Tawnee Lynn Lillo

I attribute my success 100,000, million, trillion percent to my parents. Where are you born, you know? My mom and dad started me on piano. My mother is a superhero - this short little Irish-German-Korean woman who had 5 children in 7 years, all natural births with no epidural. She was such a wonderful mother, teaching us manners, teaching us how to say thank you and how to offer people help. My father has a huge work ethic - he's an Italian man who worked at JPL, was a private pilot, an electrician, a plumber, very smart even though he was uncollege-educated. Without my parents starting me out in piano and then violin, I would have never known what the French horn was. Then my band director said, 'who wants to play the French horn?' and just really being curious, getting these opportunities to travel and tour. I also credit my educators - my band director Ken Bisky, Keith Johnson who gave me a full scholarship to U of A and mentored me like a father figure, Rick Todd who taught me at USC, and the late Vince DeRosa, the most recorded French horn player in the entire world. There's so much gratitude for my education and that mentorship I received. I've had these milestones in my career, like touring with Josh Groban in 2011 where I got to meet management and develop really beautiful relationships. It's about being in those experiences and being backstage and growing and learning.

The biggest challenges in the music industry right now are incredibly complex. We have this outdated system with the musicians union, the AFM, where there are 45 or 50 different contracts for one union, and the complexity of having all these different organizations and contracts that exist is overwhelming. There's a huge disconnect and wall between union and non-union work. The union has great protections - making sure we get paid on time, get breaks, sign contracts - but there's a conflict of interest because some organizations have small budgets or are mom-and-pop companies or non-profits, while others have $5 million to $15 million budgets for film and television. When you do a union job, there's a 30% increase for health, welfare, and pension that organizations have to pay, which can make it impossible for smaller budgets. Musicians might get called to play with some elite artist or huge orchestra from around the world - these bucket list items - but they can't share it on social media because it's non-union work. The contracts are long and difficult to read, there are bylaws that we as artists have a very hard time understanding unless we spend time sitting down and reading every single contract, possibly paying a lawyer to help us. When AB5 came out, it was a huge hurdle and a lot of orchestras stopped being able to pay musicians, so now they ask musicians to do work for free and put concerts on for free and ask for donations, and people are donating $5. When you're watching a 50-piece orchestra, the least you can do is put a dollar towards each person that you just saw make a masterpiece of music. AI is also a huge threat - people trying to create fake robots to play instruments that have to have the human touch, the human breath, the human emotion, the expression, the expertise. There's also the challenge that we don't have human resources in our business. A lot of us aren't taught that proper etiquette is so imperative. The opportunity I see is in bridging these gaps with my platform - a peer-verified trust network that can help musicians manage their careers, help contractors organize better with payroll integration, and help organizations find the right musicians. I think there could be a 'let's meet in the middle' approach where certain jobs that maybe aren't union could still be offered with some kind of retirement opportunity. We need re-engineering in the industry, and I think my platform is going to give a lot of people the opportunity to have more time to practice and create more sustainability and longevity for the industry as a whole.