No Earbuds Fest,

Jamie Coletta

Jamie Coletta started No Earbuds five years ago. You could quickly describe it as a boutique public relations and consulting powerhouse, but it’s much more than that, because Jamie Coletta is much more than just a publicist. She’s her artists’ biggest fan.

Over the last decade, she has helped break careers for Jeff Rosenstock, PUP, Microwave, Bartees Strange, and a long list of successful and venerated independent artists and bands—like The Wonder Years, Foxing, Oso Oso, Circa Survive, Thursday, Prince Daddy and the Hyena, Softcult, Pool Kids, Cheekface, glass beach, and more— have since trusted No Earbuds to promote their work and get it in front of people who care. Because Coletta cares, and she makes a point of connecting with other people who care, too.

Caring works: thanks to Coletta’s approach, her clients have received widespread media coverage with influential music publications like Rolling Stone, SPIN, Stereogum, Consequence, Alternative Press, and more; garnered Best New Music nods and feature profiles from Pitchfork; booked slots on Late Night with Seth Meyers, KEXP, Audiotree and NPR’s Tiny Desk; grown from local openers to headlining their own tours; and even helped get artists signed to labels and publishing deals. In 2021, BrooklynVegan wrote “Jamie Coletta dedicate her life to hyping up awesome musicians, no matter how big or small.” Endless Scroll called her "music’s cheerleader."

Coletta has built No Earbuds into a flexible, one-stop shop for independent, creative underdogs, offering marketing, publicity, consulting, and virtually whatever other service or help an independent musician might need. She describes No Earbuds as a “support system” for artists figuring out how to tell their story, navigate the music industry, and do it all in a way that’s strategic, smart, and sticks to their own principles and values.

Some of that involves traditional PR, but a lot of it doesn’t. Sometimes it involves building a timeline for a record rollout, or advising on a content plan, or devising an outside-the-box alternative to a usual email campaign. Over the last decade, Coletta has earned a reputation for inventive and radical campaigns that help bands find and build a community around them—all outside the structures of the corporate music industry. At No Earbuds, as she’s always done, she applies hard-earned industry know-how to help artists thrive on their own terms.

“No Earbuds is all about helping our clients identify their stories and sharing them in ways that are both engaging for fans and authentic to them as artists,” says Coletta.

It hasn’t been an easy five years to be an independent worker in the music industry. Coletta has managed all of this while not just navigating the COVID pandemic, but also bringing a new life into this world—her son was born in March 2020, right before the industry shut down for the better part of a year. She figured out how to juggle raising a tiny human while growing No Earbuds in its first few years, thanks to sharp resourcefulness and endless drive instilled by years working in the dude-dominated music industry. “It’s worth screaming from the top of the roof about a fucking woman who is doing it her own way all these years later, figuring out a way to survive all that bullshit and still stand out” she says.

More than her years of marketing, management, A&R, and publicity skills, Coletta’s secret weapon is an earnest, boundless respect for and belief in music, and the people making it. The founding pillars of No Earbuds—community and mutual respect—are evidenced in projects like EARBUDZ VOLUME ONE, a 20-song collection featuring various members of the No Earbuds roster covering each other’s music, and which raised thousands for The Last Prisoner Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to cannabis-related criminal justice reform.

The music industry is notorious for chewing up and spitting out its participants. But Coletta knows there’s a better way.

“At the end of the day, I’m still just a fan,” she says, “and I haven’t let it kill me yet.”