Level Up: Music Business & Spoken Word

press release: UCAN's Level Up Conference is BACK! This is the third of three separate workshops at the Level Up conference on Music Creation, Music Business, and Music Marketing.

Saturday, November 5, we are partnering with UW-Madison Office of Multicultural Arts! This session will feature a spoken word workshop with Jasmine Mans as well as a music business workshop featuring Wendy Day!

Conference Agenda

12:30-1:00 Registration and Networking

1:00-3:00 Spoken Word Workshop

3:00-3:30 Food and Networking

3:30-4:15 Creating Your Own LLC with Bradley "DLO" Thomas

4:15-5:15 Q&A with Wendy Day

Session Descriptions

Spoken Word Workshop

A poetry workshop led by Interdisciplinary Arts Residency Program artist-in-residence Jasmine Mans. The 2022–23 Interdisciplinary Arts Residency is presented by the UW–Madison Division of the Arts and by the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI).

Creating Your Own LLC with Bradley Thomas

An LLC, or a limited liability company, is a business structure where company members are not held personally liable for company debt. During this session, we go through the step-by-step process of creating your own LLC.

Q&A with Wendy Day

Wendy Day founded the not-for-profit Rap Coalition in 1992 out of disgust for the way urban artists are unfairly exploited in the music industry. Wanting to shift the balance of power to favor the artists, Wendy dumped her life savings (selling her condo, and her BMW) into starting the advocacy organization to support, educate, protect, and unify hip-hop artists and producers—to keep them from getting jerked. She became a fan of rap music in the early 1980s and turned her passion into a career in the music business.

Since 1992, Rap Coalition has impacted the urban music industry by helping, for free, thousands of artists, DJs, and producers individually, as well as through monthly panel discussions, seminars, showcases, and fair deal negotiations. Rap Coalition has also offered health care and dental benefits, coordinated the panels at many major urban music conventions, as well as instituting a mentor program for up-and-coming artists.

Today, Rap Coalition continues to break unfairly oppressive contracts (pulling artists out of bad deals), and teaches the business side of the music industry to thousands of artists and industry hopefuls from around the country. All, for free.

One of Wendy’s personal priorities is to consult and help build regional and national independent urban record labels so artists can regain control of their own art form. She has helped to consult Cash Money Records, Machine Gun Kelly (MGK), David Banner, Fiend, Young Buck, Young Jeezy’s Corporate Thugz Entertainment (CTE), No Limit Records, C-Murder, Do Or Die, Trill Entertainment (Lil Boosie & Webbie), BloodRaw, DJ Screw, Trae Tha Truth, TMI Boyz Records, Think It’s A Game (Rich Homie Quan, YFN Lucci, Trinidad James), Trouble’s DuctTape, and many others. In 2009, TMI Boyz had the distinction of being the #2 independent record label in any genre of music according to Nielsen and Billboard Magazine, an accolade not uncommon to Ms Day. She has helped build many of the successful indie labels that still exist in rap today.