2018-2019
I’m lucky to have a lot of firsts in my Music Export Memphis story – starting with one of my earliest tours in 2018, when I received one of the first Ambassador grants ever awarded.
I was booking myself at the time, and actually another future Ambassador, Aaron James, was working with me then. He would come to my house 3 or 4 days a week and we would just sit for hours cold emailing venues. But we were getting somewhere, and by the end of 2019, my life began to have some order to it. This was the year everything started happening – it went from being chaos to, okay, I could make a living doing this. I’d started to do some teaching in the music industry program at the University of Memphis, and that’s something that would continue to grow.
I’d met a booking agent that year when a small industry festival called Springboard came here to Memphis, and they started booking me for college gigs. When you go and play there, you’re reaching an audience that people spend a lot of time trying to reach. It’s a really unique opportunity to build fans.
I played the second ever Tambourine Bash that year, too – that was when I first worked with Daz Rinko. We got paired up and I was like, who is this guy? He came into rehearsal and just totally blew us away. We had been listening to his music and were like, there’s no way he’s this good, and he was. I had been working with James Bennett on a song called “Filler” and we felt like it needed a third verse. We both looked at each other at the same time and said, “DAZ.” CMajor sent us a verse from Daz and we planned to put it out in January of 2020.
We did Jam in the Van, we went to Savannah, where students at SCAD made a music video for us, we played summer NAMM in Nashville. Music went from being chaos to being something that – I was running a business. By the end of 2019, my life began to have some order to it. I can see this being my only income stream. This was the year everything started happening.
2020-2021
So as 2020 was starting, the momentum was growing. I was working with another booking agency that had come through some help I got from MEM connecting with industry in LA. I’d gone from feeling like I didn’t have a focus to feeling like I had a business. Ironically, I put out a song called “IRL” in February of 2020. I was out on tour with my band when everything shut down.
Shortly after we came home, though, I was grateful to Music Export Memphis for providing emergency grants to all my band mates, and my wife and I were filling our time with a social media series we started called Cooking and Crooning. After a while she got tired of it and said, “go stream somewhere else.” So, I did – and it kind of changed everything.
In May of 2020 I started a songwriting challenge on a platform called Twitch, where I was going to write live, on the Twitch stream, for 30 days straight. I collected samples from people all over the world and got so much that I ended up doing 45 days, and from that I made an album called Twitch #1. That was the thing that solidified the community, because I made something with them. They were helping write the songs, picking instruments, giving the WORST ideas.
But In 2021, the world started opening back up and I ended up playing the first post-pandemic shows at both the Orpheum and the Shell. MEM’s Merch Fund launched that year, and I was able to get two grants to produce new tee shirts.
To go from oddly having a ton of confidence and a clear sense of mission with Twitch during COVID – it was just like the end of 2019. I felt like I had all this momentum – and then it’s 2021 and everyone was like, we’re gonna go outside again! No one really knew what to do or how to act. I wasn’t comfortable going back into the world for a while. But ultimately, when it did happen it was amazing to be with my band again. And my Twitch community only kept growing. Since 2020 they’ve funded trips and tours, they’ve funded records, they even bought me a billboard on Madison Avenue.
2022-2025
In 2022 I got to play Tambourine Bash again and I’ve continued to get support from Music Export Memphis, in the form of merch grants, tour grants, and even an Export Bank grant in 2024 that helped me make the trip to APCA, the Association for the Promotion of Campus Activities, where my band played in front of 1000 student government leaders from colleges from all over the country. MEM helped tee me up for the shot, and I ended up with 9 college gig offers.
I served two terms on the Artist Advisory Council, and I’ve really learned so much from collaborating with MEM on how I want to run my own business. MEM brought order to the chaotic artistry that was a normal part of my life. The funding opportunities through MEM propelled me to a place I wouldn’t have gotten to on my own – by virtue of having to plan ahead for the application, get my materials together, it forced me to create organization and structure to access the funding.
My Twitch community has also continued to show up for me – they sent me to TwitchCon in Paris (2023) and Rotterdam (2024), and I even did a tour where I connected with other Twitch creators the entire way, up the west coast from San Diego to Seattle.
I’ve been honored to serve as a mentor for MEM’s Ambassador Access program, too, sharing what I’ve learned with the next generation of artists building touring careers here in Memphis. Giving back through the organization has been just as essential for me as the support I’ve gotten.
Whether I’m on stage or on Twitch, I’m always proud to say – I’m Nick Black, from Memphis, Tennessee. Happy 10 years, Music Export Memphis!