Finding The Fam in Music

What started out as an entrepreneurship project soon grew to become something much bigger and community focused. The FAM (The Free Artist Matchmakers) is a music industry community focused on building potential relationships and creating through collaboration. In its fruition, the emphasis was on how money could be made, building a brand and creating a community-based business. The FAM later became recognized as a club at USC and the focus shifted from a business to community growth mentality. Founder Aaron Raus was a Business major at USC at the time who double minored in Music Industry and Songwriting to build a connection within the music business.

One of ideas that inspired the creation was the age old adage, “Your network is your net worth." Raus has made a community from within USC to bring out the best in each member and produce great and lasting relationships in a common industry. He expressed that the real value within a community is the people and that each person could possibly be a passing relationship or they could become your business partner for the rest of your life.

“When there’s 100 people in the community and one person joins, that’s 100 new potential relationships.”

To further build on these connections, a mentorship program is in the works to pair recent alumni or established music professionals with current students as well as upperclassmen with underclassmen members within the club. As this community has flourished within USC, Raus hopes to finalize a model to start more chapters at other schools across the country.

These relationships emphasize collaboration and the idea that this pushes people to do their best. As Raus believes it “pushes them to learn and develop their individuality because they have to bring their voice to those collaborations and relationships.” This is something the music industry can benefit from as most work is seen as competitive and self-serving at times.

As an organization that puts an emphasis on building relationships in person, switching to online panels has been somewhat of a double-edged sword. It has created the opportunity to meet people from all different places and schools - some panels have had participants from Mexico and Australia. Raus has concentrated on having as many events, professional and social, prior to Covid because he believes face-to-face connections are best to make more meaningful relationships. To offset this lack of personable meetings, The FAM has used the Zoom breakout feature to separate into intimate groups for a space to introduce themselves and talk about their own projects. As there seems to be no clear end in sight The FAM Music will continue hosting panels and creating a family in the music industry - one relationship at a time

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