Introduction

This is a research and personal networking report conducted on the digital media and music events industry in Australia and the USA, created within the context of RMIT University's School of Design and Social Context.

My name is Alana Jessica Ward, I am a final year Media student at RMIT University, and I want to forge a career for myself as a digital media professional within the event production industry.

I saw this report as a way for me to take my first few steps into this industry, and I went into it with the following aims:

1. To connect with industry professionals in both the digital media industry, the event production industry, and also some who worked in a role that combined the both.
2. To find out what roles exist that utilise digital media while working within the context of event production. 
3. To get a better understanding of the history and climate of the industry. 
4. To identify and profile key players and companies that I would like to work for, and events that I would like to work on. 
5. To gain realistic expectations of what a day-to-day job in the industry entails.
6. To make a concentrated effort to also extend my research to the US digital media and events industry, because I am planning to move their next year and will be seeking employment over there too. 
7. To reflect on all of the above and walk away with some new industry connections, some good advice, and a plan as to what the next step in my career will be. 

Before diving into the research, I should briefly explain how I have come to arrive at the conclusion that I want to work with digital media in the event production industry. I came into the Media course at RMIT fresh from highschool with the aspiration of becoming a music journalist. I loved music, I loved writing, so I figured (as many I'm sure have before) what better job was there than writing about music? I didn't want to do a straight journalism course because I grew up in a digital age and I'd seen the shift of the world onto the internet. I knew that while there was always going to be a place for words, the web had allowed for the creation of different forms of media to stand up and demand attention: images, videos, animations etc. My creative streak also just wanted to learn how to make these aethetically-appealing works of art, and communicate with them. As I went through the degree I realised that while I liked creating videos and audio clips, working in film and radio wasn't quite for me. It was too one-dimensional. I liked the online space where I could create a number of different media forms and use them to communicate with people, where I could write and create images and collages and audio clips and videos and playlists. Then social media became king, and I saw the arena that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and LinkedIn and Pinterest and Instagram and Spotify and Flickr and Tumblr (and on and on and on) created for all these different mediums to really proliferate and thrive, and really connect with people.

Somewhere around the middle of my degree when I was studying abroad in San Diego and interning at a local events company my love for music events and festivals burst onto the scene. California has an AMAZING live music and events scene, and the fact that EDM had just blown up meant that I myself was swept up in the wave of excitement and fun. When the wave died down though, I realised these events weren't just things that I liked attending, but I wanted to be part of the team that put them together. I didn't want it for the glitz and glam factor, but I wanted to experience everything about it from volunteering and directing people and handing out tickets and photographing and cleaning up to helping set up the art forms and design the stages and book the line-ups and market the whole event. Now I really have no experience in stage design or talent booking, but marketing was something that I knew I could handle very well utilising the power of social media marketing and my knowledge of how to create a number of different media forms. And there, was born my aspiration to work in digital media within the events industry.

Four years later, and almost at the end of my degree, I have spent the past few months meeting with individuals that work across these sectors - including marketing directors for major music festivals, event producers and talent bookers, managing editors of online music publications, and writers that contribute to such publications. Some of these meetings have answered my questions, challenged my expectations, and raised new questions that I now need to answer. Continue through the Pinterest board to follow my research journey as I set about to meet the above aims.