Alumni Find Work on Serial and This American Life Podcasts

Podcast work helps alumni make a living as musicians in New York.  

March 21, 2016

Kate Bilinski isn’t one of the reporters or producers on the hit podcast Serial, but her work is in the background of every episode, setting the pace and shaping the mood. It’s what might give a certain passage a sense of urgency, or make a listener pay closer attention.

Bilinski ‘10, who now lives in Brooklyn, works as the mix engineer and music editor for Serial, the most popular podcast in history. In addition to mastering the mix, she chooses the music for the show, commissions composers, and is part of the script editing meetings.

“We have a pretty tight-knit group with the producer crew,” Bilinksi says of the staff. “We’re all in one large room together, so we’re all bouncing ideas back and forth and implementing each other’s work.”


It wasn’t a field she set out to work in, but it’s one that is offering more and more gigs to musicians.

“I do have a bunch of friends now who are doing different pieces for broadcast and for podcast. I think it’s a great new medium people can work in, and it is kind of that midground between working with film or television and working purely with music because you are living in this only-audio world,” says Bilinski, who majored in electronic production and design at Berklee.

One of those friends is New-York based Martin Fowler ‘10, who writes, composes, and produces the music for the LimeTown podcast, and was recently commissioned to write 10 songs for the iconic podcast This American Life.

Like Bilinski, Fowler, a bass performance and EPD major, says he never intended to do podcast work until the opportunity came up. “It was not even necessarily on my radar when I was at Berklee … The Electronic Production and Design Department did a great job of giving me all the skills that I needed to do this job, but it was not with this job in mind.”

The podcast work is just one of Fowler's many gigs, which also include freelance performing, recording and producing for bands and artists, writing music for Bloomberg Media, and producing content for an online music education startup called SoundFly.
 

Not the Next Hollywood

Indeed, says Andrea Pejrolo, assistant chair of the Contemporary Writing and Production Department, those making a living composing and producing music do so in a piecemeal fashion, especially at first. Podcast work, he says, is just one of the many roads that lead to making a living as a musician.

“[Podcasts are] not like music for video games was a few years ago when it first made a big splash, where you could say ‘oh, this is like the next Hollywood.’ This is a nice way of supplementing the income of a contemporary writer and producer, and a great way for spreading the name of a freelancer who's starting out,” Pejrolo says.


Bilinski, too, is engaged in a variety of musical endeavors. Her job at Serial is a temporary, full-time position, meaning that she’s hired for the duration of the podcast’s second season. After it wraps up, she’s hoping to find work in her regular field, sound design for film, in advance of the Tribeca Film Festival season.

In addition to that, she also freelances for several studios around town. In fact, it was one of these engagements that led her to Serial—or rather, led Serial to her. One of these studios was connected to Ira Glass, Serial’s editorial advisor (and the creator and host of This American Life) and recommended Bilinski when Serial came calling for a mix engineer.

Fowler also got his This American Life gig through a connection to Glass, whom he met at an event put on by WNYC. Fowler mentioned that he was a composer and Glass asked for his card.

However, brushes with Glass, who is arguably the most well-known person in podcasting, are not how most musicians get their gigs. More typical is how Fowler got his LimeTown job: the drummer in his band worked on LimeTown and asked Fowler to do some producing work for it.

“I’d say it’s a currently limited but budding field,” he says of podcasting. “There will be more room for more composers as the medium grows, but right now, it’s a tight-knit community and a small one.”