Autumn Chamberlain ’22, Music Business and Industry

With a three-song EP and music video out on streaming platforms, performing locally, and juggling a variety of part-time positions, Autumn Chamberlain has been stepping into a multifaceted career in the music industry from her home base in the Northeast Kingdom. But she’s not stopping there. The 2022 NVU-Lyndon graduate plans to expand her reach all the way to LA in the coming year, drawing on the skills she’s honed and connections she’s made through Lyndon for this next step.

Autumn majored in Music Business and Industry, pursuing a dual concentration in Self-Promotion and Audio Production along with a minor in marketing. She chose the MBI program because it was both “so local and so unique at the same time.” A Burke, Vt. native, Autumn started taking piano lessons at age five and added guitar, bass, saxophone, and ukulele to her repertoire over the year, while a songwriting class in high school really kick-started her passion for it.

During her third year in the MBI program, she took the year-long Record Label Practicum course

in which students work collaboratively from the talent scouting A+R (artists and repertoire) phase through contract negotiation, pre-production, recording, and mastering, putting out an EP on the program’s Eneekay record label and marketing it, too. She learned a lot in the process — including how to successfully pitch herself as the artist for the label the following year! Besides gaining a three-song EP, the class worked with her to create the program’s first storyline music video as part of the marketing approach. View her video here.

While every step of the MBI program is hands-on, students are also required to step beyond the campus and intern in the field. For Autumn’s internship, she worked with Catamount Arts’ (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) Epic Music education program. After her internship ended, she was hired as the part-time coordinator for the growing program which offers strings classes to children from grade four through high school.

Besides her work with Catamount Arts, Autumn is a substitute pianist for area churches, a part-time music teacher at Sutton Elementary School, and a songwriter for hire with an online company. She’s busy, and fulfilled, but is preparing for her next move — “to go to LA and try to find a job in the industry.”

While certainly a big leap for this NEK native who hasn’t lived farther than 20 miles from her hometown, she has some connections to draw on for support. She knows a few other MBI grads who are there now and MBI Professor Brian Warwick worked in the industry in LA for years. With a dream of becoming “a pop sensation” since she was little, LA seems like a good place to give it a go. To start, she says, “I’d love to do anything within the song-writing community, I just super enjoy the process. But to perform my own songs would be the icing on the cake!”