Shore Fire Media Reviews

The turnover is EXTREMELY high. They pay very little, yet expect you to live in NYC and meet with clients, attend concerts, be a socialite, find new clients, etc without reimbursement for anything. For a music business company, the office is extremely depressing. No one is smiling or socializing or doing anything you might expect in a "creative" job field. The clients pay very high fees, and most of the money goes to paying the expense of an office in a Brooklyn high rise, and the salaries of the President, multiple Vice Presidents, Senior Account Execs, etc, while most of the work is done by very low-paid (25-30k year) employees. The low-level employees submit work to the senior ones, who then send it on to the client and get credit for it. Their main job is interacting with clients. They also get commission based on bringing in new clients, and will step in to "take over" recruiting a new client when a junior employee brings them in. A lot of the entry-level employees therefore were young people with a passion for music who had another source of income - personal wealth, parental financial support, or a second job. People will not share information or help each other, because a system is set up where you have to constantly prove your worth, and therefore every employee is competing against one another. It creates a very unfriendly work environment and makes it harder to be successful as a team. Meetings consist of employees trying to "one-up" each other by bragging and taking credit for team successes to their bosses. People sometimes hid their press lists from one another to keep other employees from competing with them for press coverage. It is extremely cut-throat, and there is very little empathy for employees, especially new hires. Did you get home from a client event at 3am? That's no excuse for coming in even a few minutes late the next morning. Work 60 hours in a week? Don't expect a cent of overtime or bonus pay. Multiple coworkers experienced mental health issues due to the workload and lack of support. I witnessed people crying multiple times. I saw an employee berated so badly in a meeting for a mistake she made that she burst into tears out of humiliation. This is a true story: when I first started, one employee seemed to be struggling from mental exhaustion and on the verge of a breakdown. I saw him act erratically, moaning and lying on the floor of the office. He ended up leaving for several weeks for "personal reasons." At the time, I thought he was just mentally unstable, but as I worked there for longer I realized it was due to the extremely high level of stress he was under. He no longer works there. Another example: I remember one intern being forced to run a trivial, unimportant errand for the president one day during an intense rainstorm. She came back completely soaked and had to sit in wet clothes for the rest of the day. The employee who sent her gave the item to the president like it was no big deal and she didn't even get credit for it. I also knew an intern that was asked to consider work done at a client event as "volunteer work" because they had gone over 40 hours and their boss didn't want to tell the president they had given overtime to an employee. They were rarely outright mean. It was done in a more passive aggressive style, in a way that pitted employees against each other for the approval of their bosses in an attempt to get a raise that would allow them to continue living in NYC. Many people end up quitting and they just hire new ones. The turnover doesn't really seem to concern them. If you want to work here, be prepared to have an extremely thick skin, and to fight for everything you get. In the best case, you will leave with some good work experience and minimally damaged mental health. Some of this is the classic cut-throat New York corporate experience. The only difference is there is no big financial opportunity at the end of it. People put up with it because they are passionate music fans and want to work with great artists. It wouldn't work in most industries, but they exploit it as much as they can for cheap labor.