Royal Oak Musician Launches Dream Town Media

Melissa Behring is a creative and talented Royal Oak musician and businesswoman. She fronts three different music projects and her most recent endeavor is her company Dream Town Media. Behring fills us in on her career as a musician and the details and premise of Dream Town Media.

Patch: Who or what inspired you to become a musician?

Behring: It’s always been in me. My mom started me singing when I was really young. I just always had opportunities to perform so I never stopped. It wasn’t really one thing or person. I was 4, my mom said sing and I did.

Patch: What are the names of your different music projects and how would you describe each of them?

Behring: The band that I work with the most is 7 Million Jigawatts and our sound is rock, soul and a little bit of pop. We play everything from our own originals to covers from over the last 60 years. Anything that makes people happy and have a good time. 7MJ’s Taking Flight came out in November of 2009. Another music project of mine is called the Attention Mongers; my husband and I play together as an acoustic duo. We play honky-tonk stuff that we really enjoy. Lastly, I have a jazz project called The Melissa Behring Project. We have an album coming out most likely in the fall of this year. I thought I’d get it done in 2010, but once we finished the first session I realized we had six songs and I really wanted between eight and 10. I have three new originals that we’re trying to finish. Neil Donato plays the keyboards for me and a variety of other guys play with us as well.

Patch: What is your career background?

Behring: My background is in marketing and advertising. I worked for an agency for Ford and did a lot of digital internet marketing for them. I spent a few years before that working for Barry Dillers company IAC. I helped him to integrate properties with the Entertainment book online. I worked with companies like Ticketmaster, Hotels.com, Expedia, etc. 

Patch: What made you decide to start Dream Town Media?

Behring: I looked around at the artists, musicians and writers that I knew. They were all struggling with the internet space, they didn’t necessarily understand what to do, where the best place to do self-promotion is, how to build a website, optimize their site and things like that. I was tired of applying myself to areas that I was less than interested in. So I took the leap and left my corporate job in August of 2009, I’ve made it for a whole year and a half.

Patch: What exactly does Dream Town Media do?

Behring: What I’ve been focusing on with Dream Town Media has been a lot of digital and social media exposure for artists. Whether it’s helping them with social media campaigns to drive more traffic to their websites or helping them create websites. We’ve been working on developing a couple artists as well. Helping to give them a digital presence and helping them write and record their music. This is kind of like a sub thought in my mind of what this over arch in Dream Town Media does. It really helps foster art and culture in the community, that’s my real goal, whichever community, I guess the global community. 

Patch: What are some of the projects that you’ve worked on both past and present?

Behring: The first project that pushed me off the cliff was for a friend of mine, Chad Jeffers. He plays pedal steel for Carrie Underwood. He wanted to write a book and had a bunch of good ideas but didn’t necessarily know what to do with it. So we just started meeting and working on it over the internet. I helped him edit and organize a publishing company for his book and then built a website and helped do some social media campaigns for him. That kind of pushed me out of the nest. I've also been really lucky to team up with a fine artist named Graceann Warn. We ran some PR campaigns for her and that has led me to one of my current projects, which is social media for the River Gallery in Chelsea. The ladies who own the gallery wanted to understand the internet better and how to leverage it to bring them more business and more leads for their artists. We’ve been working on Twitter for them and increasing their followers and teaching them how to use it themselves. I don’t necessarily always want to run that stuff for them, if I can have them get started and consult for them, that’s what I’ve been doing a lot with that gallery. And  I’ve been working with a young lady named Carissa Knoles. She writes children’s music and we’ve been working on an album for her. I've also been working on some social media with a couple of artists from Austin, Texas: one guy named Dave Insley and another one named Bo Porter. They play Texas honky-tonk music. They needed a little bit of exposure outside of what they were creating for themselves. 

Dream Town Media is a Royal Oak-based company that helps support and promote artists, musicians, writers and those interested in entertainment-based careers. For more info on Dream Town Media visit  http://www.dreamtownmedia.com/