As part of our Horizon Future Leaders series of interviews, we are connecting with the music industry’s next generation of leaders to gather candid advice and insights into their career journeys.
This week, we caught up with Daniele Yandel, Senior Manager Of Member Operations at Merlin’s NYC office.
Drawing from her punk-rooted DIY ethos, Daniele emphasises how staying curious, sharpening your digital skills and keeping an eye on the bigger picture can set you up for success.
She highlights the importance of understanding revenue streams early and mastering catalogue management, showing how the sooner you grasp how catalogues work and can be monetised, the better!
Read the full Q&A with Daniele below 👇
What’s your current role in the music industry?
Senior Manager Of Member Operations at Merlin. Merlin is an organisation that licenses the music of many independent rightsholders who band together to license their rights as one bundle in order to get better terms.
I work on the member operations team. Once a deal has been negotiated, we work with the platform to get all the members onboarded and delivered into the deal, then help members get set up with whatever tools they need to operate effectively on the platform.
What does your general day to day look like?
I generally poke around on the rights and content management systems created by the different digital platforms we license and try to figure out how they work. Then when our members have questions about how to do things on this RMS or that CMS, I try to help.
I also work with our tech team to make sure the internal tools we’re building are intuitive and easy-to-use for our members.
What steps did you take early in your career to gain experience and build skills to get you where you are now?
I started a band with some friends in DC in 2012. I got lucky and the band took off, so we started a record label to put out our music, and as we toured more and met likeminded friends, we put out their music too.
The whole thing just kind of snowballed organically, and I just kept learning new things about music distribution and licensing along the way out of necessity.
What opportunities did you explore early on that were particularly valuable?
Coming from a very strong, well established punk community really helped me. I internalised the message early on that you can do anything yourself and was surrounded by a community that urged me to do so.
So rather than waiting for a label to ‘discover’ us and put out our music, our band did it ourselves. The learning curve was a bit steep as the music landscape was really in flux at that time, but the DIY ethos and self-reliance I learned were invaluable.
Has the opportunity landscape changed since then?
Yes, most definitely. Music rights are much more of a commodity than they were before. Mergers and acquisitions are playing a much bigger role in the indie music landscape and a serious consolidation of valuable catalogue has followed.
I do worry that this will make it less likely that weirdos like myself with strange backgrounds will find their way into the ‘professional’ music biz, but then again the market’s constant cannibalisation of the margins will probably offer a path forward to future freaks who are so inclined.
Are there any specific internships, projects, or initiatives that you would recommend to newcomers looking to pursue a similar role?
Dang, this is a hard one for me. My path to the music biz was winding and strange. I would just say, keep your eyes open to the opportunities before you and react to your environment. Don’t be so focused on your ‘goals’ that you miss the opportunities surrounding you.
What advice do you have for building and leveraging a professional network in the music industry?
Beats me, honestly – I’m terrible at this. Ummm, don’t be a jerk? That’s always solid advice.
How has the evolving digital landscape impacted your role, and where do you focus to stay ahead?
The growth and popularity of monetisation via fingerprinting of user-generated content has been good for me, since so much of that is organised via RMSes and CMSes, but that was just luck.
The best advice I’ve been given as I look at the industry and try to chart a path forward for myself is: stay on top of the news. Subscribe to all the relevant newsletters and Substacks for your industry, or corner of the industry, that you can.
Doing so has really opened my eyes to the bigger forces at play that would be easy to miss in my day to day work.
What trends or changes do you see on the horizon for the music industry, and how can early career professionals prepare for them?
I worry about the industry becoming too centered on recurring revenue streams. I think this invites treating catalogues like a safe, reliable place for investors to park their money, essentially as an alternative to mutual funds and other traditional investments.
Investor capital is obviously very appealing, but what happens when banks, investment groups, etc become even bigger players in the music industry, especially the indie side? I don’t want to see an indie label whose music I love become the next Red Lobster (iykyk).
This has really motivated me to learn as much as I can about these new valuation mechanisms and the companies behind these deals. I really want indies to be players in this game and not just the victims of it. It also has me always keeping an ear to the ground for alternative revenue streams outside of the models that currently dominate the market.
As for career prep, this means that people who understand how to work a catalogue will become increasingly valuable as companies – and the investors backing them – seek to earn as much revenue as possible off the rights they have acquired.
What’s one piece of advice you wish someone had given you at the start of your career?
Learn the tools you’ll need to use day to day, whether that be Airtable, Monday, Slack, Excel, Alteryx, Outlook – and get really good at them.
Fluency in the best software and tools will cut the time you need to accomplish a task enormously. Sometimes learning a new skill – say vlookups, how to write effective prompts for Gemini, etc – takes more time the first time you do it, but it will definitely save you time in the long run.