The Woman Who Refuses to Leave Money (or Votes) on the Table
An Interview with Emily White
For most of her career, Emily White has been obsessed with two linked ideas: artists should be paid fairly for their work, and ordinary people should feel powerful enough to shape their democracy.
She has attacked both problems with the same tools—spreadsheets, systems, and relentless follow-through. White is the Amazon number one best-selling author of How to Build a Sustainable Music Career and Collect All Revenue Streams, host of the top-ranked music business podcast of the same name, and founder and CEO of #iVoted, which built the largest digital concert in history to increase voter turnout.
She sat down for an interview for Tutors, Mentors, and The City, a conversation series run by Kevin “Dotcom” Brown through The City Tutors, to talk about how she learned to build revenue streams, turn concerts into civic engagement, and why none of it works if you are not sleeping enough.
“The music business was basically designed to confuse artists,” White says. “The information is out there, but no one puts it in order. I wanted to give creators a step-by-step map so they do not miss money that is rightfully theirs.”
What began as a practical document for interns and clients has grown into a playbook for a generation of independent artists—and the foundation for a very unconventional career.
From a Wisconsin swim lane to the music business
White grew up in Hartland, Wisconsin, a small town she once described as having “no music industry,” even though her parents’ friends owned the local music shop. She swam competitively, worked toward a scholarship, and spent her teenage years obsessed with English bands and message boards for her favorite artists.
She landed at Northeastern University in Boston on that swim scholarship, choosing the school because it had what she wanted most: a music industry program and a built-in co-op system that pushed students into the real world.
“I saw someone on a forum say they got into Northeastern’s music industry program,” she recalls. “I thought, I have never heard of that school or that program, but that is what I am studying.”
Through Northeastern she landed internships at a rock radio station, a local music magazine, and other corners of the Boston scene. Those internships led to the moment that changed everything: a campus concert by a rising local band, The Dresden Dolls.
White forced herself to walk up to them. She was nervous. She introduced herself, explained that she was studying music business and already interning in the field, and said the magic words: Let me know if you ever need help with anything.
“They said, ‘Can you come over tomorrow?’” she says.
She did. Within a few years she was tour managing the band, then handling day-to-day management, then working for their manager, Mike Luba, at his company in New York. She was barely out of college and already learning the live business from the inside—tour routing, settlements, artist budgets, and the human reality of life on the road.
White loved touring, but she also knew it was a young person’s game. By 23 she had retired from the road and moved into management full time, eventually helping launch an ambitious new division of Live Nation that flamed out within months. She treated it like grad school. When the dust settled, she took what she had learned and started her own company.
“I never thought those early years would matter beyond music,” she says. “But that touring experience ended up being crucial to things I did later, including #iVoted.”
Turning shows into turnout
The idea for #iVoted came after the 2016 presidential election, when White learned that Wisconsin had been decided by roughly the number of people who could fit in the Milwaukee Bucks’ arena.
“I thought, what if we literally filled a venue like that and tied it to voting?” she says.
She and an intern started calling promoters in 2017, getting out ahead of what the industry calls “holds”—dates on the calendar reserved for potential shows. They offered a simple promotion: on election night, any fan who showed a selfie from outside their polling place could get into participating concerts.
Agents and promoters liked the idea. One told her that venues would welcome anything that drove people in to buy drinks on a historically slow Tuesday night.
By 2018, #iVoted had activated more than 150 concert venues in 37 states. Artists ranging from Playboi Carti to Maggie Rogers to Living Colour participated. In later years the effort expanded into digital concerts and then back into in-person events, always with the same core rule: the ticket is your proof that you showed up to vote.
White is clear that #iVoted is not about vague civic vibes. It is about margins.
“Local elections are often decided by the number of people in a club,” she says. “A Senate race can be the size of an arena. We are data driven. We look at places where the margin is the size of a venue and then book the top-trending artists in that area. We are trying to move real numbers.”
The organization is also a talent pipeline. Its team, she notes with pride, is overwhelmingly women, non-binary, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+, a deliberate counterweight to the traditional demographics of the music and political industries.
Writing the manual the industry refused to give artists
White’s path to becoming an author began the same way many of her projects do: she was tired of repeating herself.
At her management company she noticed she was teaching the same basics to interns over and over. She wrote what she jokingly called an “intern manifesto” so they could read it instead and move on to more complex work. Two interns from NYU told her it should be a book. That became Interning 101, now used as a course text at multiple universities.
The second book came from a similar pattern. Musicians kept asking to “grab coffee” and pick her brain about how the industry actually works. The conversations were long, detailed, and repetitive.
“I realized I could either keep having the same meeting forever or write it all down once,” she says.
She self-published How to Build a Sustainable Music Career and Collect All Revenue Streams, taking her own advice by launching a pre order when the manuscript was only halfway done. The pre orders paid for editing and printing before the book came out. Years of speaking at music conferences meant there was already an audience.
The book quickly hit number one in its category on Amazon and began to spread by word of mouth. Artists told one another, I wish I had this ten years ago.
Unlike many industry guides, the book is structured linearly. It starts with getting your art together, then walks through recording, release, administration, and marketing while pointing out each revenue stream along the way. White compares skipping ahead to reading the chapter on marketing before making something worth marketing.
“I am not saying it is easy to make great work,” she says. “But if you skip that, no strategy will save you.”
Because she kept ownership, White was later able to license the book to Hal Leonard, the giant of music publishing, on terms she was comfortable with. She talks bluntly about royalty structures she has seen—some with authors buying their own books at high prices and earning 10 percent royalties—and argues that writers, like musicians, need to understand the economics before signing anything.
Experimenting without betting the house
Across White’s story, a pattern emerges that mirrors Jon Baron’s in a different domain. She takes real risks—touring in her early twenties, starting companies, self-publishing, launching a national voting initiative—but avoids bets that could irreparably harm her or her team.
She experiments and expects some things to fail. A short-lived corporate division collapses? She mines the experience for lessons and moves on. A project does not land? She adjusts course.
She is also unusually direct about asking for feedback and help. When she turned her tour managing years into the foundation for #iVoted, she leaned on promoters, agents, and venue owners to sense check the idea. When she considered traditional book deals, she called agents, joined the Authors Guild, and asked other writers to walk her through their contracts.
Her guiding questions sound simple: Is this actually working? Is this deal fair? What does the data say? In practice, they require the same stubbornness she asks of artists analyzing their own careers.
Building a career on sleep, smoothies, and systems
If there is a secret engine behind White’s productivity, she insists it is not hustle culture. It is the opposite.
“If you are not taking care of yourself, you cannot take care of others, and you cannot do any of this,” she says.
She describes a daily routine that is as non negotiable as a tour schedule: a full night’s sleep, a green smoothie in the morning, movement first thing, local food whenever possible, a short meditation before sitting down to work.
It sounds simple until she points out how rare it is in industries built on late nights, travel, and endless notifications. She recommends the book Why We Sleep to her students and has seen grades and moods change when they start treating sleep as infrastructure instead of a luxury.
“I am addicted to feeling good,” she says. “Once you realize you work better, create better, and are nicer to people when you are rested, it is hard to go back.”
A different model of a life’s work
White’s career does not fit into the standard boxes of “label executive,” “artist manager,” or “nonprofit founder.” It moves: swimmer to intern, tour manager to entrepreneur, author to voting-rights organizer, teacher to podcast host.
What ties the chapters together is not one job title but a mindset. She treats art and activism as systems that can be redesigned. She believes audiences should be reached directly, artists should know where every dollar goes, and concert tickets can double as incentives to vote.
She also believes, deeply, that people should be allowed to change course.
“I did not set out to be an author or run a voting organization,” she says. “I followed what I cared about and tried to build structures that made sense.”
The result is a career that, like her advice to artists, prioritizes ownership, data, and long term relationships over hype. It is also a reminder that sustainable work—whether in music, publishing, or democracy—starts with a simple, stubborn premise: do not leave value on the table, and do not leave yourself out of the equation.