In an effort to completely remove myself from social media, I am moving my WORK HISTORY from LinkedIn to my site, which is a platform I own and control. This will help me tell more of the story of my work experience. I hope it’s helpful. Enjoy.
In April of 2006 I started my very first for-real web job, as a web producer at AOL Music. It was just a three month contract gig, covering for someone on maternity leave, with zero guarantee of anything afterwards.
I got this gig because I put my music blog (Buzzgrinder) on my Monster dot com resume, and a headhunter found me. I left a full time job with five weeks paid vacation for this gig, and looking back it was one of the best moves I ever made.
This was someone else’s set up, but I was able to plug in my iPod and listen to my own music while I worked. I wrote copy for weekly new songs and videos features, built and scheduled music main page graphical elements, and wrote daily headlines for Music Main news section.
Some of the people that worked at AOL Music recognized me from the referral traffic that Buzzgrinder sent them, which blew me away.
I remember seeing artists come in and perform acoustic in conference rooms, which was sort of the start of AOL Sessions.
I had typos on pages that were seen by millions. This is where I learned a valuable lesson from a co-worker, when he was sitting beside me while I got “talked to” for my mistake – “we’re not saving lives!”
Oh yeah, I auditioned to host The DL, which was AOL Music’s “music show,” but Sara Schaefer got the job and MURDERED IT. They picked the right person for the job on that one.
My time with AOL Music music last just 3-4 months (I can’t really remember how long it was), but I met a lot of amazing people along the way.
Oh yeah, around this time in 2006 the #1 music site on the internet was MySpace. Wild, right?