Member Spotlight #22: Saidah Blount, Senior Manager, Global Brand at SONOS, Inc.
New York City adoptee Saidah Blount shares her experience entering the music industry and her hopes for the future of music and culture. [Interview by Alix Vadot]
A true music fan, shesaid.so member Saidah Blount made her own way up the ladders of the industry. Senior Manager, Global Brand, at SONOS, Saidah never thought her involvement in music and culture would go beyond attending concerts and geeking out on new music.
“I didn’t feel like I was going to ever have a career working alongside music and culture. That’s such a big concept for somebody that’s coming out of the Midwest… For me, the concept of moving to a big city and working along bold names — that wasn’t something that 14 or 15-year old me would have thought was realistic.”
Growing up in a family that saw intellectual prowess as sacred, Saidah has always valued what she describes as “being bookish”. Her curiosity and her family’s tendency to prefer academia led her to study political science in undergraduate school. The move to New York City that changed her career path was, in fact, motivated initially by an enrollment in graduate school to study public policy and political theory. Though she has now moved on from the world of political science, Saidah admits that parallels can be drawn between that world and that of the music industry.
“To quote Q-Tip, one of the rules of the music industry is that it really is shady. You kind of have to figure it out — you have to know how to maneuver amongst people, speak their language. […] There’s no barriers within mixing business and pleasure. That’s very much like politics.”
And that’s not all that politics taught her.
“Politics taught me to read people very well. I think that has served me well in working with music. I’ve always tried to maintain a personal belief and a reputation of not being shady. […] You need to be able to read situations in which you’re getting yourself involved with. Do you want to work with this artist? Do you get a good feeling from them or are they just doing this for the wrong reasons? Is this label really going to help you out? Is this outlet going to cover your art fairly? Those are the kinds of moments that you need to know and answer quickly and politics really gave me those tools and guidelines.”
Even during her time as a self-described “nerd”, Saidah constantly surrounded herself with music. Starting with going to concerts when she was younger, she eventually joined her college radio station, which brought her to New York City to represent her school in the CMJ Festival. “That’s when I fell in love with the idea of ‘Oh, I can do this as a job, I can live in a big city working in music.’” When she moved to NYC, she confirmed this: “I started just taking advantage of the city’s nightlife and bouncing in and out and finally realized ‘This is what I really want to do day to day, even if I don’t get the ‘success’ that I wanted.’ I just wanted to be surrounded by the music.”
As with any risky career move, the switch from politics to the music industry did not come without its challenges, though Saidah is an example to us all regarding how to overcome such challenges. In some ways, entering the music industry after college meant having to start over. “It was an absolute 360 — from going to writing theses all day to literally going in handing out flyers and materials and being at the very bottom of the rungs. It was hard. It took a lot of pounding the pavement and meeting people and shaking hands.”
Saidah describes the people she met in those early years when she first arrived in New York as some of the best friends she has today. “We were young scrappy kids that were probably broke and eating Ramen. We would all go to music industry parties and that’s how we got to eat and drink for free — because back in the day, they used to always serve food. So that was our dinner taken care of,” she says. She describes those days as intense networking, helping each other out, and learning to recognize faces. “We all saw each other at concerts. That was the big thing. we all went to the same shows together.”
For Saidah, socializing and networking did not come naturally. She pins that to her having been “bookish” and growing up relatively sheltered. “I was used to that world of always thinking critically and spending a lot of time in front of books. Being bookish and being with myself a lot in my own thoughts. But to be involved in music culture — you’ve got to be out there, you’ve got to be social. Growing up, I was a very shy kid. […] In New York, I really had to put myself out there a lot more and literally take my head out of the books.”
But Saidah cherishes the era she came into and that it meant more effort.
“There was much more of that desire to want to investigate and be in the scene. You had to put a little bit more legwork into it. So you knew when you saw those repeating faces that you saw over and over at shows that those were probably real music fans that were hustling hard and hustling out to shows like you were. […] Back in that day, you had to read up on the folks, and then had to pick up a copy of the Village Voice and find out where they’re performing. Then schedule your time, take your car. It wasn’t as easy as just hopping into an Uber. Sometimes, you went to sweaty little dirt boxes on the outer fringes of Brooklyn. I feel very lucky that myself and some of my colleagues came up in that time.”
Being a woman of color in that time, according to Saidah, had its own effects. Often finding herself to be the only woman of color at some of the shows she attended, Saidah shares that she felt “kind of like a unicorn”. She says, “There weren’t a lot of people that looked like me, so I’m sure that was of interest to a lot of people. Like, ‘Hey, who’s this girl and how does she know about that?” It makes people want to know you. So I got to take advantage of a lot of things overall.”
Among those things Saidah was able to take advantage of, was the immense variety of artists performing in the city. “It was kind of the golden era of a lot of those artists that you consider iconic now. […] New York had a spirit of just coming together — and this is pre-9/11, when a lot of people felt comfortable going to and fro to different types of shows and different neighborhoods, and coming together. I think those periods of the Internet and 9/11 did change a lot of things in New York, and that a little of that magic did disappear. I hate being that person that’s hating in the midst of change. Cities always change, but I feel like there was something special — it fostered a spirit of invention and creativity that I don’t always feel is here anymore.”
She hopes today’s young people will have their own version of that magic, and is cognizant that she might have to step back like others did before her to allow for that transformation.
“Really great things tend to come out of awful political times. I came up in the late 90s — not all those times were really great for a lot of people. And really beautiful music and art and creativity came out of it. we’re kind of facing some of those things now and I’m hoping that some beautiful art and creativity could be at least a positive that comes out of it.”
Two pieces of advice Saidah shares for young people who might want to follow this career path:
- Find a mentor. “It’s really important to have somebody of a similar background that could offer advice or different perspectives or somebody that you can spitball ideas off of that you trust, that you know is looking out for your general growth. […] Take those moments, when somebody offers you an informational interview, take it. Information is key. And that person taking their time out of their day is invaluable.”
- Challenge yourself. “Push yourself forward and find as many ways to make yourself uncomfortable in situations as possible. I had to do that. A lot of people that know me would probably not think that I was a shy person but when I was child, I could not talk to other people. Being an only child, I was just used to hanging around my parents. [When I moved to a whole new region, a new coast], that nearly broke me. I didn’t know what to do. But it worked out for me. […] And same with moving to New York City. […] I put myself in an uncomfortable situation and made myself challenged. I would recommend that — sometimes you can get the beautiful benefits out of it.”
Although Saidah did not have one specific mentor as she describes above, she networked hard and constantly put herself out there. Today, her job allows her to be totally immersed in music and culture, working with colleagues with the same passion she has. She is grateful for SONOS, a company founded by and made up of music heads, that has fully invested in her vision. Still, she often finds it difficult to be the only one in the room. “The only of a lot of things. The only woman. The only black woman. The only black person. Sometimes being the oldest person in the room — that is a new one for me. […] It’s sometimes tough to think that you’re being undervalued or judged because of that.” Unfortunately, this means Saidah sometimes feel she has to ease back or slow down, an experience she describes as nothing less than frustrating.
In her new role at SONOS, Saidah gets to educate people on culture and sound and music discovery, bringing together, in a way, her passion for music and culture and her background in public policy. “I’m always inhaling new books about music, and documentaries, and different things like that. Now in this new role, I get to translate a lot of the stuff that is always bouncing around in my head and filtering in new artists and concepts and creative opportunities, into that experience via SONOS and our products.” Saidah says to look out for new things coming out of SONOS in 2020, which will reflect a lot of the work that she and her team have been working on. “I think it’s going to be really interesting.”
Saidah has hope for the industry. She recognizes that SONOS and others in the industry are trying, and realizing that there is a lot to be gained by having diversity in workplaces. She is particularly grateful to see that, today, she sometimes walks into rooms with all-women teams. Or teams with people from all over the world. “I think that music has always been a global language but now to see that global face put on every day, on video calls, on emails…you hear perspectives from people that are around the world. That is a big difference. […] Seeing the global nature of how music is spread and that we are a global culture has been really glorious to witness. That makes me really happy because listening with big ears and learning those new perspectives is always a healthy constructive way for all of us to grow as people.”
Saidah ended our chat with a note of gratitude for shesaid.so:
“I’m really happy that organizations like shesaid.so exist because I do think it’s very important that other women have a support system. I’ve been really lucky that a lot of really good girlfriends have come out of music but also just having women that I trusted in other industries as friends, that have been there, and have acted as a support system to push me through in those moments when I need it. I think it’s always really helpful and healthy for us to commune with other like-minded women in this day and age. So I’m really excited that shesaid.so exists. So thank you.”
Thanks so much to Saidah for her time and for sharing her thoughts with us for this interview.
