It started, as these things often do, with an inbox full of chaos. AIM Music Business academic and alumna Jaz Yates had spent close to a decade managing artists when she found herself stuck on a thread with a PR agent that just wouldn’t end.
“This was like my tipping point, where I was on an email chain fifty emails long, on a release that hadn’t even come out yet,” she shares.
“She’d said, ‘Hey, can you send me the bio for the band?’ And I’m like, I did that five emails ago. I had to go and find that email to send it to her again and be like, ‘This is the bio, please save it somewhere, for the love of God, because I can’t do that again.’”
Frustrated, she started asking around – publishers, label managers, distributors, anyone who’d listen – to see if it was just an artist manager problem. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t.
“They’re all finding that they’re having to duplicate all of this information across different platforms,” she explains. “They’re all trying to store all their tasks in weird and wonderful places… It’s just very complex and very disconnected.”
That disconnect is exactly what her new platform, RELEASR, was built to fix.
Launched in July 2026, RELEASR aims to bring the scattered administration side of music management into one place. Instead of information living across inboxes, notes apps, and folders within folders, Jaz hopes to give artists and their teams one shared space to organise the details that keep a career moving.
Managing bands from the girls’ bathroom
Long before RELEASR, Jaz’s career in artist management kicked off in one of the humblest of settings while she was still studying at AIM.
“I actually started managing my first band because I met them through an assignment we had to do for the live events subject, where we had to put on a frat party of all things,” she laughs.
“I was in the girls’ bathroom talking with one of the performers, and I was like, ‘Do you need a hand at all with some of your stuff?’ and she’s like, ‘Yeah, absolutely,’ and so I started managing bands from then, and I’ve basically been managing bands and solo projects ever since.”
A career built on one question
Since graduating, Jaz’s career has stretched well beyond artist management. She’s spoken at conferences including BIGSOUND, hosted a music industry podcast, and has now added startup founder to the list. Ask her how it all fits together, and she says it comes down to one filter.
“I really tried to keep coming back to this concept of: is it music business? If it’s music business, then I’ll say yes, I’ll do it. I’ll take the opportunity, because I’ve done so many different things across my career, but I’ve definitely come back to this thread of, is it music business, and is it going to help my career?”
The podcast, she adds, grew out of that same instinct. “It’s something that I wanted to build because I wanted to bring the conversations I was having with people into one room and have people on record, basically saying it. But it also came out of the fact that it helps you to network. Everybody wants to be on a podcast,” she jokes.
These days, her multi-hyphenate job title has become its own kind of icebreaker.
“Because I have so many slashes after my name, people can just pick what they want to ask me about, and there’s always something that will interest them. It’s great to be able to walk into a room and know that you can provide some sort of value to somebody, particularly in this industry, because it can be very transactional in a lot of ways.”
Building RELEASR.
Designing a platform for the entire music industry meant learning just how differently everyone actually works. The research process, she says, relied heavily on the generosity of an industry keen to get it right.
“It’s been really, really refreshing seeing who wanted to step forward and really help the music industry for the better.”
“There’s a particular artist manager that gave me four hours of his time to show me his workflow. I was like, ‘I’ll take it,’ but we just kept on talking and talking, because he just wanted me to be able to build a platform that worked for him and worked for the rest of the industry.”
One feature Jaz is especially proud of is the release builder, which she says has become an accidental education tool for emerging artists.
“A lot of the new artists that we tested with jumped on and they were like, ‘Oh, I needed to have this information here, and I needed to have that information there.’ They ended up being really educated about all these different parts of the pie that they never really knew they needed.”
Life in the classroom
Alongside running RELEASR, Jaz still teaches AIM’s Bachelor of Music Business students; a decision she says comes down to two key factors.
“Once I got past the trauma of being in the same classrooms again, I realised I really love teaching the next generation,” she laughs.
“I’ve learned so much, and I want to be able to give that back to the students and help them understand how the business side of music is run and why, and how some of these bigger companies that they maybe grow up thinking are the devil – what is the actual reality and why do they act that way?”
The other reason is far more practical: it keeps her plugged in. “If I didn’t lecture at AIM, I wouldn’t know what the start of that industry is really interested in. What are they even consuming? Which artists are they getting into?”
It’s a gap that plays out in real time in her lectures. “We share artists to the room, and there’s like 30 people in the room, and not a single one has picked the same artist, nor have they heard of any of the artists that are being pitched,” she laughs. “It’s just mind-blowing, really.”
By the time they reach graduation, Jaz says she sees her students undergo a genuine shift in the way they think.
“The battle I try and teach them is: what is something that you would want, but then, is that something that another hundred people would want?”
“I think when they first start their career, they’re like, ‘Oh well, I would want this thing, so I’m absolutely going to be putting this thing on with my artist,’ and then commonly we find that that flops. When they get towards the last few years, you can see them go, ‘Okay, well, we know that this is going to work because A, I like it, I am the demographic, but then also B, the stats tell us this, the artist is saying that, we’ve done some testing here.’”
“They have more of a strategy around why they’re making that decision, instead of just putting their finger up in the air and seeing where the wind’s blowing.”
And her best piece of career advice that has nothing to do with music at all?
“Learn how to time manage,” she says simply. “Time management in this industry in particular, but honestly in any other industry, is so key to being able to do everything that you want to be able to do in your life”
