Chris Parr Background
If you had told me that, at this point, I would be working for MTV Networks doing what I’m doing 20 years ago, I would have; yeah, sure; right; you know, I would have never believed it, so I guess I’ve always been a music lover. Played in the high school band, which is typical of a lot of people. I think you’ll find a lot of people behind the scenes; we have a lot of musicians at CMT. We have a ton of employees, so it’s inevitable we will have that, but it’s just a love of the music that really kind of got me there.
I was fortunate to find a program that was actually close to home, Middle Tennessee State University. It’s very well known for recording industry management program and myself, like a lot of other – there’s quite a few people and a lot of other people in the business who studied there, and then there’s an internship program, and so it’s really – you have to kind of get in and be willing to work for nothing. It’s the entertainment business, and I think this is probably true of LA or New York or wherever it is, and you really gotta want it and be passionate about it.
And I think as much as artists – I say that about artists; it’s like; man, you’ve really gotta want to be an artist because there is a grind. It looks glamorous, but there’s a grind when you’re on the road that many days a year, and you make a lot of sacrifices to put your creativity out there, so I guess I basically got into it; I went to the university. I ended up getting a business degree and minored in recording industry management. I originally wanted to be a record producer.
That was what I went – and I thought; man, I wanna be a record producer, and then I realized; boy, there’s not a lot of slots that become available for record producers. You can certainly be a sound engineer and you can work in the studio and all that, but those opportunities are – they’re hard to come by, and you really have to start at the bottom, in most cases. Some of my friends there, who I went to school with and are record producers now, and they did the same thing. It’s, I think, just wanting to just kind of, as you go through it – I’ve always had music video – that’s a common denominator in my particular career.
I’ve been at CMT, a couple of weeks ago now, nine years, which seems like forever. Before that, I was did a startup network for about three years that was a music shopping concept, which was before its time. It was basically before you could go and buy music on the Internet, so we were kind of doing the same thing. It was an interactive type of trying to use traditional television, which, at that point, was – it wasn’t really gonna work.
The idea was solid, and we actually utilized some of those ideas, even to this day, in our e-commerce and out dot com world, and before that, I was, basically, was in video promotions and marketing, so I was on the other side. I actually used to – I started out pitching. My first job in the business was working in video promotions and PR company, and we were pitching artists. I pitched – my predecessor, who was the director of programming; I used to market and pitch music videos to CMT, VH1, MTV; there’s a lot of other outlets out there across the nation that utilize music videos, whether it be the scoreboards at the ballgames that you see or a guy with a regional show in Cincinnati or Birmingham or wherever; there’s a lot of those guys that do local stuff.
And we were basically marketing the artists through the music video, and I did that for a number of years, probably about seven years, and so I kind of was on both sides of it. I tend to understand – I think I have a better understanding of when people come in to pitch us at CMT and want us to play their artists and what they’re doing, and it’s like; I’ve been on that side of the fence, so I kind of understand that a little bit better maybe than most.
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