“I think I Googled ‘website to start a website,’” said Belmont sophomore Acacia Evans when recalling her journey to creating her successful alternative music promotion website, Big City Thoughts.
At age 15, Evans began discovered her passion for music promotion when she started Big City Thoughts.
Now, four years later, she’s found herself running a successful website managing around 20 interns across the country.
“I’m still trying to figure out how it even happened,” she said.
Evan’s path to discovering music promotion and the eventual creation of her website found its unlikely start in her younger self’s obsession with the Jonas Brothers at age 10. After seeing them about 27 times, Evans began taking in everything that was going on at the concerts.
“I was fascinated by the entire production process. You don’t realize how many people it takes to put on a show and promote a band. One artist has so many people behind them, and I needed to be a part of that,” she said.
As Evans started exploring the different aspects of the production process, photography really stood out to her. She started small with some of her friends in the New Jersey music scene, slowly realizing she wanted to expand her website.
At 16 years old, expanding was more of an abstract idea than a specific plan, but she boldly dove in headfirst into the world of music promotion by starting dialogues with her favorite smaller bands’ publicists.
For Evans, it was a learning process still going on today and well worth it. Starting out with a non-existent knowledge base, it was a constant process of asking for an interview and instead receiving a photo pass and having to look up exactly what a photo pass entailed. From there, she went on to develop her budding website into a full-fledged promotions resource.
Running her own business has complications, especially as a college student. Being a young entrepreneur comes with many responsibilities. Evans is constantly juggling schoolwork and her duties as the head of Big City Thoughts. However, she humbly reminds anyone who asks that she couldn’t do it without her amazing team of interns.
“It’s very stressful, but I absolutely love it,” she expressed.
While Big City Thoughts has already come so far from its early days, Evans has even bigger plans for the future. She hopes to make her website more band-friendly in providing resources for bands to easily access publicity outlets such as publicists and photographers. She also hopes to continue publicizing her artists as well as her website so that eventually Big City Thoughts becomes a publication that never gets turned down for a press pass.
Taking her experiences from Big City Thoughts and translating them into other aspects of her professional life, Evans has accomplished some other dreams in the process. To date, she has not only gotten to join the press team for a week of Warped Tour, but she has photographed for her role-model Demi Lovato and fast-rising pop star Sam Smith.
Evans has advice for her readers.
“Stay as professional as possible. When you don’t understand a reference, ask a friend. Google it. Figure it out on your own before you respond to an industry professional,” she said.
As she walked through her story, she provided invaluable insights into the life of a young music business entrepreneur, a mysterious yet well-traveled path at Belmont.
This article was written by Haley Buske.