Chicago Music Nexus Co-Founder Olivia Mancuso is Starting a Marketing Agency

Olivia Mancuso talks about Chicago Music Nexus, the Elevated Frequencies podcast, and her plans to launch a marketing agency in dance music.

Stored on Olivia Mancuso’s hard drive is a folder that she’s named “Nice Words.” In it are screen shots of praise she’s received throughout her time advising artists in dance music on how to promote themselves.

“Keep up the good work, you’ve been insanely helpful with my music career from your tips…” reads one. “You’re doing amazing work for our community.”

Another says, “Took your advice. Threw my own pop-up with my friends. Good amount of people showed up. Now a barbershop owner wants us to play a pop-up at his shop. Making my own destiny. Thanks, Olivia.”

These testimonies are the creative fuel Mancuso needs to take her operation to the next level. She recently passed the 100-episode mark on her podcast, Elevated Frequencies, and the 2024 debut of her Chicago Music Nexus conference broke even in its first year. Now, she’s set her sights on launching a marketing agency geared toward the dance music community.

“We’re gonna serve artists, festivals, and music executives,” Mancuso told EDM Identity over video chat. “That’s still a couple of months away from fruition. I’m building it very intentionally, taking what I’ve learned from my agency outside of music.”

Glance at any of Mancuso’s social media accounts, and you might get the impression that all of this happened overnight. Anyone invested in her content can tell you otherwise, as she’s not shy about the winding road that brought her to where she is now.

The Olivia Mancuso Origin Story

Long before she entertained the idea of working in dance music, Olivia Mancuso pursued a career as a multimedia journalist. She was born and raised in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. After graduating from Illinois State University in 2014, she got hired by an NBC affiliate in Iowa.

But the perils of public figuredom temporarily derailed her career. One night, Mancuso was out with her close friend, a gay man who tragically passed away in 2017. “We went to the bars and there was this guy following us around all night,” she recounted. “Long story short, we got into this pizza place. He calls my gay friend the F slur, and I throw a piece of pizza at him.”

The incident was captured on CCTV cameras, and Mancuso’s employers received a complaint about her. “He started it, but I was the local public figure, so I got fired,” she said of the incident.

Mancuso “somehow failed forward,” as she put it, and landed at a CBS affiliate in Florida. But working in a bigger market wasn’t the happy ending she hoped for. Her new bosses often discouraged her from impactful reporting in favor of chasing stories for the sake of ratings.

A breaking point came in 2018, when Mancuso was getting ready to go live on the scene with a story about two disabled elderly men displaced by a lightning strike that burned down their house. Included in her coverage was a full list of everything they needed, from walkers to medicine to other odds and ends. But minutes before the story aired, she heard on her police scanner that a minor rollover crash had just taken place elsewhere.

“I got a call from the executive producer,” Mancuso said. “He was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing? You need to get out to that crash right now, we just heard about it!’ I was like, ‘Guys, it’s on a road with no street lights, it’s not blocking traffic, it’s nothing.’ He was like, ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s breaking, it’s fresh, it just happened, you need to go.’”

Mancuso continued: “So I had to abandon this story where I could have helped these men in my small way to go stand in front of an abandoned car on the side of the road. I went home to my now husband but boyfriend at the time, unpacked all my gear, laid on the floor, and went, ‘I’m done. I’m so done.’”

Mancuso decided to move on, this time of her own volition. Over the next several years, she gained experience with a wide variety of different companies. Her résumé grew to include positions at nonprofits like Youth Haven and the Chicago Better Business Bureau as well as a business incubator called 2112 Chicago.

The throughline connecting these roles was marketing and social media management. During her time at the lattermost brand, she met entrepreneurs renting desks and offices who inspired her to blaze her own path in the dance music industry.

Enter Elevated Frequencies

Initially, Olivia Mancuso cast a wide net with her personal brand, creating content about entrepreneurship, manifestation, and other lifestyle topics. “I tried the whole ‘be for everyone’ strategy,” she explained. “It didn’t work.”

“I’ve always been a dance music fan and worked in the industry in a very unofficial capacity. But before I made it, I was making content for TikTok about general entrepreneurship principles, some manifestation/vision board stuff, and some lifestyle stuff,” Mancuso elaborated. “I hit 140,000 followers, but my content was too varied, too all over the place. I was losing followers, gaining others, some of them were bots — it really sucked.”

Olivia Mancuso launched her Elevated Frequencies podcast in June 2023, and the algorithms rewarded her once she also refocused her short-form video content on the specific niche of dance music. This is one of countless personal experiences that she cites as teachable moments when advising artists.

“These followers hang around, they engage with all my content, and when you look in analytics at followers versus non-followers, my followers are the ones engaging,” she pointed out. “That feels good because I know they’re gonna follow me to the next thing.”

Mancuso professes to be deeply passionate about the roots of the music she loves, and her “House History” features explore the stories of pioneers like Marshall Jefferson and Green Velvet. But while she still keeps the series going to this day, it was her profiles on the careers of influential superstars that helped her gain significant traction.

“I asked new artists about their business and brand strategy, and I did it in shorter form,” Mancuso said. “The first one was Jamie Jones on his Paradise party series. That video just exploded. I posted that in February, and it’s still doing numbers today. It was bite-sized content that still teaches a lesson. It’s actionable, and you can learn from their story. So I did the same thing with Experts Only, Anyma, Drumcode, even festivals.”

In the process, Mancuso found not only her voice but also her competitive edge as a content creator. “What I’ve learned is that people and artists want actionable strategies,” she pointed out. “There’s a lot of higher-level, overview, thought leadership content — not just in the dance music space, but everywhere. But there’s not that next step that answers the question, ‘How do I do this?’”

Mixed Signals

It’s not lost on Mancuso that her role in the dance music industry is a controversial one as of late. In April, the Pete Tong Music Academy shared findings suggesting that 61% of emerging DJs believed that “social media numbers matter more than musical skill” in the present day.

When asked how much time she thinks the average artist today must spend creating social media content in order to make what they do a full-time career, Mancuso gave a nuanced and realistic answer. She said, “You need to decide what’s sustainable for you, and whether you’re okay with what that might mean in terms of how fast you’ll grow.”

Mancuso elaborated: “Maybe it’s two to three times a week that you’re posting until you hit a certain point where you can kind of dial it back. Are you okay with the fact that that might take you longer than someone who’s posting five pieces of high-quality content per week? The other part of this is that so many artists are afraid to invest in help, either because they’re afraid to spend the money, or they’re afraid to release creative control. And the thing is that you will need to make an investment at some point in your artist career if you wanna get to the next level. This is a dream career. Just because you love making music doesn’t mean you’re automatically owed a career in it. Everybody wants to be a star.”

In spite of this, Mancuso is also at pains to dispel the notion that dance music is the rich person’s playground that people often make it out to be. Her most readily available evidence to the contrary is the career of her brother, Proppa, who currently happens to be experiencing a breakthrough of his own.

“My brother did not have any money,” Mancuso admitted. “There’s not a nice way to put that. He’s someone who scraped things together, literally ate scraps for dinner, and did whatever he could to 100% focus on music, and his persistence is paying off.”

Mancuso also cited Toronto DJ and producer HNTR as an artist who didn’t let modest means hold him back from achieving their career goals. “He is pretty open about the fact that he was a homeless teen, but then he won the Juno Award for dance single of the year in 2022,” she said. “He’s been on a ripper since.”

Olivia Mancuso’s New Marketing Agency

What stone could possibly remain unturned for someone who’s managed to make a career out of helping artists in the community she holds dear? Olivia Mancuso has her sights set on launching a marketing agency.

It doesn’t yet have a name — at least, not one that she was willing to share during our video chat. She did at least disclose a fair bit about the direction she plans to take with it.

“I’ve learned a lot from my work outside of music about how to cut down time trying to find the right client fit,” Mancuso said. “Some providers just get into this lack mindset where they want anyone and everyone’s business. I’m going the opposite route and figuring out how to screen clients to make sure that we’re both a good fit.”

The prospect of a dance music-specific marketing agency doesn’t signal a departure from Mancuso’s path; it’s arguably the next step. “When you look at the levels of access, the free podcast was the first thing,” she said. “Chicago Music Nexus still has a low barrier to entry, $150-175 ticket to get all of this networking and education, plus an open bar, plus you’re getting fed. Now you get to the music marketing agency that I’m developing for the clients who are really serious about taking their marketing to the next level.”

No matter where her endeavors lead, it’s safe to say that service to others will remain at the forefront of all that Olivia Mancuso does. From her humble beginnings as a broadcast journalist to where she stands now as a budding marketing mogul, she’s never lost sight of the higher purpose that’s guided her ascent.

“I hope that I can continue to be accessible on a different level even as I start to do more,” Mancuso reflected. “The core of who I am and the mission of the podcast is to empower artists to make themselves the business owners they deserve to be. That won’t change.”

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