Local musician who left the pandemic lockdown with sponsorships
- Elisha Asif
Before 2020, Gabi Rose was relying on her band and solo gigs to pay her bills, but sometimes the gigs wouldn’t make ends meet. Most of her pre-Covid gigs were also covers which she wasn't opposed to, but she did go out of her way to seek venues she could play her original works at. Then the pandemic happened which flipped her life around for the better.
The pandemic caused concert venues and music festivals to close down which resulted in revenues to fall by 85% in 2020.
Rose went from playing an average of two gigs per week with her band, Enrose, to no gigs at all during the pandemic. But the lockdown gave her time to focus on her key instrument, the saxophone, and write music with her band. Rose left the lockdown with an active social media presence as a musician and a crowd of venues and private events inviting her and her band to perform.
“A lot of what I was working on before Covid certainly bounced back,” said Rose, “Now I have more going on, post-Covid, than I did before.”
The pandemic worked in many ways in Rose’s favor. While she was briefly disappointed with her music career plans being ruined, she used the time in lockdown to pick up video shooting and editing skills. She then used these newly learned skills to create a social media presence for herself.
“I would film myself playing the sax and singing, playing the keys part, and then put it all together in a creative way.”
Rose would take up collaborations with other artists on social media, but her main focus wasn’t social media, rather it was the presentation of playing music and shooting/ editing the videos that she really enjoyed.
She used social media as a job because she had lost all her gigs. While it wasn’t a real job, it gave her a “musical responsibility” as Rose herself puts it and eventually became a stream of revenue.
“Social media has opened a lot of doors for me,” she says.
Once Rose started to shoot and edit her music content and post it on social media platforms, her digital presence started to come together. She gained 68,000 thousand followers on her TikTok and 10,000 followers on Instagram, as of today.
“There’s a lot of opportunities on TikTok,” Rose says.
Social media really did open new doors for Rose. She found new ways to earn through having thousands of followers and garnering enough attention for sponsored content.
Gator Cases, manufacturers of cases and protection bags, was her first sponsored collaboration. Currently, she’s working with Rockstar Energy Drink and a potential start up, an earbud company.
“I want to make sure my content is still relatable and organic for the most part,” said Rose. Sponsored content is the only worry for Rose because she doesn’t want the sponsors to dictate her content. Therefore, Rose infuses her original music to promote the brands; however, she still feels unsatisfied with sponsored content and hopes for more gigs with her original music and Enrose.
Whether it's gigs or sponsored content, the important thing for Rose is, she has the privilege to say, “this is my full time job.” Many musicians suffered and had sunken morales through the lockdown because of the unprecedented pandemic; but some artists like Rose found a new hope in the midst of dire situation.
