Life & Work with Ariaa of Los Angeles / OC

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ariaa.

Hi Ariaa, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I started making music at the age of 15. My brother is a producer and started making beats when I was about 12 or 13, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. He produced a few songs for rapper Chief Keef while we were in high school, and at the time, Keef was one of the biggest rappers out, so it was a huge deal to his friends and classmates.

Right around that same time, my brother started getting invited to record and make music with some of his friends who were in his grade, and he let me tag along. That’s where my love for it started. Watching his friends come up with lines for a song, seeing the recording and production process — it was all so beautiful to me for some reason. I knew instantly that it was something I wanted to try, so I did.

I started recording remixes to some of my favorite songs on my laptop in my bedroom closet with a Guitar Hero microphone. All of the songs sounded terrible, but to me, they were the best things I’d ever heard because I was making them. Slowly, I learned how to write and record myself and eventually invested in real equipment.

By my senior year of high school in 2016, my brother could tell I was improving and started giving me some of his beats to record on. I was only releasing music through SoundCloud back then, and one of my singles started getting some traction on there and around my school. The song ended up getting about 10,000 streams in its first month, which was mind-blowing to me.

That song caught the attention of an up-and-coming music manager in New York who eventually became my first manager. Since he lived in New York, he had much more of a music environment around him compared to me being in Waco, Texas. One night, he was at a small show and ran into a teenager named Mike, who happened to be an A&R and the son of Jason Flom, CEO of Lava Records. He played some of my songs for Mike and eventually connected us. To this day, Mike and I are still good friends.

Mike went on to show his father my music in the summer of 2017, and my biggest song at the time caught his ear. On June 1st, 2017, I got on a call with Mike and his father. Jason told me he wanted to fly me out to New York City — and he did.

They picked me up from the airport in a private helicopter, and we went to dinner in the Hamptons. I was living a real-life dream.

I signed a record deal with Lava / Republic Records in September of 2017. Mama, I made it.

My first release with them came out on April 5th, 2018. It was a remix of my biggest SoundCloud song, and we got musical legend T-Pain on the record. Still dreaming… don’t wanna wake up.

But that was the peak of that chapter. The record deal ultimately didn’t work out. My songs weren’t meeting their standards, and I was dropped later that year.

At the time, I had no idea that getting dropped would eventually become one of the best things that could have happened to me.

It took a toll on me for about a year. I wasn’t releasing much music — maybe one song every four or five months. Slowly, I found my way back and became focused on making high-quality music rather than simply making a lot of music.

For a long time, my biggest obstacle wasn’t the music itself. It was me. I was too shy to promote myself on TikTok or short-form media. The music was getting better than ever, but I just couldn’t bring myself to consistently put myself out there. I finally broke through that barrier over the last year, and I’ve been promoting myself every day. The results are starting to show.

Since leaving my record label, I’ve accumulated roughly 10 million streams across all music streaming platforms independently. I’ve had my music featured in the NBA 2K21 video game and, most recently, in the #1 Netflix TV show “The Hunting Wives.” NFL quarterback Caleb Williams and the Chicago Bears also used one of my songs in Caleb’s highlight reel on social media this year. I’ve been able to make money from my music outside of the record label, too, and everything I’ve built since then has been independent.

Looking back, I’m almost grateful that everything didn’t work out exactly how I wanted it to when I was 19. It forced me to figure out who I was as an artist and person and how to keep going without a label behind me.

I’m proud of me, and I don’t think I could ever not do this.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Furthest thing from smooth but that’s all apart of it. If it was easy, I wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t be who I am today.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m a recording artist and songwriter, and I’ve been releasing music independently for most of my career. My sound has evolved a lot over the years, but I’ve always gravitated toward melodic music that blends elements of hip-hop, R&B, and pop. More than anything, I try to make records that feel like me. I make music that I am a fan of first. What I’m most proud of, though, is that I’m still doing it. Music is a career where there are a lot of highs and lows, and I’ve had periods where things were moving incredibly fast and others where I’ve had to completely rebuild momentum. I’ve learned how to record myself, develop my own visual direction, market my releases, and essentially build the world around my music from the ground up.

So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
Listen to the music & share it with a friend. If someone is trying to work with me on music, they can just reach out to my Instagram or email.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://unitedmasters.com/a/ariaa
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ariaaii
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ariaaii
• Soundcloud: https://www.soundcloud.com/ariaaii
• Other: ariaamgmt@gmail.com