One of the often overlooked aspects within the Hip Hop industry and culture is the public meeting forum. Each year dozens of conferences, seminars, retreats, summits and meetings and festivals are held across the country. Although each may have a slightly different purpose or mission, collectively they represent our attempt at maintaining a sense of community identity.

Mary Datcher is one of those individuals dedicated to ensuring that the music industry has ways of reaching out and supporting its constituents, socially, politically, and financially. A native of Chicago’s Westside Austin neighborhood, Mary has always has a unique perspective on personal success. After rewarding positions at Def Jam, George Daniel’s Music Room, WGCI FM-Chicago and KBA Marketing, Mary formed On The Street Promotions and Marketing a firm specializing in executing field and event marketing programs with its primary focus on the music industry. In 2000 she created the Chicago DJ’s Summit, and four years later co-founded the Core DJ Retreat. Those efforts have culminated in the Global Mixx Music Retreat (GMIXX), an exclusive ‘trend influencer’ collective of industry professionals who participate in panels, seminars, workshops, showcases and convnetions.

HipHopDX: How did you get into the entertainment industry?
Mary Datcher: Well, basically how it started was I was in a program called Junior Achievement. I entered Junior Achievement during my sophomore year in high school and I was doing pretty well with some other the programs that they initiated, like the Dale Carnegie program of speaking and going on different trips and dealing with different people with different aspects of the community. And that’s how I feel in love with entrepreneurship. There was a program started by WGCI-FM, which at the time, was independently owned and not under the ownership of ClearChannel. It was managed by a predominantly black staff and they wanted to see how they could reach back in to the community. So that started a program that took Junior Achievers into the whole day-to-day operations of how to run a radio station. The had some extra air-time on their AM dial, to provide us (every Saturday) a forum to play what we wanted to play; having actual programming staff, sales staff, marketing staff, and that’s how I got pulled into that as another interest. This was something that I wanted to do, another interest of mine, and I learned how to really run a radio station. So I took to that whole-heartedly and ran from there and became an intern full time for the programming staff at WGCI and that’s how I broke into the business at the age of 16.

DX: How has the corporatization of radio affected promotions and marketing?
Mary Datcher: It’s affected it a great deal. When I was coming up, most of your major radio stations in major markets like Chicago were independently owned, black owned, with black management. They encouraged making sure that they dealt with record reps and people from the labels that were predominantly black promotions directors or indies. Instead of what you see now; everything is so consolidated. It’s not about the protection of community like it used to be. If a record rep that had been in the business for a few years that had become good friends or had a long standing relationship with the radio station…it was like family…back then, if someone was out of their job, everyone banded together to make sure that that individual got another job. And also because it was a predominantly black community on both records and radio, they made sure that they looked out for their fellow African American executives. So that it allowed us to really preserve what we were doing, not only on the artistic side but also on the employment side. That’s a difference that I see now, there’s no level of community like it used to be. There’s no sense of history of how the people before us fought hard to look out for one another. You don’t see that a great deal because of the corporate structure that’s been put in place to breakdown what we built. And not only on the structural side, but also the relationship side. It’s more machine ran than anything. That’s the difference that I see.

DX: One of the things that is most impressive about your background is the fact that you’ve got experience in lots of different areas of the industry; you’ve worked for record labels, in promotions, retail, etc. I’m interested in your perspective on how those different pieces work together...
Mary Datcher: One thing I believed in starting out in radio was really paying my dues. Having people in the industry say, “Hey you can go to college for this, but we don’t know if it’s gonna be beneficial to go to college E and major in broadcast communications when you have learned way more that the average college student within your two or three years in high school. There are other areas in this business that you can learn from.” And I started discovering that it wasn’t just about radio- it was also about the record side of things. And it wasn’t just about the record side- it was also about distribution. It wasn’t just distributions, it was about retail. It wasn’t just about retail- it was about marketing. And each area had their own way of working but they all cohesively had to work together. And that’s what really challenged me. When I would get bored or even burnt-out in one area of promotions with Def Jam, I could always go over- I had an opportunity to work with George Daniels on the retail side. And at one point I thought, “Man I did the distribution thing where I had to service all the retailers throughout the Midwest. And then I went from distribution to working records at radio and working with some of the best people there and now I’m a retailer?” It all kind of gelled together because it showed me not only the side of selling the record into the stores, but also the side of selling it to the consumer. That allowed me to hear one-on-one what the consumer had to say about certain records or certain ways that labels marketed certain records. Or hearing it as a retailer and hearing it on the other side of the counter. And I think that was so beneficial. So when I got back into doing promotions from retail, I knew both sides of the coin. And it allowed me to do my job even better and be ahead of the competition in terms of being well-rounded like I was. So you can never learn enough. That’s just how life is working right now in the business that we’re in. Continued on page 2 »