VCU news

By Sian Wilkerson

For two hours and 40 minutes every Thursday evening, a first-floor room in Virginia Commonwealth University’s T. Edward Temple Building found itself transformed. No longer solely a classroom, it was also home to a student-led music label – complete with production studio, boardroom and marketing team.

Here, Robert Milazzo’s 410 Media Entrepreneurship class, known as the 410 Collective, has worked all semester on an ambitious group project – curating, producing and releasing an album featuring music from Rams past and present. The album seeks to “capture Richmond’s mantra,” as highlighted on flyers calling for music submissions.

“Mantra, Vol. 1” is available now on streaming platforms including Spotify. Several weeks – and just a handful of sessions — before the big day, it was “crunch time,” said Milazzo, an instructor in the Richard T. Robertson School of Media and Culture in the College of Humanities and Sciences. The conversation among students was by turns practical, passionate and punctuated with laughter.

From the front of the room, he clicked through a slideshow put together by students – updates on upcoming deadlines, an overview of the album’s final track list and biographies and headshots of the assorted artists, whose majors range from music to homeland security and emergency preparedness. Each point prompted lengthy discussion from the student-creatives.

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel like a class,” Milazzo said. “It has often felt like a bunch of people together running a business that they love, versus students and a teacher who are required to do something. It’s dissolved those lines of, ‘Why are we even here?’ to ‘What’s next?’ And that’s an exciting transition.”

Throughout the semester, Milazzo’s students have jumped wholeheartedly into the project, which they chose by way of a vote. The premise of the course is to give students the opportunity to execute hands-on and public-facing media-based entrepreneurial projects.

In addition to the album – which features 11 tracks, with audio production by the 410 Collective’s creative branch – the students also have been putting together a making-of documentary, as well as all of the promotional, marketing and artistic tools required for both releases. This includes the all-important social media factor: The collective is on Instagram and TikTok, both @410artcollective.

It shaped up to be such a large undertaking that Milazzo cautioned the class early on to prepare for the possibility of failure.

Fourth-year mass communications student Emmanuel Buachie, who came up with the idea, joked, “Honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking when I pitched it.”

The inspiration for his original pitch was personal, prompted by “years and years and years of trying to go ahead and do something like this, whether it be online with different friends or so on and so forth, and just seeing how it all fell apart due to so many different circumstances,” Buachie said. “So when I pitched this idea, I didn’t have that much faith in it. I just decided to go ahead and put it down on the list because it’s something I’ve seen happen and not work.”

It’s ambitious, to be sure, but Milazzo said the students have more than risen to the occasion.

“I do talk about the previous class to the current class because I want to set the bar,” he said, with an earlier class having produced a documentary. “And this class is really raising the bar.”

With 16 enrolled students in this fall’s session, everyone has had their roles, assigned by Milazzo. The groups include marketing and design, audio production, content strategy, partnership and outreach, talent and, of course, “vibes.” Even a handful of students who weren’t registered in the class have regularly attended and participated.

Third-year mass communications major Addie Lawrence said the dynamic has been unique and engaging for an academic course.

“We’ve gotten this weird, professional relationship with each other. Like we’ll message each other outside of class and be like, ‘Hey, I need you to get this done,’ or ‘Hey, can you change this?’” Lawrence said. “And it’s not even like, ‘I can’t believe she’s telling me what to do.’ It’s like, ‘OK, yeah,’ because you care.”

To meet the demands of the project, each student has worn several hats. Buachie, in fact, has worn three. In addition to his duties in audio production and content strategy, he was part of the talent pool, with a song featured on the album. “It’s a lot of work,” Buachie admitted, but joked that “I’m built different.”

The 410 Collective has been different, too – and not only because this is a class assignment.

“People do care about this,” said Kelly Ntambwe, a fourth-year mass communications major. “Which is weird, because we’re a class, right? This doesn’t feel like a class anymore – we’ve become something so much more than that.”After months of hard work, coming to the project’s conclusion has been bittersweet. Several students want to see the project continue in some form once the semester has concluded.

“I’ve only thought as far as up to the finish line,” Ntambwe said. “After the finish line, I have no idea. But I hope that the album does live on and that people revisit it and continue to listen to it. I’ll be listening to it.”