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Music Articles

What Social Makeup is Needed to be Successful in Music Culture? Ask VanJess.

Music
Jun 27, 2017

What Social Makeup is Needed to be Successful in Music Culture? Ask VanJess.

WORDS BY: JACQUELINE SCHNEIDER | FEATURED + LEAD PHOTO BY: MADELIENE DALLA

As music hits areas of culture, it attracts new ideas, people, technology, structural innovation, and chaos. A time tested product, music maintains top shelf relevance as the cultural marker and language of this generation. Music like any creative industry—is a business. With a model built largely on IP and entertainment, the recording industry is worth approximately $6.8B annually—15% of what Coca Cola spent on marketing alone last year. The music ecosystem is large and the communities are tight knit like any other cultural group with subcultures weaved in.

Anyone can enter music, there’s a low barrier and you don’t need a license. To prepare taxes or represent an athlete in America, you need a license—in music, you don’t even have to know how to spell or what a “bcc” on email is. The inherent inclusive nature of music as a form of art becomes much more narrow at the point of monetary pursuit in the wild west that is the music business in a digital age.

Writer and “Eduprenuer” Peter Baskerville explains the low barrier to entry very simply: “If the barriers to establishing a new business are easy to overcome, then the market is seen as having a low barrier to entry. If the barriers are very difficult to overcome, then the market is seen as having a high barrier to entry (i.e. a new airline business).” In other words, when an industry is easy to enter, there is less of chance you will be successful financially by the sheer number of competitors alone. The music business is in fact a penny business. You are literally collecting pennies on the dollar from digital streaming platforms, royalties, live shows, merchandise, and endorsements if you have all the pieces figured out. You are rubbing together pennies and maybe after a decade in the game, you and your team are eating. It’s a competitive business where money, lack thereof, and fame can turn people indecent or expose the indecency that was there all along. It’s not an easy place to live and you can get burnt out quickly from the grind. In a business based on relationships you quickly find out who the real ones are and try to keep them close. There are people you deal with strictly to do business and then there are the you’d-still-be-friends-if-you-didn’t-work-together homie, the girl you came up with, the executive who believed in you and opened a door, the promoter and agent who took a chance, the A&R that cared about culture—the list goes on.

Music is a social glue—a connector that draws in pieces of culture, race, gender, ethnicity, friendship and locale. Now that music is largely digital, it’s online where new communities are connected, built and grown.

Enter VanJess.

Two sisters who began their career on YouTube—singing, beatboxing, playing piano and covering popular songs—are the model for an internet generation built on a DIY mentality. Ivana and Jessica Nwokike, first generation Nigerian sisters grew up just outside of LA in Fontana after leaving their homeland at 8 years old. When you meet “the girls” (as close friends call them), you instantly feel at ease with an aura of kindness and decency swimming around you. You might expect this level of decency from sweet old church ladies—certainly not from twenty-something millennials in LA.

At sunset, over a glass of wine in my living room, I caught up with VanJess for the first time outside of a studio, restaurant, or nightclub. I felt like I was talking to old friends and we were catching up about life. The tone was interested, insightful, respectful, funny, and at times, heavy. I’d met Ivana first about a year ago, she’s the older sister—and you can tell—as she carefully sends non verbal cues to Jessica as she is telling a story about them. The girls take care of each other (and their parents) which you can tell is the source of VanJess’ inspiration and motivation to build a career in music pursuing what they love. As I speak in depth with Jess and Ivana, I can quickly feel that being self sufficient is not a choice for the girls, rather it’s something hard-wired from an early age. Their mom was a diplomat, their dad is a doctor, and the family is close. After quickly learning that work ethic is the backbone here, everything they’ve accomplished thus far makes more sense and seems to come so naturally for VanJess.

The two are confident-cool, smart, beautiful and most importantly, talented. As we got into our conversation, it was apparent these two had a special shared charisma and musical niche—think TLC meets En Vogue next year in space with a keyboard.


How many subscribers do you have? 

Jessica: Not that many subscribers nowadays…like, 350,000?

350 thousand?! 

Jessica: Yeah, but views-wise we have almost like, 50 million, just off the covers and stuff. But at the time, we started basically late 2008, Justin Bieber was still a Youtuber.

Ivana: He hadn’t even been discovered yet.

It was just a place to broadcast.

Jessica: Exactly. Like it wasn’t anything you could make money from, but slowly it seemed like people started to do that.

Ivana: And once Esmée Denters and Bieber got discovered and signed, that was 2009 I think, that’s when YouTube became something else for music.

Jessica: Yeah, and then a lot of people started doing covers, but the thing was, we started getting wind of it. We had that viral cover late 2009 that Perez Hilton had posted—and that was when he was super poppin’. But yeah, that was interesting for us because we weren’t industry kids, we didn’t have any experience with any of this. Random celebrities were tweeting about us when Twitter just started. Twitter literally began in 2009 and I just remember, Ashton Kutcher at the time had all these followers because he was one of the first people on Twitter, and then he tweeted the cover we did. And random people would shout us out.

Ivana: He was like, “En fuego,” it was a Jason Derulo cover.

Jessica: I don’t think it’s even public anymore. But the most random people, I think Rosie O’Donnell said something. At that time YouTube was the only social thing for video, there was no Instagram, so everybody was watching YouTube, so everybody saw us. And then it got even bigger in 2011—and I don’t think we had ever experienced that side of it—when we were more deliberate with the covers and more creative, when we did that 90s medley and the “Thinking ‘Bout You”/ Headlines” cover, that was when we started getting music people saying stuff.

Ivana: That’s when Worldstar would post us and managers started to hit us up.

When was that? 

Jessica: That was end of 2011.


Ivana and Jessica have been blessed with good examples—extremely hard working parents and family, an uncle they speak very highly of, and of course and a strong management team. The management duo consists of creative community strategist Joshua Bloom and Tunji Balogun—A&R at RCA and the man who has reinvigorated the music industry championing acts like Bryson Tiller, Khalid and Goldlink.

VanJess may not have “made it” by commercial standards quite yet (although they are well on their way), but what is clear is their tenacity and persistence to create from an honest and decent place—something that you cannot manufacture in this industry. The girls have broken the low barrier to enter the industry successfully, and have persisted to create a business and voice for themselves in music. The two have something special needed to succeed in any creative industry—a combination of talent and charisma, authenticity, inspiration, dedication and a commitment to something greater than themselves.

PHOTO BY: MADELIENE DALLA

For more on VanJess, check out their SoundCloud and follow them on Instagram + Twitter.