You need to know about Honey, a female-led digital platform for DFW artists

Three years ago, Milan Merlo had a crazy idea.

As a journalism student at the University of North Texas, she identified a gap in media coverage of young artists and musicians in the university’s creative arts scene.

“I wanted a way to share everyone’s stories,” Merlo says. With just one camera and her best friend, she began conducting interviews with photographers, videographers and creative professionals on campus and around Denton. As her interview series grew, she developed a love for creative direction, content creation, and branding for artists. “I started to see this [creative direction] was something artists needed help with, so I pushed the [series] in that direction.

This evolved into The Honey, a hyper-local music platform aimed at uplifting the musicians of Dallas-Fort Worth.

“We are always changing,” she says. “New things are thrown at us.” She listed examples: a musicians advisory platform for help getting music on streaming services like Spotify. Team meetings on innovative ways to market a musician’s videos for greater visibility online. And, frankly, the company offers their services to provide whatever is needed to help an artist grow, especially when it comes to business.

“The experience is different from other videos I’ve made, because of how practical it is on everything,” says Blackk Egyptt, a local hip-hop artist and songwriter who worked with The Honey for his music “Thinking Of You”. video. “It’s hard to find a director who integrates what he sees with what you see. In terms of bringing the two ideas together into one vision, she does it very well. “

His commentary reflects the company’s mission to be an equal partner with artists, to serve as a platform to not only create art, but also elevate their vision.

Merlo and her female-led team of interns, photographers, videographers and writers operate the platform in an effort to increase the online presence of local musicians who are often overlooked. For musicians outside the industry hubs of New York and Los Angeles, a strong online presence means a level playing field during negotiations. After all, they can count the views themselves. She aspires to give musicians the tools to establish and build from Dallas and the rest of North Texas without having to scavenge elsewhere to see their vision come true. In many ways, The Honey is infrastructure.

Merlo believes the city gives musicians the opportunity to create “more authentic, more organic and more meaningful” music. She describes our region as a crossroads of artistic expression, where artists can create on their own terms. The Honey wants to help provide the resources to keep creatives local. In three years, Merlo and her team of four women have extended the platform’s services to creative direction, photography, writing, social media consulting and Soundcheck, which is their video series in direct. Think of NPR’s Tiny Desk, but local. Artists like Maya Piata, Piper Byers, Zane Loose, Ashton Edminster and free blck. are some of the artists featured in the live video series.

In the years to come, she wants to move the digital platform to a brick and mortar studio space where artists can meet in person. Until then, Merlo continues to cover the region’s hottest artists and sits between traditional and non-traditional media to give local artists a fighting chance.