February 09, 2010

Top Ten Top Twenties: Marisol Segal

November 3, 2009 3:00 PM

Marisol Segal is a digital strategist and marketing maven with more than 20 years experience in the music industry. Born and raised in Los Angeles, a San Francisco resident since 2005, Marisol has worked in digital music marketing for more than half of her music industry career. She started at just 18 years of age, working for Los Angeles based concert promoter, Avalon Attractions. From there she moved through the major label chain working at bothInterscope Records and Capitol Records . In 1998, Marisol transitioned to artist management representing a broad range of acts including platinum selling electronic artist, Robert Miles.

Moving to San Francisco enabled Marisol to dig deeper into her appreciation for the intersection between music and technology, taking her knowledge to global digital distributor, IODA where she was Director of Marketing Services. In 2008, she moved on to learn more about online and mobile video as the Marketing Director at Kyte. She is also the co-founder of the Flux Summit.

We share a patent from our work together at IODA and at CMJ 2005 she took me to the meat packing district in NYC and taught me to dance all night.

Like every digital music maven, inventor, renegade, passionista, business diva you will read about in the Top Ten Top Twenty series: Marisol is also a superfan.

More specifically, Marisol Segal is a Duranie. I only know the term "Duranie" because Marisol taught it to me. Nobody loves Duran Duran as much as Ms. Segal, superfan to all things Duran. In all the years I've known Marisol, she has spent money on Duran Duran at least twice a year and sends me at least 10 videos (a year, at least) of John Taylor. Articles about the band are usually emailed with subject lines "OMG." Most recently was an excited twitter from Ms Segal on October 29 when John Taylor addressed a crowd to wish the Internet a happy 40th birthday.

Meet the digital music industry in SF: everything we started doing in this town originates from a love of music first. Everything else came next.

Marisol loves music so much that when I asked her for her top 20 albums between 2000-2009 she was so excited she read the interview question incorrectly, and slaved over her top 20 albums of all time. Like any music geek knows, in order to create a top 20 *all time* list, much thought and work is required to come up with the top 30, 40 and 50. So Marisol (rather accidentally) wrote her Top 50 albums of all time list. And on the last day, after two extensions (yes, I grant extensions in certain circumstances) Marisol realized I was asking for the top 20 albums of the 21st century. Not all of the centuries known to man...

Within the industry, Marisol Segal is a go-to electronic music expert for me and you and everyone we know. Her reliability for expertise reveals an intricate command of genre and sub-genre filing systems for electronica, not to mention she knows just about everyone (DJs, producers, fans, managers) in the LA, SF, Detroit & NYC electronic scenes. In researching her list and finding links, I was not shocked to find most of her favorite albums are $35 imports which are not yet available at digital retail. Ms. Segal, you're taste is so refined, it's hard to find.

Marisol Segal - Top 20 (uuuh 23) Albums 2000-2009
One can only assume it took Marisol less than one minute to actually type this list, as she also happens to be the fastest typist in San Francisco. I give to thee her top twenty-three albums of the 21st century, because one of her clever disclaimers was the addition of 3 "honorable mentions." I hadn't thought of that loophole.

Honorable Mentions:

Next Up: Anu Kirk

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