Hello, everyone. We are absolutely thrilled that you chose to spend a few minutes of your day with us. It has been well over a week since we ran any interviews with our friends in the writing community, but that finally changes this afternoon with the official return of the Blogger Spotlight series. This blog exists to promote the future of the music industry, and to do that we need input from people like you and your music-loving friends. If you have any questions about the content in this article, or if you have an artist you would like to see featured on this blog, please contact james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
H: Hello there! Please take a few moments to introduce yourself to our readers:
MB: Hi, I’m Mariam (but you can call me Mary), a 22 year-old settled between Paris, France and Brussels (Belgium). I aim to live positively and I’m the co-founder and Editor for Plug-In, which is a European based web magazine.
H: Thank you for joining us, Mary. It’s an honor to have you take part in this series.
MB: Well, thank YOU, the pleasure is all mine!
H: Before we get into your work now, I want to learn a little bit about your history with music. When you think back to your earliest memories, what visions of music comes to mind?
MB: I think the earliest memories I have with music involved me, dangerously playing with my father’s vinyls and his old record player. I would listen to Michael Jackson, Supertramp, Simon and Garfunkel and The Beatles (who are still one of my favorite bands to this day). Later, I discovered how to expand my music horizons with my aunt who used to take me to the annual opening concert of the national philharmonic orchestra. Both of my parents listened a lot to French classics in the car, so I had a lot of Joe Dassin every day while going to school or during our travels. In my early teens, I finally discovered the world of the Internet and rock music. I was a huge fan of Green Day, Blink 182, Good Charlotte, Sum41…The first record I’ve bought myself was Avril Lavigne’s ‘Let Go’. I was about 13 I guess.
H: We ask everyone this question, but I promise we will have a few more unique ones in a matter of minutes. Can you tell us the first concert you ever attended? Bonus points if you include an early ‘fan girl’ story.
MB: I grew up in Morocco and concerts weren’t a thing back then (except for a very few particular artists only “adults” liked at this time). However, we had this great folkloric multicultural festival called “Mawazine” in my city and I enjoyed a lot getting there and listening to World music. But the first real concert of an artist I actually knew was probably Juanes’ (at this same festival). And I can tell you, it was a bloody great one! For the fangirl story, we were standing first row and it was the first few months after Juanes did cut his hair and we were completely obsessed with the “new and handsome him”.
However, the first concert of a band I loved and listened to for years was however Green Day’s in Antwerp (Belgium). From 2005 onwards, I’d watch their DVD Bullet In A Bible almost on a weekly basis and knew it by heart. Attending their show felt like a lifetime achievement!
H: Having an interest in music is pretty common, but taking it upon yourself to launch a blog and promote bands free of charge is a fairly unique trait. When did you first realize you wanted to be more involved in the world of music?
MB: I always had a drive in discovering smaller bands no one knew about, back to the good old myspace days.
When I moved to Paris, I started going to a lot of concerts, but it was mostly “big ones” such as Muse, 30 Seconds To Mars, Green Day, etc. But then I started discovering more and more smaller and younger bands and therefore attending smaller shows, that felt very special and intimate. I guess I fell in love with this environment and eventually started seeing those people as regular people that are passionate about what they do, no matter what it takes. I remember Madina Lake / Young Guns tour fairly well for that. I would stay at the venues after the shows and have a chat with the bands and other people out there. At this point, I was just happy to be able to talk with people who performed music I enjoyed listening to and it made me want to talk about them to my friends, make them listen to those bands. I didn’t really realize what was happening, but looking back, I think that’s where it all started.
However, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago, when I started befriending people who were actually “in/from the scene”, witnessing their challenges and their struggles, that I realized that was a world I wanted to be part of.
H: Did you have any writing experience prior to the launch of Plug In? If so, where?
MB: Yes I did and I couldn’t launch something like Plug-In without those previous experiences to be honest. A long time ago, I wrote a (very) few pieces for a web magazine (madmoizelle.com) which didn’t focus on music, but had a music column. Basically anyone could contribute, but not everything was approved (which I can understand, when you’re looking for quality). It’s quite a big publication in France, so when the album review I submitted was approved, I felt really overwhelmed and proud of myself and thought maybe this could be something I’d like to do more.
But what took me to Plug-In was the previous website I was writing for. Sadly and for various understandable reasons it doesn’t exist anymore, but I’m glad I’ve been part of it for its last year of existence, because it taught me a lot and helped me “get in there”. I started off as a news contributor, then I got the chance to review records prior to their release, review show and eventually conduce interviews. I think that’s where things opened up to me because that’s how I started networking. To this day, I’m still working with these people I met thanks to this! I ended up being the chief editor for this publication and I can’t thank the people who trusted me in the first place enough.
I’ve always liked writing, whether it was about music or politics and I wanted to be a journalist when I was at high school (in the end I did something completely different).
H: How about education wise? Did you study journalism or any kind of communication in school?
MB: Not at all, I studied HRM at school (I’m currently finishing my masters degree in that field). Maybe it helped me at least for the communication part. Everything else I acquired was from the aforementioned experiences.
I really do think that working in the music field doesn’t necessarily require a university diploma dedicated to it, even though it probably helps and get you started maybe quicker because you already have an overview of this environment, contrary to people who never had anything to do with it. If you’re autonomous and motivated enough, you can make it. Get involved, meet people and get things done.
With that being said, I know I still have a lot to learn.
H: Okay, let’s dive into the reason we first began speaking: Plug In. Please tell us the origin story behind the site’s existence:
MB: We had already considered the idea of launching something music related where we could promote bands a couple of years before Plug-In was born but it was never anything concrete. Plus there were already a lot of websites of this kind at this moment and we didn’t want to be another number among the masses. At the same time, standing out from the others isn’t an easy thing to do, especially when this is not your primary job and all of your time isn’t dedicated to it. This is also why we took our time to figure things out and decide if we really wanted to involve ourselves in such a project. We eventually did and taking time to set concrete goals was probably the best decision we made, because this is the reason we managed to stay consistent and faithful to our original ideas.
What we wanted to do in Plug-In was – besides the classic news / reviews / interviews – to create a space where people can:
1. Express themselves
2. Discover new music
3. Give exposure to the hard working people out there who doesn’t get the exposure they deserve
Number 3 is something I care very much about, because somehow, media keep on givingattention to the same (and few) bands out there that are trending or buzzing every year or so. Some of them deserve it, others don’t. Or at least not as much as they do, but the thing is that it’s always about the same ones. Why is everyone bragging about those 10 same bands whether it is on the radio, the tv or online? I don’t really know and probably never will, but it works, so I can understand why publications are fighting to get the best coverage from these bands. I’m not here to say what’s good and what’s not either, but I do believe that there are a lot of bands out here, especially in Europe that deserve just as much recognition as Pierce the Veil or Bring Me The Horizon (no judgment here), but are still struggling only to play a 10-people venue in their hometown.
Too many people keep on focusing only on American, international acts (or from the UK when they’re a bit more open), while we also do have so many great artists also in mainland Europe. When they get to locally support those bigger acts I just mentioned, I still see way too many people ignoring them or voluntarily skipping their set because, you know, “they’re only locals”. Why wouldn’t anyone outside the Netherlands know about 18 Miles who are just as good as The Ghost Inside? I can’t tell, but I know for sure that it’s a shame.
On a more positive note, this tends to change. The process is still slow in my opinion, but I think there’s progress regarding this.
I could do a whole essay on the subject, but to keep things short, that’s mostly what we want to do with Plug-In : contributing to those hard-working artists’ exposure and showing the world that our scene is rich and deserves support to stay alive!
H: It’s hard to believe you have only been active for about 14 months, but I guess that goes to show that hard work pays off. Congrats on that. What has been the most exciting development as far as growth and exposure are concerned?
MB: Thanks! As cliché as it may sound, hard work definitely pays off! Plug-In is the result of long sleepless nights I had a year and a half ago, revising both my pre-masters finals and building the project. But that was only the beginning.
I think we had three major levels of excitement. First exciting step happened only within 6 months following the launch, when we earned our first press accreditations and interviews. It proved us that the past months we entirely dedicated to creating interesting and valuable content completely were not a waste of time and gave us even more motivation to keep up with the hard work, because industry professional trusted us and it was our role to prove them that they were right. We started receiving press releases and promo material and that’s when the amount of work nearly doubled.
Second level of excitement was when we started building our very first long-term partnerships with bookers and promoters (shout out to One Heartbeat Productions!). We’ve been doing this in two different countries and the list keeps growing. That’s also when the team started growing.
Third – and probably my favorite – was when professionals I reached for various purposes started giving me extremely positive feedback about our work before actually answering to my requests. Even better : Those who understood what was Plug-In really about and highlighted those traits in their response. It just feels absolutely amazing and overwhelming to realize that you’re slowly but surely reaching your goals, despite the hard times and persistent lack of feedback.
H: How would you describe Plug In and the content found within its pages to someone who has never visited your site before?
MB: Plug-In is a space dedicated to alternative music of all kinds, where we aim to put in the foreground young and local talents, rather than the same info about bigger acts everyone else talks about already. If you want to discover new music, especially in Europe, I suggest you to have a look at our website. Plus, we tend to give the floor to the people and the fans of music so they can share with us their experiences (see the ‘Crowd Report’ feature). Finally, we would like to make people aware that all the music they listen to and shows they go to wouldn’t be possible if industry professionals were not here and that aside from the bands and managers there are a lot of hard working people dedicating their days to make all of this work. They’re often put in the background, while their work is more valuable than any other (see our ‘Guest feature’). It’s interesting because we know for fact many of our young readers would ideally work in the music industry, without having a proper idea on what it is about, really. We’re only getting started with these features though, but we have interesting content lined up already!
H: What were your initial goals for Plug In and how have they changed, if at all, over the last year?
MB: Like I said before, our initial goals were mainly promoting the local scene and everything around it that keeps it alive, as well as the sense of sharing stories. These goals haven’t changed, however, things evolved positively as we initially had trouble getting to this point and making people aware that our website wasn’t just another news-proving web magazine. Things have only kicked off for real towards this direction recently and we couldn’t be more happy about that. I would like to say that without the help of some very supportive friends, it would probably have been way more difficult for us to reach this level this early in the process. We celebrated our first birthday two months ago and we couldn’t believe how far we’d come already. We’re still far from our ultimate goals but I think we’re getting there!
H: How many people do you consider staff at Plug In?
MB: At the moment, we’re 10 on board with 4 people guesting for us from time to time. But we’re constantly looking for more!
H: Are you currently looking for new writers? If so, how should people go about submitting their application?
MB: Absolutely! You have to know first that it does take time and even though we’re really cool and don’t put much pressure on our contributors, we need to get things done properly. Meaning here that we have deadlines to meet and feedback to give. Sometimes you’ll have time to do your task, other times you’ll be on the rush. But if you’re part of the team, you have to show some dedication for your work. We promise it’s always exciting and Plug-In is like a family!
To apply at Plug-In, we created a simple application form that can be found on our website.
Once we review the application, we usually contact you within a week to discuss in more detail.
For any further questions, you can always email us : contact@plugin-mag.com
H: What advice would you offer someone who may be reading this and considering their own pursuit of a career in music journalism?
MB: Journalism in general (and particularly) music journalism is a hard place to get into and it’s not easy to make a living out of it when you begin. I’m not a specialist, but from what I know and experienced, the key to succeed is to persevere, never lose motivation and work hard. You might not be the best writer ever, but you shall write as much as you can in order to develop your skills, your writing ability and your style. I think developing an identity as a writer helps a lot and will only value your work and attract the others. Think ‘these people at so and so publication need me more than I need then and I will prove it to them’. Also, to achieve this, I think you really have to be passionate about what you do.
Networking is also something important in music journalism and it’s important to socialize, get to know people and stay in touch. Be aware of what’s going on and don’t hide behind your desk.
H: When it comes to receiving music for review and feature consideration, which distribution platforms do you prefer and why?
MB: When I review music, I like to be able to listen to it anywhere at any time, which means that I mostly prefer being able to download it. I know some people don’t mind streaming it on Soundcloud and such platforms, but even though I do also enjoy listening to music this way, when it comes to reviewing it, I’d rather not be on my computer because I easily get distracted and lose focus on the music. Also, I never spend as much time on my computer as I need to for reviwing music. Therefore, I like Haulix a lot and I don’t say this because I’m answering to your questions. I’ve been using Haulix for the past 3 years and a half and that’s still where I enjoy receiving promo music. Aside from the fact that I can download my music on it, it keeps things organized by expeditor, due dates are visible and it’s all simple and clear. Also, special mention to the rating / submitting link it features, allowing us to directly submit our reviews instead of emailing back everyone and sometimes getting lost and forgetting to do so.
H: Have you taken any steps to monetize your efforts on Plug In? If so, what are you they? Do you have plans to expand those efforts in the future?
MB: Not really and money has never been a goal in the first place. I often got asked this question when I started, but this is something I didn’t have in mind and still don’t. For now, I want to focus on the content I provide and strengthen the website before actually thinking any further.
H: Looking towards the future, what are the biggest challenges you face as a side as far as growth and continued development are concerned?
MB: Being able to dedicate time to this project is my biggest goal, personally. As for the team, I think we all want to keep Plug-In alive as long as possible and reach our initial goals on a bigger level, reach even more people and help them interact as much as possible. Ideally, I would like to work with a wider team, both in terms of number and localization. I’d also like to work with more specialized people, because we don’t all listen to music of all kinds, nor have highly developed communication skills and I think the more we’ll expand, the more we’ll feel this need. At the same time, we’re very proud we managed to make all of this work without major experience beforehand and the feeling of achievement would only be greater if we progress all by ourselves.
H: What is your personal career goal?
MB: I’m currently involved in a HRM degree. After my current internship, I’d like to work in that field at an international firm. Ideally, I’d love to conceal both my specialty and my love for music by working at a music-related company.
I can also consider after working and saving money for a few years, transiting exclusively into music and being my own boss but for now, I don’t have a concrete plan in mind but who knows what happens?
H: If you could change one thing about the music industry, what would it be?
MB: I would like people to stop thinking it’s easy. I would like people to stop thinking bands are rich and owe them everything. In a perfect world, I’d also love to see the more deserving people succeed. In Europe, I’d like people to acknowledge the existence of great talents locally, the alternative scene to grow and expand so bands are able to play to more than two people and their tour mates.
H: It seems we have reached the end of our time together. Before I let you go, are there any final thoughts or observations that you would like to share with our readers?
MB: There’s one last thing I would like to add, indeed. If you’re really passionate about music and your absolute dream is to be part of it, then be confident, work hard and make it happen.
See that band you love? They all split their time between writing, rehearsals, promotion, jobs and their own personal issues but they didn’t give up because they didn’t have anymore time left to chill or to sleep and that’s what makes a difference between those who succeed and those who don’t. Regarding what I do, I’m tired of people thinking I have a lot of free time only because I run a website of this kind on a daily basis. The truth is that ever since I started Plug-In, I went through one full time internship, two university semesters and therefore two sessions of finals, a part time job and now another full time internship. Did I stop working for my website? No. Did I stop having a social life? No. Did I failed my education? No. To all these people complaining about having to go to school or whatever else any other human does anyway and not being able to fulfill their dreams my point is : have you even tried? I don’t think so.
You don’t go anywhere if you give up before even getting started. Be confident, be strong and get started, that’s the only way you can achieve your goals.
Also, thank you for reading this, I hope I caught the attention of at least a few of you. If you want to join us, you’re more than welcome to do so and details can be found somewhere above this.
And last but not least, thank you James and Haulix, keep up the great work!
