MEGAN THELE

During the spring 2020 semester, I was able to gain experience with marketing and public relations in various parts of the music industry. My internship was based at the Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma (ACM@UCO), where I aided with blog posts, brochure rewrites and various tasks. Alongside this, I also worked with a small local venue, The Paramount Room, and an indie record label, Burger Records. In the months before lockdowns shut down the live music industry, I aided The Paramount Room with social and branding strategy, did a social media audit and started to organize shows for March - June. In this time, I was also tasked with pre-release research for Burger Records artist Part Time's upcoming album. This research included a thorough past press report, media contact list, and the beginnings of a press release and release schedule.

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Although many plans from the first half of my internship were not able to be implemented, I was still able to gain important insight into how small venues and indie labels operate and handle unexpected interruptions. Below is a sample of the assignments I worked on for each facet of the internship, although many tasks went beyond print. While this semester was not what I had imagined it would be, the unexpected lessons along the way were valuable to my understanding of industry resilience, crisis management and innovation on the fly.