Meg Travis
Director, Global Head of Marketing & Communications, Entertainment Services
Iron Mountain Entertainment Services
Years with Company: 8
Address: Boston, MA
Web: imes.media
Email: [email protected]
Clients: World-famous music labels, film studios, broadcasters and individuals with legacies and archives to protect and monetize.
BACKGROUND
Musicians should know that preserving their catalogs is essential. Iron Mountain Entertainment Services is ideally suited to assisting with this goal. As a chief representative of the information security giant’s entertainment media-focused division, Meg Travis has assumed the mantle of educating the public about what they do and why it’s so important to think about archiving at every stage of an artist’s career.
A Singer Becomes a Marketer
I trained as an opera and musical theater singer in high school and college. I really thought I would have a performance career, but I had some trouble with my voice senior year. I needed to take a rest, so I decided to work in arts administration for a while. I worked at New England Conservatory of Music right out of college.
After having spent a little time in arts administration, I thought if I’m not going to be performing, maybe I want to dive into the business end of things. So, I got a graduate degree in marketing. Since then, I have dedicated my career to marketing as a way to get my creative and analytics fix. It’s been a great outlet for many of the passions I have–psychology, communications, creativity and analytics–all in one.
Masters of Security
The Iron Mountain Entertainment Services brand is all about securing and protecting our clients’ assets, whether they’re photographs, posters, awards, musical instruments or legacy media formats. Iron Mountain is a 72-year-old iconic brand that is synonymous with security. IMES is an innovative and technology-focused division, but of course world-class security comes with the territory when you hear the words Iron Mountain. Our clients love that in our locations in Hollywood, Boyers, PA, Nashville, Moonachie, NJ, London, and Paris, they can store their precious assets with us, have them digitized by experts on demand in our studios, and then returned to safe storage— all without ever having to leave the building.
Small, Medium, and Large
Our archival and preservation experts can deal with any size collection, in any configuration. We customize our solutions for any type of archive. You don’t have to know everything that needs to be done with your collection—you just need to give us a call and we can do that heavy lifting for you. We regularly talk to people who have closets or garages full of tapes or hard drives that are decades old. If they just pick up the phone and say “I need a consult with an archivist,” our experts can easily advise which items need to be prioritized so it isn’t an unmanageable or overwhelming project.
You Can’t Profit Off What You Can’t Find
[As artists], we think about hiring a tour manager, a business manager, and a publicist to ensure our brands are exactly what we want them to be. As we’re creating, we’re not necessarily thinking about how we’re going to find our work later on. Many artists are hoping to make money, but making money requires knowing where things are and being able to access them at the point of opportunity.
Variable Pricing
We’re always happy to have an upfront, no obligation discussion determine the size of an archive and the types of assets that are in the archive. Archives obviously vary depending on the type of creator. If it’s an actor, it may be photographs, wardrobe and props. Those assets need to be cared for differently and in a different sort of space than an artist that has all their work digitally born and only needs a digital storage preservation solution. Every case is different, so the services we’ll recommend will be custom to that client’s situation.
More Than Storage & Data Centers
Most of the time when [people] hear the words Iron Mountain, they immediately think of document storage and data centers. So it’s a matter of education that we provide media archiving services for the Entertainment industry. We do that through partnerships and speaking engagements with industry partners such as AES, Americanafest and the Producers & Engineers Wing.
Although the vast majority of our clients prefer to keep their relationship with us private so they’re maintaining the ultimate level of security, there are certain clients we can talk about. The GRAMMY Museum has been a wonderful partner to us. IMES is a longtime sponsor of the GRAMMY Museum, and they are also a client. The Museum is now storing all their digitized video archives in our Smart Vault digital media asset preservation platform that they’re then able to use for curated digital exhibits.
High-Resolution Imaging
There are all sorts of imaging services an artist might want. High-res 2D imaging would be important if, say, you had original album artwork you wanted to turn into an NFT. The same is true for a lyric sheet or something written on a cocktail napkin that turned into a hit song.
Many artists, especially at the beginnings of their careers, don’t think about needing to save those things. And then, if they do find them later, they don’t realize what historical value they have to their fans. Imaging can help make those artifacts accessible and monetizable.
The Value of Metadata Organization
Metadata needs to be captured in a way that makes it possible to find the work [artists] created. Our subject matter experts and archivists spend a lot of time at conferences, especially places like AES [Audio Engineering Society] chapter meetings, talking about the importance of metadata and structuring files so that they’re easily searchable.
We’ve all heard the horror stories where artists or organizations were looking for songs or albums they thought were in one place and it turns out they were mislabeled in another box. We end up participating in quite a few treasure hunts to help our clients find things. It’s great to be successful at that, but it ends up being more costly than if they had organized their work, correctly archived it, and securely stored it in the first place.
Spending a bit of money and time now is going to save a lot later on. Build it into your tour or album budget to capture and archive everything. It could be incredibly valuable ten years down the road. Everything is a little piece of history.
Amplifying Women’s Voices
I’m also actively engaged in initiatives, to raise the profile of women in the industry, particularly in technical roles. I serve on the board of the North America chapter of an organization called “Rise: a group for gender diversity in Media & Broadcast.” Together with IMES’ wonderful partners at the Recording Academy’s Producers & Engineers Wing, we held a networking event at AES in New York last October that we called Women in the Mix. It was a wonderful celebration of groups and people that aim to raise the profile of women’s voices in the audio engineering field.
