042: Cherie Hu - The Math Behind Water & Music, and a Successful Newsletter

Cherie Hu is an accomplished musician, an award-winning writer, a columnist, entrepreneur, and self-described “professional overthinker.” Cherie specializes in analyzing, tracking and critiquing innovation in the global music business.

Cherie earned her bachelor’s degree in statistics from Harvard, studied piano and music theory at The Juilliard School, and has taught as an Adjunct Professor at New York University. Cherie has worked for Forbes, Billboard, and Music Business Worldwide.

Cherie is also the founder of Water & Music. Water & Music is an independent newsletter, research hub and community forum that is “dedicated to unpacking the fine print of commercial, technological and cultural change in the industry.”

The Water & Music newsletter reaches over 10,000 free subscribers and 1,000 paying members. Subscribers represent numerous industries: music, film, fashion, advertising, gaming, investment banking, venture capital and more.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to leverage your life experience to dramatically improve your newsletter  
• Why freelance writers should focus on a core group of clients
• Why your audience needs a dedicated venue to find your content

Links & Resources

• Zack Greenburg
• Forbes
• Billboard
• Music Business Worldwide
• Revue
• Greg Isenberg
• Kendrick Lamar Meets Quincy Jones on Hypebeast
• ConvertKit Creator Sessions
• Spotify Greenroom
• Twitter Spaces
• Tim McGraw
• Arnold Schwarzenegger’s newsletter

Cherie’s Links

• Cherie’s Twitter Page: @cheriehu42
• Water & Music
• Water & Music on Twitter: @water_and_music
• Water & Music on Patreon
• Cherie’s LinkedIn
• “Five Lessons From My First Year of Running a Patreon Page”

Episode Transcript

Cherie: [00:00:00]
A 2015 interview between Kendrick Lamar and Quincy Jones, and Quincy Jones says the last two things to leave this planet will be Water and Music. I was just watching, and I heard that and it just immediately clicked with me. It’s been called a universal language for a reason. I liked that concept of always having that at the center, even of conversations about the business side.

Nathan: [00:00:30]
In this episode, I talked to Cherie Hu. Cherie is an entrepreneur journalist writer, and she writes about the intersection between music and technology. She has this popular newsletter in a community called Water & Music. We have a lot of fun talking about how she grew the newsletter, her journey from piano performance, through to math and then into journalism. We spend a lot of time in this episode on some trends in the industry, not just, crypto and things like that, but also, Spotify and podcasts, and how the world of music and podcasts and newsletters is all intertwined. It’s a fun episode.

There’s a little less hard hitting tactics of, “Do this next to the newsletter,” and a lot more on: this is what’s going on in the industry and what you should pay attention to.

Those are some of my favorite episodes, and this one is pretty great. So let’s dive in.

Cherie. Thanks for joining me.

Cherie: [00:01:25]
Thank you so much for having me, excited to be here.

Nathan: [00:01:27]
All right. So I want to start with your love for music and the music industry. Where did that come from? You went to Juilliard for piano performance. Tell me more about it.

Cherie: [00:01:41]
Yeah, sure. Yeah. It almost feels like a past life at this point. Right? I guess to be more specific about that, I did the Juilliard pre-college program. It’s like a weekend program out of conservatory. And did that throughout high school where I would go to Juilliard, to the city on Saturdays, do private lessons, have classes in music theory, chamber music.

And that, that was my path for a while, to just go to conservatory for piano and study that, and be a full-time performing pianist ideally. Very, very different from what I do now, but, still very near and dear to me. A lot of my closest friends, I kind of made in that environment, very intense, but fun environment.

So, I guess my first and most intense involvement growing up with music was definitely on the performing and on the creative. At the same time academically, I was really into math and I was on the math team, did math competitions in school. I ended up majoring in stats in college, taking a lot of math and stats classes, but at the same time, a lot of music classes, and from a very early stag, trying to think about where those two worlds intersected.

So, because I was more like a performer initially, I was thinking, applying math to music theory. I think that’s still a really interesting like application area. I guess also in spite of learning, studying piano for 10 to 15 years, I wasn’t even aware of the scope of what the music industry involved in terms of the jobs that were possible, the new kinds of jobs that were emerging, until I would say 2013, 2014.

That’s when I had the opportunity just to explore, this career path, to do a two week, two to three weeks shadowing experience at Interscope. It was with their A&R team. In terms of like actual like tasks, I didn’t do that much because it was a short amount of time, but just that experience opened my mind, even to things like, like real questions, like what is A&R?

I didn’t really know what that was before, being in the middle of it. And also at that time streaming had been around for a while, but I think that period of time was really when Spotify had just launched in the U S, and it’s really starting to pick up; Apple music with launch just a year or two later.

So, the whole conversation around like who the main players were in streaming was also changing pretty drastically at that time. So, timing also plays a huge role in my journey to where I got to now. So, it’s kind of through that. I realized I was interested in maybe applying like my academic interests on the staff side to more of a data analyst, or data-facing role in the music industry, whether that’s at a label streaming service, music startup, et cetera. So, did a handful of internships kind of in that world, did some academic research on the music business from a tech perspective.

So, especially looking at music, startups, and I’m super randomly at a career fair that my friend dragged me to, I very serendipitously read into my first freelance gig. I happened to meet an e...