How did Noon Pacific come to life?

It’s made by a team of music lovers, out of Newport Beach, California. We put out daily and weekly music, while also curating music for brands, working on our clothing line, record label, and live series. My co-founder, Alex Givens and I just started collaborating one day—he’s an iOS developer as well. He helped build a newer version of the app that is already out, and the is the one you see today. He focuses on the tech development side of mobile and I do all of the curation. That is how we split up the roles. 

It’s the perfect balance.

Yes, it’s both designer, developer, and co-founder, which is fun. We’re both obsessed with the latest technologies and we are always trying to leverage with those to help these artists. We have our weekly mixtapes on the site from Monday-Monday. More than the typical blog, like Pitchfork or The Fader, where the premiered song will be at the top of the page for maybe twelve hours and then it is off the front page, we have them for one full week. They’ll gather maybe 2,000-5,000 plays, but then it is kind of useless. It is cool to say you are on The Fader but it does not attract plays—which is what most artists want.

Right. So how does Noon Pacific help?

All of a sudden we were able to create this tool that’s able to draw out 50,000-100,000 plays of a song and it’s able to gather a large group of fans for these artists.

That’s amazing, have you gotten direct feedback from artists who have thanked you when they realized that’s where they were getting all of those plays?

Yes, absolutely. It’s all tracked through Soundcloud’s API. Every week we get notes from at least half of the artists saying, “OMG, thank you so much. This is amazing!” That part is really fun—to be able to make an impact, especially on the artist who may have started the week with five hundred plays on their SoundCloud, they’ll get featured on New Pacific and end up with 50,000.

That’s really helpful to the artist’s trajectory.

Yeah, it is fun to be able to have that impact. As we saw that happening we brought on our advisor, James Heeley. Currently, he works at Backstage, and has managed the likes of Calvin Harris, Frank Ocean, and so many more. He’s seen all of the record label deals and he knows how un-artist friendly most record label deals are. So he turned the model on its head and launched a singles only, artist-friendly record label deal. In terms of associating with our brand, we give them PR support, and then push them out through Apple Music, Spotify, and all of the major platforms.

So when did the record label actually start?

It began in June 2016. The end goal is to have one single signed to New Pacific every week. So with every single mixtape, one of those songs would be one of our singles. We’ve launched eleven singles so far, with a bunch in the pipelines—it has been really fun.

You also have clothing and live sessions. Can you tell us a bit more about them?

For the live events, we weren’t happy with the “concert experience.” So this was our attempt to fix the online discovery experience. We wanted to creative beautiful and intimate events with the artists that we were finding. We didn’t want to do it at a traditional venue, we wanted to do it at the most beautiful locations in the world. Our first event was at Scribe Winery in Sonoma, California. That was our first go at it and we were able to replicate the experience in Brooklyn, New York at a rooftop winery last year.

The clothing is something that I eventually want to put more energy into to really solidify us as a lifestyle brand—but for now we everything bootstrap style, which is fun. We do on-demand printing and it’s been fun to leverage new ways of manufacturing for our fans, in addition to them getting a good product.

As far as the actual business, was being your own boss always something you set out to do or was it just a happy coincidence?

100% intentional—I’ve always wanted to be my own boss. My dad was an entrepreneur. The first experience I had down here in Los Angeles was not great and even though I learned a ton, I didn’t like the whole “boss” aspect and I knew for sure that I wanted to start my own thing. It just worked out that my side project was able to turn into my full-time gig.

Is there a dream project that you’re looking forward to working on? What’s coming up next?

Yes, I definitely would like to have some type of festival. I think it would be amazing to have the top 10 bands of the year and have a traveling festival—that would be the dream.