Meet Caleb Jerome Morales

 

We were lucky to catch up with Caleb Jerome Morales recently and have shared our conversation below.

Caleb Jerome, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?

I always say that in the music business, my work ethic is unmatched because it was developed outside of the music industry. From five years old, my parents structured my days around three fulcrums: Work, Fitness, and Passion. From 7am to 3pm, I was in school, performing at a high level as the top student through eighth grade, top 20 in high school, and top of the University of Florida Marketing graduating class of 2016. After school, I returned home to practice piano and/or guitar for an hour or attended band rehearsal before going to baseball practice or the gym after that.

At fifteen, I began my first job umpiring baseball. My first manager instilled the important tenets of professionalism and punctuality. “You are only on time if you are at least 15 minutes early to work.” I have had a consistent job or career ever since.

Today, this lifelong routine of structuring my day around Work, Fitness, and Passion has been maintained, as I happily perform at the top of my industry in Consumer Research, engage in resistance and cardiac training five to six times per week, and perform music almost every day. I have even leveraged my passion for music into additional work that enables new possibilities for my family that I had not previously imagined.

As I recently got engaged, I have a new sense of motivation that targets my focus and gives direction to the relentless work ethic I have built throughout my life. While working for oneself certainly drives an individual, working for someone else and potentially for future children, has elevated my work ethic to new levels. These days, I will typically work six to seven days per week from 7am to 11pm, with two to three hours of break to cook and exercise – after all, the ability to work is predicated on good health.

I am certain that my unique work ethic and determination will drive wonderful outcomes as time goes on. The blessings have been abundant already!

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

My name is Caleb Jerome Morales. I am a recording artist, entrepreneur, and session musician based out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

I release a new original song every two weeks with accompanying lyric videos on YouTube, am currently exploring sync and royalty free music licensing as a member of the Independent Music Licensing Collective (IMLC), and perform with dance pop band, Neon Nights and country artist, Gabriel Key. I am always pursuing new session work with up and coming artists.

These days, I am most excited about all the burgeoning opportunities. It all started on September 1, 2023, when I hosted my first event as a musical entrepreneur, a release party for my single “Face to Face.” Through that process, I learned the power of AI for adding a visual dimension to my music, and since then, I have mastered the tool of AI video generation combined with human refinement and editing to begin developing my “Artist World.” My music centers around lyrics that tell individual and collective stories, and adding a visual component has changed the game, showing viewers the worlds I describe in each of my songs.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1) Negotiation: I went to school for Marketing and have developed a niche in the Consumer Research industry as a leading expert in Consumer Panels, a style of data collection that allows analysts to study consumption behaviors based on like characteristics and traits that help brands efficiently tailor their sales and marketing strategies to various consumer cohorts. By developing a decade long career in business, I have gained the unique skill set to self-manage, balance a twelve to sixteen hour workday via short and long term scheduling, and most importantly, to negotiate.

Monetization and representation prove to be persistent challenges for musicians who typically lack the business skills to “go to market.” Many musicians and artists will outsource these responsibilities at great costs – both financial and organizational – leaving their schedules in the hands of agents and managers who typically charge artists by large percentages of their earnings.

In keeping everything in house, I have maintained full autonomy over all opportunities that I accept. As a result, I have never in my professional music career worked a gig that pays less than I am comfortable taking, never shared my earnings with an individual who did not contribute to the show, and never invested my time into a project I am not fully passionate about.

Negotiation is a crucial skill for artists, and I am grateful for my extensive history in this field.

2) Musical flexibility: My musical skill bag is deeper than most. I play keyboard, guitar, and bass at a high level and have working competency in a number of other instruments. I sing, rap, write great poetic lyrics, produce, compose, arrange, and listen to a massive range of musical styles and genres. I began playing and studying music at four years old and have practiced an instrument or relevant skill nearly every day since. At this point, I am essentially wired by music, giving me the distinct and unique advantage to step into nearly any musical environment and add to the sonic output.

This flexibility has opened countless doors in the music industry, from joining South Florida’s hottest live acts on stage (many times without a single rehearsal), to sync opportunities writing music for TV and film, to producing a new song every two weeks.

While music largely comes from the soul, a deep skillset and decades of experience are irreplaceable. My musical flexibility has provided a consistent stream of work for me over the past year, and these experiences only strengthen and grow my abilities to share with more artists in the future.

3) Technological competency: My experience in the commercial world and my desire to be a one-stop-shop artist has afforded me great expertise in a number of tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, photo/video editing software, GenerativeAI, website building, music production software, and more. I – create all of my photo/video content, built and published my website, launched a vlog mini series to YouTube, produce and distribute my music, developed a brand image, book shows, manage accounting and banking, and host events – all on my own.

For years, I watched other musical artists pay thousands of dollars to outsource these activities, but I could never afford to do the same. By taking the time to learn to do these things on my own, it took much longer for me to get my music career off the ground. However, the autonomy I retain over every aspect of my career and image has allowed my investment of time to pay full dividends. With all these costs staying in-house, I grow steadily closer to turning a profit with each passing day.

It can be scary and overwhelming to take on all these tasks on one’s own, but with tools like Canva, KaiberAI, CapCut, and Google Suite available to all at under $150 per year, there has never been a better time for independent artists to build careers in the exact image of their desires. I encourage anyone reading this to take the same path. You CAN do it!

What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?

My parents engineered a balanced education for me from an early age, as discussed in the first section, fostering an environment centered around Work, Fitness, and Passion. However, the most impactful moment came when I was browsing various majors and universities as a junior in high school.

My AP Language teacher, Mr. Joel Ballantyne, who to this day remains one of the most influential educators I’ve had in my life, gave us our best assignment of the year in October 2011 – go on the CollegeBoard website and research a few majors and a handful of universities. From seven years old until that point, I attended the University of Miami (UM) each year for annual music theory and performance testing, which ingrained in me a desire to study music business and production at UM’s Frost School of Music. However, Mr. Ballantyne’s exercise and his advice to explore public universities to avoid hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt opened my mind to new possibilities.

I consulted with my mother, who was also my piano teacher. In fact, she put me through all the music testing at UM! At the time, I was surprised by her advice – to major in something outside of music, preferably business, that will expand my available opportunities. After all, she said, I love music too much to let it go and would inevitably continue to hone my skills on my own, but an expertise in business would allow me to do music on my terms while setting me up for a career that would allow me to evade certain lifestyle struggles that many musicians face.

With that advice in mind, I discovered the field of Marketing. The description of Marketing on the CollegeBoard seemed thrilling to me. While I always had a proclivity to music, I was equally captured by marketing and statistics from early on. As a young baseball player, I recorded and calculated all of my game stats in a notebook. My first full sentence as a baby was “I need Coke!,” which my mother assumes was something I came up with after exposure to Coca Cola’s TV ads while captive in my high chair.

Moreover, I found the coursework and the clubs I joined in Business School to be absolutely enthralling. The career I have built in marketing continues to bring me joy every day. There are new challenges and lessons that enrich me, and I have gained a unique perspective that has freed me of the ad saturated digital world in which most of us live. Some of the friends I met studying marketing are my longest and strongest relationships.

Of course, my mother was completely right – I never abandoned music and found all of the educational development that I’ve needed online. I did not need to go to Berklee to study guitar performance or UM to study music production. I have learned and grown from the countless educators who share lessons on YouTube and Instagram. But the formal business education I learned in the classroom and in the field with my peers was truly something I could not replace anywhere else. The networks that the University of Florida plugged me into have provided boundless opportunities for success that have only translated into my musical life.

Mom, thank you for looking into my future and guiding me on such a crucial decision. I am forever grateful for your advice and your determination to set me out on a path of well roundedness and self-sufficiency.

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