Breaking through as a musical artist is something which gets harder and harder every year. With record amounts of new artists flooding the scene, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out and stay memorable to an audience being bombarded with new songs left and right. Digital Marketing Expert, Jonathan Rivera, cracked the enigma of taking artists from their starting points and navigating their careers towards the major inflection points necessary to become a hit artist. Rivera’s foray into hacking success in the music industry began as early as middle school. He would DJ parties and school events and began to ponder about the best ways he can expand his understanding and bring value to the musicians. “I was attracted to the music industry since it’s the universal language and saw how music and an artist can change the emotion of anyone,” says Rivera.

Jonathan attended Full Sail University where his hunger for knowledge and innovation gave him a head start amongst his peers. Not wanting to wait until graduation, Rivera began working with his first artist Gabreil Orengo (aka Radikl) while still in school. Through a combination of clever marketing tactics on youtube and twitter, Rivera helped Radikl’s cover of Usher’s Climax get over a million views within three days of posting and ultimately landed Radikl a record label deal. “All my peers were learning the history of entertainment and content from books,” says Rivera. “Where I excelled was actually testing and building contacts within each social media platform which put me ten steps ahead of everyone else.”

After graduating university, Rivera took his talents to Sony Music Entertainment where he was in charge of building Latin Artist’s social media and online presence. At Sony, Jonathan excelled at taking artists to the next level. He was able to help a top reggaeton artist break into the candian market and ran the marketing for a five day tour which filled up with over twenty thousand fans every day, an unheard of feat for reggaeton in Canada at the time. Rivera also helped an artist who had recently split from a duo hit seven million views within twenty four hours, eclipsing the numbers the duo managed to pull off together. Yet another strategy Rivera implemented was building out a seven hundred person fan club of die hard fans for his artist which captured the attention of promoters and allowed for a worldwide tour and sponsorship deals. “At Sony I was able to really push the limits to what I already knew, “ says Rivera. “I learned to understand larger multicultural audiences and expand the reach of the marketing principles upon which I built my success.”