One of the nation’s leading authorities on careers in the music and record industries, Ms. Taylor has connected countless people to jobs and opportunities through her work in the US and abroad, cultivated collaborations for over two decades, helped launch hundreds of projects and several companies. If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book “The Tipping Point” then you may recognize her as a “super-connector,” the concept Gladwell coined to describe that unusual species of person who knows everybody.
Says Hollywood Today Publisher & Editor Jeffrey Jolson-Colburn, “Tess Taylor is one of the great resources of the music business. She’s a walking job fair. She has amazing insights into where the business is going and combines that savvy with a Rolodex the size of an SUV.” These traits are at the core of the two organizations she founded, the Los Angeles Music Network (est. 1988) and the NARIP (est. 1998). Ms. Taylor oversees initiatives of both groups to promote career advancement, education and good will in the music and record industries. Headquartered in Los Angeles, NARIP has chapters in New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta and London.
Music Connection magazine says LAMN and NARIP are “top-notch and brilliantly executed” and named Ms. Taylor in its list of “50 Innovators, Iconoclasts, Groundbreakers & Guiding Lights of 2008” (Dec 2008). Dubbed “International Music Ambassador” by music supervisor P.J. Bloom (Glee, Nip/Tuck, CSI: Miami), Ms. Taylor works with groups such as the European Music Export Office, Danish Songwriters Guild, French Music Export Office, Boomtown (Sweden), German Independent Label Assn. and others to connect their members to opportunities in Los Angeles and throughout the U.S. Ms. Taylor has consulted leading businesses such as MySpace.com, InsideSessions (a joint venture between the Universal Music Group and Penguin Putnam, Inc.), The Walt Disney Company, BMG Entertainment (formerly Sony BMG), Concord Records and others.
A frequently quoted analyst of industry developments, she has been a featured expert on international television and radio, and her analyses have appeared in national and international business press. Along with workshops and seminars for her clients, she teaches “The Future of the Music Business… and YOUR Future In It,” a course she developed at UCLA, at institutions worldwide. She is at work on a book about the music business. A frequent keynote speaker and guest speaker at industry conferences and universities around the world, Ms. Taylor has lectured at the Harvard Business School, in Bangalore, Berlin and beyond. In 2010 she keynoted at the Drucker Career Conference in Los Angeles, at the Trigger Creative Conference in Sweden, and guest-lectured at the University of Vienna’s Institute für Popularmusik in Austria. In early 2011 she was invited to give a special presentation at NAMM (Los Angeles) and at the Georgia State University School of Law. She has delivered dozens of keynote speeches and hundreds of lectures to thousands of people worldwide.
Deeply annoyed by people who think music should be free, Ms. Taylor is a vigorous defender of intellectual property rights and debated Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow on “free music” at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth (2006) and was invited for a rematch at Ohio University (2008). She won both times. From 1988 to 1993 Ms. Taylor was employed at MCA Records, Inc., last serving as Associate Director of Marketing. A classically trained pianist, she studied music at the University of Vienna, and is a Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude graduate of the University of Redlands’ Johnston College where she received her BA degree in music, German and literature. She loves traveling the world, nibbling dark chocolates and drinks lots of tea. She also loves fine fountain pens, anything written or recorded by Glenn Gould or Pete Townshend, gripping crime novels and hiking with her English cocker spaniel.
