Last fall Belmont University’s Curb College started a speaker series entitled “Women in Leadership.” Leslie Fram, the Senior VP of Music Strategy at CMT, was one of the featured guests and did a great talk with interesting stories about her career and offered advice to college students. We were lucky enough to get to sit down with her at her office in downtown Nashville at CMT to discuss how she got into music and what projects she has lined up.
Fram’s career started with a love of radio early on in her life. “I was very shy growing up, so listening to the radio was a form of entertainment for me,” she says. “I always envisioned being on the radio because you’re sort of behind a microphone, you don’t really see an audience.” Her fascination with the format lead to many successful years working in Atlanta and then New York.
“I’ve had twenty plus years doing radio – programming, on air. I absolutely loved it because I love music and I love the whole architect of putting a radio station together and staff and music. So I did that for over 20 years, getting up at 4am and doing the morning show and then staying at the radio station all day programming. My last station was in New York, and they sold.”
When the station was bought, she was left looking for a new job. “I was sort of at a cross roads of ‘do I want to go to another radio station with the possibility of them selling it or changing the format and having to start all over again?’ That’s when I started interviewing outside of radio, which was an eye opener for me. My mentor, who is now my boss, encouraged me to do that. So I started interviewing at a lot of media companies and coincidentally somebody here [at CMT] that was running the music department was about to start their own company, so there was an opening here. I made that leap of faith from radio to television and also from a completely different format – I was doing rock and alternative – to country. You apply the same basic principles that you do in radio or running any music department. It’s about marketing to a certain audience.”
She took all of her music industry experience and applied it to her position at CMT. Her day to day now includes “everything from maintaining relationships with labels and meeting with managers to find out what’s coming up [for their artists]. We love to plan six months to a year in advance. So specifically on my team we deal with music across all platforms. We may be working on video premieres or promotions we do with artists. I spend a lot of time on the phone with our digital franchises booking artists for events and performances.” Not only does she handle all of the music integration for the CMT channel, but she also helps with other promotions across channels. “I’m also the point person for the Viacom music group, so I work a lot with MTV and VH1. We do several cross channel promotions together. We’re doing album streams now with artists, so I book those.” In addition to all of those tasks throughout the day, several times a week she attends showcases around Nashville for artists, and she also gets to the office early each day to get organized before everyone else comes in – likely a habit brought over from her early morning days in radio.
Her biggest accomplishments during her time in radio include being the first female to receive the T.J. Martell award, and she also says breaking artists was something she thoroughly enjoyed. Now in her position at CMT, one of her main projects has been the creation of the Next Women of Country franchise. The lack of females on the charts is what spurred the first event, as Fram says “It really started because we’re in this wave right now with the format where women are not getting airplay. It’s in a real party phase where a lot of the males are getting played and it’s very hard for the females to get played on the radio. So this was a chance for CMT to play and expose a lot of female artists, not only playing their videos but getting content from them.” Another way they are helping women in the format is with “a couple of events throughout the year, and we’re about to kick off a tour. We’re taking it to the next level. So I’m really proud of that.” Though she sees hope for the format, she recognizes the present moment is very difficult for females. “I think the tide will change, but right now it’s scarce,” she notes.
They are currently in the beginning stages of putting together the Next Women of Country tour, looking at artists’ schedules to see who is available. As far as where she sees the franchise going, she says “we’ll start out small with club dates – I would love for it to get bigger next year to where we could add more dates, do bigger venues, bring along more women,” she hopes. “So I’d love to be able to grow it. I think once you kick anything off it’s always hard the first year, but then when it gets exposure and more people know about it, it gets easier the next time around. We also have a fall tour that CMT has been doing for years and I would like to be able to have some women on that tour as well.”
Fram recognizes that the inequality seen in the artist world is not isolated to that area – CMT has a lot of females in VP roles, but not all companies in the business can claim to have that many women in high positions. She is part of the early stages of a grassroots campaign called Change the Conversation which aims to “support women in all industries. I think it’s about changing the conversation, that’s why we started this campaign, with not just women but men are involved too, to help that. We had a meeting this week, and [at] the second meeting we’re going to have our vision goals of ‘what do we want this to be in a year? What do we want to accomplish? How can we get there? How can we mentor?’”
When asked about her thoughts on feminism, Fram said she likes to put a lot of time into mentoring young girls that are looking to get into the industry. “I’ve always felt like I have been not just pro-women, but pro-anyone that can get the job done [with the talent]. I feel like my best job is at mentoring because there are so many women that right out of college get into the media world and they have their sights set on doing one thing and I’d like to mentor them to see that there’s so many possibilities of what they can do out there if they just believe in themselves. So in that sense absolutely [I’m a feminist], I really want to help younger women getting in because it’s scary now. The landscape is so different.”
Her talents and interests extend beyond the media world, as she also is very interested in fashion. Luckily she has found a way to incorporate that into a side project. “I started this company called Four Bags with some friends of mine,” Fram says, “and we wanted to rep boutique handbag designers that weren’t the Kate Spades of the world, these were people that were smaller and they just sold to boutiques and not department stores. Then that turned into opening up a boutique with my sister because I really like trend spotting, so we have a little boutique in Alabama that sells accessories and some clothing. I do all the buying, that way I can fulfill another one of my passions which is fashion.”
With Fram’s incredibly successful career in different aspects of the music industry, it was great to hear her advice about trying different parts of the business. “Now more than ever the internships are so important, and I love what Belmont does because by the time you graduate you can intern anywhere in this town and a lot of interns end up getting hired. We’ve hired many interns for full time jobs because we’ve had that day-to-day interaction with them and how passionate they are and how quickly they learn. But being in Nashville, which to me is the center of the music business right now you don’t have to be in New York or Los Angeles, to be able to go from one industry to another – a CAA to a management company or a record label or a media company like CMT – to be able to intern and get this well rounded vision of what’s available is incredible.”
This article originally appeared in the third issue of Songbird.