Meet Mark Mackay

We recently connected with Mark Mackay and have shared our conversation below.

Mark, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

The first job I ever had – I was 20 years old and had a sales territory of a couple million dollars in the ski and snowboard industry. Our skis weren’t in much demand and they were too heavy and expensive at the time to be competitive – but when a customer tells you NO you quickly have to figure out how that actually means: “ok lets figure out how to work that into a yes.” My sales manager at the time didn’t care for me to explain to him why it wasn’t going to happen, he wanted to hear how I was going to make it happen. There’s so much more involved in that scenario. It’s not just how can I go back and be charming and try to convince them to do me a favor. It’s about showing marketing plans and direction of the brand… give them a reason to get “in business” with you. I think that spirit has always carried with me. In music, we just get told NO 400 million times a week, about everything… so it’s about always getting better, always having a good vision, always working on giving someone a way to see an upward trajectory. It’s relentless.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I gave up my corporate life one day, kind of out of the middle of nowhere, because I missed playing guitar. I decided to go to music school, thinking I could join someone’s band or maybe someone would “discover me.” I quickly learned that I was basically building a brand and taking it on the road. Ive released several EPs and a bunch of singles, and we’ve toured all over the USA (over 1200 shows) with a lot of my heroes. We’ve toured and played shows with Blake Shelton, REO Speedwagon, Tim McGraw, Steve Miller Band, Gary Allan, you name it. I have had to learn how to split the difference between the creative part of my brain who’s trying to be a great songwriter, guitarist, performer, entertainer… and the business side of my brain, who’s trying to keep our entire organization moving forward into the next 10, 20 years of an ever changing industry!

We are about to head out on our 3rd annual Christmas Tour, which this year takes us across the whole country. and we have a ton of new music ready for 2026!

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

NEVER give up on your own vision, know your place, and don’t expect anyone to do anything for you. I’ve been raised that way and it’s the only way I know. Very early on I was expecting that a lot of folks in the business would ‘handle’ things for me or open doors, and unfortunately as an artist, most of it, to get it off the ground at least, is done by grinding through things yourself. I am also a big believer in being able to zoom out and know my place of where I fit in the puzzle: for example if Im going to have a meeting with someone in the business that could potentially take us to the next level- I look at it from the perspective of “is what I’m doing right NOW worth it to him? do I need his involvement because I need help or because I need to expand? If right now this isn’t worth it to him to get involved, what can I show (trends/metrics) that could show that by jumping in it WOULD be worth it to him for the long haul.” I’m so realistic about the state of where I am right now and where the business is as I relate to it. That being said, the single most important thing in entertainment is to do what you do. Not what someone else tells you to do. The entertainment business jumps around, but you stay the course. At some point it all connects at the right time, right place.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

When I was growing up idolizing all my favorite rockstars, the path was through the radio. You had a great song, a record label signed you, it went on the radio, everyone found out about you and the foundation was there. Just in the last 10 years we’ve seen our formats with streaming and socials and algorithms change over and over. Sometimes weekly. It’s almost hard to keep caring about THE BEST SONG or THE BEST PERFORMANCE because it feels like all anyone cares about is the quantity of your TikTok followers. That being said, it’s all the same to me. I love all these changes and our direct ability to reach fans through all these social channels etc. We’re just always trying to thread that needle between what we remember of the business and what it is today. Put yourself in the shoes of an artist: You write something that you love and care about. You play it for thousands of people and they tell you that they loved it and they scream and clap and cry. Then you play it for someone in the industry and they tell you it sucks and doesn’t have enough streams or views for them to do anything with it. What do you do there!? The answer is go get ice cream and go for a nice walk… and start the process all over again the next day.

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Image Credits

Sean Murphy
Iris Leonardo

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