For this month’s shesaid.so Member Spotlight, we are featuring award-winning journalist, researcher and entrepreneur Cherie Hu. Hu has been covering the nexus of music, technology and business for over five years. She runs the music business newsletter Water and Music and has bylines in Billboard, Forbes, NPR Music, Columbia Journalism Review, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Music Business Worldwide, Variety, DJ Mag and more. We spoke with Cherie about the future of newsletters, the difficulties of freelancing, and where new media is heading.
shesaid.so: What do you consider some of your greatest career achievements?
Cherie Hu: I think my greatest accomplishment to date is simply that I’ve been able to maintain a full-time freelance/independent writing business for my entire professional career so far, including two years of sustainably running my own company. Given the precariousness of the digital media landscape, especially amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, I feel extremely fortunate to be in a position where I can build a more entrepreneurial career around cultivating my own voice, as well as elevating other people’s voices and perspectives that wouldn’t otherwise see the light of day.
Thinking to specific milestones around my newsletter, I monitor the business side of things on a daily basis, and am really proud of its recent growth (we’re at around 1,300 paying members as of reading this article, versus around 200 members a year ago). But in terms of what really feels like an “achievement” per se, I realize I’m more motivated by reaching the right people than by reaching the most people. If I can consistently get my analysis and reporting in front of even just a few C-suite executives at top music companies, and/or if I inspire one new emerging artist or manager every week to think about the music industry in a different way, I consider that a success.
shesaid.so: Newsletters are growing in popularity, and you are the founder of your own newsletter, Water and Music. What do you like about the newsletter format, and where do you see the newsletter trend going?
Cherie Hu: It’s funny that something like email that has been around since the 1960s is now considered a new hot trend in media and technology. I think what feels “new” about email in the current climate, and what I appreciate about the format from the perspective of growing my own newsletter brand, is its immediacy and intimacy. Email allows you not only to speak directly to your audience one-to-one, but also to have much more transparency about whom your message is reaching and how they are engaging with that message compared to what you would otherwise get on social media. Because the nature of email distribution is much more intimate and lean-in — subscribers opt in themselves to follow a given newsletter, and each issue lands in their own inbox, which they’re checking multiple times a week if not every day — the quality of engagement is also much higher from the jump.
It might not seem like it, but the personal nature of an email newsletter — which can sometimes feel like reading someone’s journal — is also a major advantage for B2B and industry-facing media.
I think articles and conversations about the future of the music business can have more impact and reach more people when they’re less buttoned-up and more personable and accessible.
As for general newsletter trends, we’ve seen tons of well-known writers move away from legacy newspapers or magazines to start their own paid newsletter publications, often in the process making a higher equivalent annual income than they would have at their previous full-time jobs. I think this ongoing exodus and the inspiration it sparks will lead to a boon for niche digital media. Music is definitely part of this wave, with newsletters like First Floor (electronic music), Penny Fractions (the business of music streaming), Cabbages (hip-hop) and Music Journalism Insider (news, job opportunities and interviews related to music journalism).
In response, though, I think several larger publications will see the value that these writers see in their editorial independence and direct audience relationships, and try to lure these same newsletter writers back with a better job offering and more infrastructural support. Running your own newsletter is certainly freeing from a creative perspective, but you also have to front the bill for health benefits, editing, legal and accounting support and more — i.e. you have to act as the de facto CEO of your own business, which isn’t the right fit for every kind of writer. Forbes recently launched its own paid newsletter platform where writers receive a guaranteed minimum full-time salary and split additional subscription revenue 50/50 with the publisher. We’ll likely see more publishers experiment with these kinds of models in the coming months as they seek to compete on trust, a more important currency than ever in the modern media landscape.
shesaid.so: Have you ever made a mistake in your career that turned out to be an invaluable learning experience? Could you tell us about it?
Cherie Hu: There are too many to list… I did a bit of reflection recently and realized that all of the mistakes I’ve made in my career can be mapped to one or more of these four factors: 1) not trusting my gut and intuition; 2) procrastinating and sitting too long with my decisions; 3) being afraid to say no; and 4) general miscommunication. The learning experience, which is still in progress, is all about the value of being confident in what is best for yourself and communicating that knowledge transparently with others. Otherwise, the mutual empathy required for great creative or commercial collaborations is impossible to achieve.
shesaid.so: How would you like to make an impact on the music industry?
Cherie Hu: Generally, I’d like to open up people’s eyes not just to the trends that are happening in the music industry in the present, but also to what is possible in the industry’s future.
I’m most motivated by writing articles that encourage people to experiment and innovate, instead of being stuck in what are considered “industry-standard” ways of thinking and doing.
Countless other fields outside of music look to us to take the pulse on where culture is moving next, and I think we as an industry have to take that positioning and responsibility as innovators seriously, on the playing fields of both creativity and business.
I also hope to inspire other fellow women, Asian Americans and minorities generally to carve out their own paths in the music industry, and to show them how leaning into their fullest selves and identities is more of an asset in the industry than ever, not a liability.
shesaid.so: What are your tips for others starting out in your area of the industry?
Cherie Hu: In my opinion, as the music industry grows, so will the market for its media. It might not immediately seem that way, especially with several music-centric alt weeklies and indie publications closing shop in the past few years. But I think part of this decline is due to an overreliance on business models that inherently treated media and criticism as a commodity — whether through click- and ad-driven success benchmarks, or through private equity firms buying out local newspapers and wringing them dry.
I might be biased, but I think now is an amazing time to build alternative kinds of media companies whose content and business models inherently fight against commodification. In other words, the media companies that thrive are highly specific and insightful about the audience they’re speaking to in a way that competitors can’t replicate, and then monetize those connections in a way that optimizes for depth and quality of engagement.
With that in mind, probably the most cliché-but-true tip I have for those who want to carve out their own path in music media is to own a niche that you’re passionate about.
Read all the major music and entertainment publications out there voraciously, study what they’re good at — and then pick up on their blind spots. What angle on the music business is nobody writing about, but is hiding in plain sight right beneath our feet?
For me, when I first started out around 2015, a major blind spot in music-business journalism at the time was consistent coverage of startups and technology. There are tons of other potential examples: for instance, I would love to see some more independent music writers focus on the evolving business of songwriting and producing, or on specific revenue channels like livestreaming and merch, or on creative trends in specific geographic regions that are “trending” in the industry right now but tend to be misunderstood or misrepresented (e.g. Africa, Asia, Latin America). Above all, chase the perspectives that cannot be commodified.