Ariel Hyatt: Providing Full Service
 By Allen Foster
Songwriter's Monthly
She's sharp, she commands respect when she
speaks, she's only in her mid-twenties and already
she owns a successful full-service music company,
yet she's a regular girl who loves the music first.
Heck, her company logo is even a coy caricature of
herself in her trademark skirt and boots. Who is
she? She's Ariel Hyatt and she's in control of your
career. Or, she could be if you let her.
How does a young woman survive in the often
brutal world of development, promotions, publicity,
and booking where a majority of a bad day can be
spent simply being hung up on?
Ariel explained, "Both my parents are
entrepreneurs. My mother is actually a best-selling
author, she has written a book called The Women's
Selling Game: How to Sell Yourself and Anything
Else. So I think sitting at the dinner table was the beginning of my education, just having this amazingly dynamic
mother who was creating things when women weren't really yet in the work force. I came into the world with an
edge. But it's not a do-anything-to-get-to-the-top, killer instinct type edge."
Hyatt has a smart, instinctive charm that gives her a definite advantage over her competition. For instance, one
of her ways of dealing with being hung up on isn't to get mad and bitter, it's to send the person who hung up on
her flowers.
In high school, Ariel became a huge ska fan. "I'll never forget the day in 10th grade when one of my girlfriends
slipped me a Toasters tape. It changed my life!"
Hyatt smiled at how interesting fate can be. "It's kind of ironic. . .When the lead singer of the Toasters, who runs
the record label that we work for, came out to the offices for a visit, he really came out to see if I might be the
right person for the job. Through the whole meeting he was looking at me with this really weird look on his face
and I was smiling and trying really hard to impress him. I had this baby company and I was only 23 years old.
Finally, he said 'I know you from somewhere. Where do I know you? This is killing me.' And I had to admit that I
was the teenager in the front row of every single ska show. It's great to work for your childhood heroes."
As far as Ariel's own performance background, throughout college Ariel was a singer in a touring all-female a
cappella group. "We would sometimes play in front of thousands of people," she noted.
Though most of her current bands have no idea that Ariel could jump up on stage and improvise a harmony, she
believes her touring years have brought her one step closer to really appreciating what her artists go through on
the road. "I've never spent more than two weeks in a van, but I know that it is not fun."
Hyatt started out strictly doing publicity. However, she soon realized a major benefit of working at an
independent record label, "I had the privilege of really watching what everyone in every department did," she
stated. "Unlike at a major label where you're sort of pigeonholed into the one thing that you do and you don't
understand what the person in the office next to you is doing."
Ariel realized that, as an independent label, she was part of this fantastic group of people who all seemed to
know every aspect of the business. She explained, "If the retail person was gone for the day, the promotions
department could step in and handle their job. Or, if the publicist was absent, someone from the computer
department could take the call and set up an interview. It was an amazing, symbiotic way of running a label."
Another stepping stone that helped Ariel on her way to having her own full-service music company was the fact
that at the label she originally worked for, they would have regular meetings where everyone shared what they
were doing with each other. It was a great way to see first-hand how all the separate branches of a label worked
together to achieve a common goal.
Once she learned how to do more than publicity, it just always made so much more sense for her to do
everything at once. "Also it's more fun to do more than just one thing," Ariel commented. "Publicity is wonderful.
It's interesting and fun, but it's the same cast of characters every time, and it's the same basic drill. You might
have a different band, but it's still leaving messages and sending lots of packages through the mail. If you book
the show, you're going to have a little more interest when you're publicizing it."
When asked if there was anything special she wanted to comment on, Ariel simply said, "This is what I do. I'm in
the music industry. There's sort of this pre-conceived notion that everyone in the music industry is a big jerk, but I
think a lot of people are just jaded and a lot of people have been mistreated. I'm trying to put integrity into a
place where a lot of people think it doesn't exist. Our place in the world is not to have phone wars every day with
writers, it's to say, 'Look at what we're doing. Look at what these people we represent are doing. This is
something that's special.'"
|
|