Our alumni just keep surprising us. A superstar making waves in the music industry, Naomi Tominaga has worked with some huge names and shares her story of how to turn Hult-honed business acumen into a successful music biz career.

Family ties  

I’m from a musical family. That much has been clear to me from an early age. My grandmother is a famous pianist in my native Brazil, and other members of the family have talent that sees them sit everywhere along the musical spectrum. I’m of Brazilian, Lebanese, and Japanese heritage, although I’d say the Lebanese family are the most musical!  

I should say, though: None of my direct family members are what you would call “in the industry”. My connection to music is just that: Through the music. I didn’t receive any help from them about how to make it in the corporate world and the boardrooms of such a worldwide influential industry. For that, I needed Hult. 

How Hult helped  

Hult’s whole deal is that you have to participate. There were no opportunities to sit back and let others talk. And for me, that was tough, initially! So, after the three years I spent with Hult my confidence had increased crazily. I found the presentation skills and the ability to really ‘sell yourself’ to be the most useful. The music industry can be tough but through my undergraduate degree, I developed the attitude to match it! 

Climbing the ladder 

I first started in the music industry with a video. It was a bit of content that went a little viral and caught the attention of a producer at Sony. Long story short he invited me to go work with him on a project between São Paulo and Rio. 

Since then, I have held various roles within the industry, including production coordinator, label manager, and their current position as market lead and client relations at music industry conglomerates around the world.  

Big Names 

My experience has primarily been with Latin artists although I do have had a few brushes with EDM and techno. Names like Karol G, J Balvin, and Connie Garcia are huge in the LatAm music world and I have worked with each of them. A name in EDM you might recognize is Steve Aoki. His collaboration with Kenia Os on the song “Reply” got to 1.4 million streams in 7 days due to the campaign I worked on. 

You can’t market music or manage client relations without social media: It’s inescapable.  I tend to measure TikTok renditions to check how successful the music has been as streams themselves don’t tell the whole story. That said, I work with influencers and other social media stars to drive the success of nearly all the artists I work with. A great example is Myke Towers recent track “Advino” which garnered 250 million streams on Spotify due to the relationships I leveraged with influencers worldwide.  

Where I am now 

Let me leave you with this. While I was the Regional Sales Director for Latin America for Spotify, I was instrumental in establishing Latin American as the #1 Spotify market worldwide for the music industry. Representing over 30% of this tech giant’s business I feel I can honestly say I was involved in a seismic music industry shift.  

Being the epicenter of great change has set me up for whatever I want to do in the future. Where next? I’m not so sure, but with the wealth of experience under my belt, whatever the move is, it’s sure to be epic.