin Life and worked on their marketing team. I got experience on-campus in social media marketing and it was a great experience because, at the time, most students didn’t even know UCLA had a yearbook. We got to do a lot of cool activations on-campus to put it in front of people. That, combined with the job at HTC, put enough on my resume to get me the position with Fullscreen. 

Coinciding with the Fullscreen internship, I was a campus rep, again, for CNET. CNET is essentially a publication that does tech reviews, coupons, basically anything and everything to do with technology both online and in print. They also wanted to get a younger audience so it was me and one other person that were campus reps who the company helped put on activations on campus as well. We went to all the basketball games and would post up on Bruinwalk and give away demos for new phones, VR pop-ups, little things like that. I honestly thought I would go into tech for a while since I was really into the digital space at this point.

So music kind of came out of nowhere.

How did your UCA experience help shape your success?

It was a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work. I joined UCA during my freshman year and I went to the ‘Meet the Board’ workshop. One of the members on the board was senior Tori Owens who had interned in music (and who ended up working at Epic Records!). At the time I thought “Oh, you work in music tell me about it” and I didn’t really think it was an option to be honest. I thought “Oh, people just work in music, that just happens for some people, and I am interested in that but there’s no way that could happen for me.” So I interviewed to be on the board for UCA and she was part of the interviewing team that helped me to get the Director of Recruiting position. 

It was a weird thing where I made this connection with Tori and we kept in touch after she graduated and went on to work at Epic. Then fast forward three years later, I am starting my senior year at UCLA and I was looking for internships. It was this black hole where you submit your resume to Sony Music internships and wait forever! You never know if you will get a response. That summer heading into senior year, someone from Epic Records reached out to me. They wanted to interview me for a marketing internship. So when I went in for the interview, the girl that interviewed me had looked me up on Instagram and saw I knew Tori, who had worked at Epic for the last two years at that point. When she asked how I knew Tori, I told her we met at UCLA through UCA and now I am on the board. 

I started as a marketing intern and it was fun. I liked being at Epic and working in music but I felt like it was a little bit off in a way I couldn’t quite describe. I loved being there but the work that I was doing I wasn’t crazy about. Still, I would always walk around the office asking people if they needed help with anything because I was so so so eager. I loved being there and I wanted to do everything I could. So one day my supervisor’s co-worker asked me for help with this report. We put out this report every week with updated social analytics and growth trends for the week for all of our artists. So she handed it off to me and I did it in like an hour and a half because I was really into it. When I handed it back to her she was surprised because I was super quick with it. That report became mine from then on! 

The last day of my internship, she came over and as I joked that I didn’t want to leave she laughed and asked if I wanted to stay and intern with her over in digital. I said yes, of course, I do!

What does your day-to-day look like?

My position is currently a little bit in flux. For some background, when I got hired I took the position as an assistant to Lisa Kasha who is the head of the digital team at Epic Records. I am technically her assistant but I have continued to work really hard and have since started taking on a lot more responsibilities. Since she knew me from my internship she knew I was good at coming up with ideas, making social copy and assets, etc. So I kind of have this weird position now where I am an assistant but I also have my own projects. So my day-to-day is half and half.

Half of it is very administrative like answering phone calls, scheduling, updating our socials, managing our finances. The other half is project management. Being in touch with managers and coming up with and executing digital plans. Making sure we’re on track for upcoming projects and we have rollout plans ready for either projects that are coming out or ones that are already out to make sure they’re growing at a good pace. The way that our team is set-up is we have a roster of artists split up across five members. I work on a certain number of acts and my boss works on another list but we work together on some of them and she’ll work with other members of the team on some of them. I kind of assist everyone!  

The day-to-day is definitely difficult to run through. For example, this week we had Meghan Trainor announce her album on Wednesday at 6am so there was some scrambling. We had to make sure we had everything ready to go such as assets to post, copy, making sure fans had a good experience on her website and all sorts of little things. On top of that, Ozzy Osbourne released his first single in ten years. That came out of nowhere, and then we had to make sure management was happy, they had content to post and everything went smoothly. So that’s kind of my job — make sure things run smoothly for everyone.

What has been your greatest career challenge and how did you overcome it?

Honestly, my biggest challenge while I was in school was getting my foot in the door and figuring out what I wanted. Especially if you are a comm major, UCLA doesn’t always do a great job of helping you figure out where you want to take that. How I overcame that challenge was mostly just doing everything. Trying to put my fears aside instead of questioning if this will be the right choice for me and just taking every experience that came my way. Even if that meant I was working two jobs and an internship at the same time. I was putting everything into these experiences just because I needed to figure out what I wanted to do. So I think it was putting my own personal prejudices aside of what I “should” be doing and just doing “it” if that makes sense.

What advice would you give to members of UCA who are interested in this field?

I think there are two parts.

One, as far as getting your foot in the door, as much as people say this and it’s kind of corny, but it really is about who you know. I hate saying that because I remember hearing that and thinking “Ok, well I don’t know anyone, so what do I do?” but, there are A TON of workshops, speaker series, shows -- all these opportunities put on by people in the industry. I wish I would have known that as a student because now that I am on the other side I see them all the time and they’re available to the public most of the time. Don’t be afraid to go, because I definitely was, but no one is going to turn you away because you are curious. They can even help people who are trying to figure out if it’s the right place for them by learning a little bit more if what these people do is a good fit for them. 

There are a lot of great Instagram accounts like Women in Music and hermusicclub. Those are both female-centric but there are a lot of other industry-centric accounts that post as well as companies like Youtube that put on workshops all the time. There are Facebook groups that post about things too and I would say that like you kind of just have to keep your eye out because it’s not centralized. Also, the music industry club at ucla (micatucla) has a lot of great workshops you can go to. 

The second part is once you do get an internship, offer your assistance to EVERYONE. You will start learning people’s names, you will start learning exec’s names, you will start learning about how the company works on a wider scale rather than just doing the jobs that are put in front of you and calling it a day, which is sometimes what people fall into because they are juggling a lot and they just want to do a good job at what they’re doing. I think one of the best things I did as an intern was asking the publicity, A&R, and radio teams what I could do for them. I made myself integral to the company so they didn’t want to throw me away because I was helping everyone. When I started working there I knew exactly what to do and how to do it because I had already become part of the company!