Come to the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, and you won’t just get an education. You’ll become part of a network with teachers, alumni, and fellow students who can help launch a career.
Two examples are Frost School Music Industry program alumni Josephine Westphal and Kwame Kandekore, who are key players at Analog Metaverse – a boutique rights-management firm and music publisher founded by producer Salaam Remi to “reimagine the traditional rights model.”
Westphal earned a Bachelor's in business administration and finance degree from the University of Miami before getting her master's in Music Industry at the Frost School in 2019. Kandekore earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Miami Law School in 2013, concurrent with earning his master's in Music Industry at the Frost School.
As for Analog Metaverse’s founder, Remi is a GRAMMY-winning producer whose studio credits go all the way back to rapper Kurtis Blow in 1986. He has since worked on landmark recordings by Nas, Alicia Keys, the late Amy Winehouse, and Jazmine Sullivan. The Analog Metaverse catalog includes over 2,000 songs by prominent artists such as J. Cole, the Fugees, and Dennis Brown.
Remi has long had a relationship with the Frost School, presenting a series of seminars, workshops, and masterclasses. When it came time for him to hire people to work at his new venture, it was natural for him to turn to Frost School.
“I’ve always thought that providing tutelage to the next generation of talent was important, executive as well as musical,” says Remi. “Josephine had been in some of my sessions at Frost and was also one of the graduate assistants assigned to work with me. I met Kwame while he was working at a law firm I was familiar with. Jo is a key component of the royalty administration while Kwame handles the contractual aspect.”
Helping with introductions was Professor Serona Elton, director of the Frost School’s Music Industry program (MIND) and chair of the music industry department.
“The way that Josephine and Kwame have become a core part of Salaam’s team makes me very excited for several reasons,” says Elton. “Having an industry executive as accomplished as Salaam enthusiastically consider alumni from our MIND program for his team is evidence of our program’s reputation. And having our alumni working on projects for Salaam that are at the leading edge of the music industry makes me excited and optimistic for their professional career journeys.”
Analog Metaverse’s specialty is finding revenue streams in music catalogs that others might overlook. Westphal and Kandekore both bring solid skills to that endeavor.
“I’ve worked across so many decades and developed a lot of contacts that Josephine deals with now,” Remi says. “That gives her a strong sense of where the bodies are buried in doing forensic accounting, to assess true value. She’s able to understand how many different revenue streams are possible. With Kwame, having a dedicated legal team member who is in tune with our purposes is important. Things have to be by the book, but also by the imagination. You get what you can negotiate.”
Both Kandekore and Westphal cite their Frost School experiences as essential to their launch.
“The Frost School was really helpful because all my instructors had real-world experience they touched on often,” says Westphal. “My finance degree was a lot more theoretical, but I got a lot of practical experience in Frost’s master’s program.”
“I was in law school interning at a firm that represented some high-profile producers,” adds Kandekore. “Because of the Frost School, I was way more knowledgeable than the other interns, which made me seem smarter. They ended up hiring me because of that.”
