For our second episode we're joined by Nick Papa, co-founder of Philadelphia's leading musician creative support team: Upandovr. Although he isn't too much of an artist himself his projects are driven by a deep-seated belief that, when it comes to art, you have to try to give as much as you take. In this episode we talk about project ideation, work-life balance, and staying flexible to overcome challenges and drive your mission forward.
In this episode, we have Nick Papa. No one loves the Philly music scene more than him and his co-founder Leo Porth. The story of these two self-described “professional $15 concert-goers” began when they realized how many immensely talented Philly artists weren’t getting the recognition they deserved. This disconnect motivated the launch of Upandovr, a platform focused on providing in-depth free support for artists to help create, network, reach more fans, or figure out their next steps. Today, hi will talk about the music scene in Philly and what it means to be an artist. Tune in to learn more!
What is Upandovr?
[01:01]
Upandovr is essentially a creative support team for the DIY community in Philadelphia. The inception started a couple of weeks before the pandemic started when the founders discussed the amazing community wrapped around music in Philadelphia and how much opportunity lies in supporting that community with so much talent and so much to offer.
Newsletter
[02:57]
The Row-Z is the concert calendar newsletter for cheap shows around Philly. Leo and Nick manually aggregate all the information. One of the things they discussed early on was taking many different forms. They do a lot of research, and they have people reach out to them for events and shows. There are tons of resources to help and pull shows from other platforms.
Moving Forward
[04:41]
Coming from the marketing world, Nick sees how quickly things can be tainted when positioning your brand as support. One of the big things that Nick and Leo will do is do business with sponsorships events, especially live events. They need to have people help contribute to making that happen. Their roadmap is to have the support to scale to keep creating cool things and figure outputting things like events together.
Show Coverage
[09:45]
Coverage of shows is something that Nick and Leo are trying to invest some more time thinking about because it is an opportunity for them. It’s a medium where there’s an opportunity for reinvention and opportunity for show covers to be reinvented. It’s more of trying to start very ambitious with something because most of the time, you’ll end up halfway there.
Balancing Time and Creating Boundaries
[12:22]
Nick reminds himself to create boundaries by turning them on and off. He says that because when it’s your passion, you can work yourself past the point where you have diminishing returns where you work yourself so much because you’re so invested and interested in it. Nick believes to have “breaks” to be motivated and get out of bed in the morning feeling excited to talk to people.
Defining Art
[15:52]
For Nick and Leo, art is so many different things. But it’s the driving life force where they are putting back in. It is to put some energy back into something that they take from. Art is the creative inspiration, and it can be any medium. It can be in a painting, music, movie, etc. Art is crucial in both of their lives regarding what balances out their light and darkness.
What it means to consume art
[17:46]
Nick felt that he could not progress. But in some way, he knew he could be always better himself and learn in very tangible ways to evolve and move forward. He knows that he can always become a better person, especially when consuming something. Nick feels a total imbalance of him taken from a cultural zeitgeist. You just listen to put into making that, and it feels. And that has always felt weird to him where he is consuming art but not contributing something back.
[20:24]
Nick is always conscious of this balance of how much he is consuming and putting back in, and it’s important to him. And he is going to keep finding ways to tip the scale back to more output rather than more input.
Creative Resource
[21:37]
When you build something, you have to look at it as something around the creative community and as a creative resource. Anything wrapped around creativity, you have to leave room to adapt.
Upandovr:https://www.upandovr.com/