Daniel Trebejo-Ariza, WH ’24, Hayward, CA
This summer, I worked at Regalias Digitales, an independent music publishing company dedicated to representing local Bay Area artists and underrepresented Latinx artists. My role focused on auditing and registering clients’ songs across streaming platforms to ensure they were receiving the royalties they deserved. This was my first time working at a music company in-person, so I was both thrilled and nervous to finally meet other professionals in the industry.
Most days I worked from home, but when I went into the office, I loved being surrounded by music memorabilia and other coworkers jamming out to their playlists while they worked. I shared much time with Susan, who was in charge of the interns and helped train us and teach us about our varying tasks. Susan was key in helping me understand the financial aspects of the music industry I had yet to learn. I also worked alongside Josh, who was in charge of the company. Often, he would go over the analytics of the company, where we looked at revenue, views, and the most popular songs that we should be focusing on for the week. I was grateful to have someone like Josh mentoring me through all of this and sharing his knowledge with me, knowing he had taken many of the career steps I hoped to take. I learned a lot about his experiences managing other record labels, creating relationships with artists and other publishers, and the reasoning behind is decision-making when it came to the company,
Even throughout the onboarding process, I could tell how passionate the company was about ensuring that their clients were being paid their rightful royalties. Most of our artists are regional Mexican artists, who may not have much information on receiving all their digital royalties and the US publishing world. Regalias made it a key part of their mission to offer the best service to these artists by collecting their royalties from all around the Internet, which was the main part of my position. I got to learn about new artists, new styles of songs, and all the behind-the-scenes of releasing and promoting music. I am very grateful to the team at Regalias Digitales for sharing their wisdom and knowledge, as well as making me feel welcomed, valued, and part of the family!
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2023 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here.
