Amy Reitnouer moved from North Carolina to LA to work in Hollywood. Instead she’s working in bluegrass with a Hollywood star.
It wasn’t a genre of music she always loved. In fact, when she first moved to North Carolina to go to Elon University, she was “really turned off by it.” She “thought it was back woods. Old school. Like crunchy white dudes playing banjos.” But then she found a young, progressive bluegrass scene in the area and fell in love.
When she got to LA, she found more young bluegrass bands and a group of like-minded fans, so she started writing about it all. It was just a simple blog that was getting a couple dozen visitors a month. “Half of those were probably my mom,” Reitnouer says.
But one of the other visitors was none other than actor Ed Helms, who was then starring on NBC’s The Office. Helms is another bluegrass fanatic who organized a bluegrass festival in the area. He was looking to expand, so he reached out to Reitnouer. The two started a passion project, the Bluegrass Situation.
Today, the Bluegrass Situation has blossomed into a successful hub for the bluegrass scene. It includes an online home for news and reviews, podcasts, a video series, travel coverage for bluegrass fans, an annual festival, and booking for other events like Bonnaroo, one of the biggest music festivals in the country.
We sat down with Reitnouer to talk about starting your own business and finding a way to follow your passions.
Tell us about your company, the Bluegrass Situation?
Our brand now encompasses a really wide scope of music: we cover everything from traditional folk and bluegrass to old-time, Celtic, indie rock, and folk rock—anything that carries on acoustic songwriting tradition that utilizes new ways of playing traditional instruments.
We also cover the lifestyle aspects that connect with that musical community. Food. Drinks. Style. Travel. All those things. That’s about 50 percent of what we do.
We also have these live events like festivals across the country where we’ll curate stages or produce jams, workshops, and video sessions. We also serve as a marketer and promoter for the music. That’s the other 50 percent.
What attracted you to bluegrass, and why did you start writing about it?
When I got to school at Elon, there was a really young, progressive scene happening, especially around central North Carolina. That was exciting to me, so I started going out to shows. The first time I saw Nickel Creek was on their farewell tour while I was in college. I left that concert like, What did I just see? It was just so different than anything else I’ve encountered.
For me that really opened my eyes and had me digging deeper into the genre.
When I got to California, I was working in the film industry out here. I didn’t know a lot of people. I wasn’t really connecting with other film industry people. I just wasn’t part of the scene. But there were a lot of young bands that were emerging out here at the time that I did become friends with. I was like, Oh, these are the people I want to hang out with.
So, that’s when I started writing about it.
And then you partnered with Ed Helms. Tell us about that.
I was working for the Academy of Motion Pictures, which is fun for like three months of the year and then the rest of the year was really boring. The blog was something I was doing for myself really—and for the community that I’d grown to love.
Ed was working on The Office. In the show, the characters are all at their computers in the background. In order to make those cast members seem authentically bored, they would actually sit there perusing the sites that they thought their characters would like.
Ed loves bluegrass music, and his character was written in to love banjo, so he would read bluegrass blogs—for fun, just to kill time. Somehow he found mine. When he decided that he wanted to expand a festival that he had established called the LA Bluegrass Situation, he reached out. It was just as a side project for both of us.
But now it’s an actual business venture. What made you realize it could be more than a passion project?
We noticed a response from artists because there was no hub for what we were doing. We had people like Bela Fleck coming up to us and saying, “Oh my god, what can I do? How can I get involved? Can we play your stage?”
The producer of Bonnaroo came to us and said, “I’m hearing a lot of things about what you guys are doing.” And we sent him a proposal. Eventually, we took over their entire roots stage. We would program all day Sunday at Bonnaroo with artists and then bring all those artists together, and invite in some special guests who would jam at night. We’ve been doing it ever since. Ed hosts the jam and we’ve had everybody from Dierks Bentley, the Avett Brothers, and Lake Street Dive. Skrillex showed up out of nowhere one year—we’re not really sure how or why.
That’s how we started really getting recognition.
What advice do you have for students who want to turn their passion into a business?
First off, you can make money in just about anything. Whatever your passion is, there are a lot of elements that go into that. There are a lot of gateways into it.
I realized that I cared deeply about this musical genre. I was going to commit a ton of personal time. I mean I literally gave up having a life for several years, because everything I did circled around the company and the job. I also realized that there was this gaping hole that needed to be filled, which was coverage and promotion of the current roots music industry.
You have to do something you’re passionate about, but you also have to have the skills to run a company. It’s not like you can say I love jazz and somebody will be like, “Here’s money to love jazz.” You have to know that there’s something to do.
And how do you make that company successful? How do you turn it into something that you can make a living doing?
The thing is, we didn’t start this to make money. Never in a million years did I imagine that it would be my full-time job.
I’ve had a lot of people, especially college students, ask, “How do I make money as a blogger?” And I’m like, Oh my god, don’t ask me that question! If you’re going into it thinking you’re going to make money as a blogger, you’re never going to make it—or if you do, I don’t think you’d be very fulfilled, because you’re just going to be beholden to whatever makes money.
You can’t think, This is how I’m going to make my millions. Because you won’t. It’s so hard to do. I probably could be making a lot more money if I was still working in the film industry.
What skills do you think people need to be able to start a company like the Bluegrass Situation?
We are getting to an age when everybody needs to be an entrepreneur. Everybody needs to be business savvy. So, I think that’s the first thing to teach yourself.
On top of that, I think you need to have good networking skills. You need to be able to talk to people. Our company is built on relationships, and that’s with me literally going for six months of the year from festival to festival forging real, personal relationships and gaining people’s trust. And their interest. And their investment. And their involvement.
It takes some really thick skin, too. You have to learn how to take rejection. All of those things are intangible, but they’re also really important.
The last thing I would say is people management—just knowing how to work with people and understand where they’re coming from. Understand how to utilize their skills and their dreams. And learn how to manage yourself. Know how to manage your time. You have to know how to balance yourself, to maintain having a life while still being passionate about something and committed to something.