Jaffe continued working with Rykodisc as a legal intern during law school and then as a full-time employee on its legal team after earning his law degree. Meanwhile, he kept coming back to WMUH as a community DJ, in the summers during law school and more regularly upon moving to Philly, for 10 years after graduating. He got his first taste of band management through a connection at Rykodisc, a legal intern who was friends with the garage-rock band The Greenhornes: “That was the first band that called me their manager,” Jaffe says. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but sometimes, that’s how you figure out what you need to do.”

What band managers do, Jaffe discovered, is a mix of organizational and creative tasks. Because musicians earn money from a variety of sources — shows, record and merch sales and licensing, to name a few — managers keep tabs on those revenue streams and ensure artists are being paid for their work. Managers might also coordinate travel, lodging and other logistics for tours and promotional appearances. On the creative side, managers help clients execute their artistic vision. That could mean considering which recording studios and producers could be a good fit for a forthcoming album, imagining what album art might look like, narrowing down potential directors for a music video and so on. It’s the creative side of management that Jaffe is passionate about.

The first artist that Jaffe managed in this more complete way was Philadelphia’s Kurt Vile, starting in 2008. Jaffe’s wife ran a record store in Old City, and Vile would bring in homemade CDs for the shop to sell. Jaffe listened to one and “immediately thought it was special,” he says. He asked his wife to make an introduction, and Jaffe quickly learned that a handful of record labels were interested in signing Vile. Jaffe, who had moved on to the metal-forward label Relapse, had by then established relationships with executives at multiple labels. He offered to help Vile shop his record to the three major indie labels at that time, and all three were interested. Vile ultimately signed with Matador Records. Jaffe then helped Vile navigate the multiple booking agents who were interested in working with him.

“At that point we realized: ‘I’m doing manager things.’ I became his manager, all with just a Gmail address. I didn’t have a company. I was just managing Kurt Vile,” Jaffe says. “He put out his first record on Matador 15 or so years ago. That gained real legs, and it just really grew in an organic, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other way. It wasn’t an overnight success. Every record was bigger than the last one. Every tour was bigger than the last one.”

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia indie scene was flourishing. Vile was part of it, and was the first act to find major success: He has since gone on to be an answer on Jeopardy!, play a roadie on Portlandia, sell hundreds of thousands of records and even have a day named in his honor in Philadelphia. Labels started looking toward his home city for the next big thing. And local artists began looking toward Jaffe, with his experience managing Vile and his legal background, as they began getting more attention and interest.

“I became — and I loved becoming — the guy that bands would come to to give my two cents on, ‘Which record deal should I choose? What does this contract mean that this label offered me?’” Jaffe says. “Even if I wasn’t their manager, a lot of folks would ask my advice, and I was really excited to be in that position.”

He did go on to become the manager for one of those acts: Waxahatchee, the musical project of Katie Crutchfield, whose Cerulean Salt (2013) was named among the best albums of the 2010s by Stereogum and Rolling Stone, while Vogue called her latest album, 2020’s Saint Cloud, the “best album of her career.” Jaffe, who describes himself as a “superfan” of her work, began working with her shortly after Cerulean Salt’s release, just as she’d signed to a larger label.

His third “client” (“if you want to call bands and friends clients,” he says) was one he discovered: Snail Mail, the solo project of Baltimore’s Lindsey Jordan. He heard her demo on Bandcamp when she was still in high school and says he was “floored by” it. He reached out and offered to manage her. She’s since released two critically acclaimed albums with Matador; 2021’s Valentine made best-of-year lists from Stereogum, The New York Times and Pitchfork, among others.

It was around the time Jaffe began working with Snail Mail that Jaffe’s friend and Vile’s booking agent, Eric Dimenstein, intervened: “Up until that point, I did everything. I was a control freak,” Jaffe says. “[Dimenstein] really, really encouraged me to relinquish some control, to really come to terms with what I’m good at. While I can rent vans and book flights and reserve hotel rooms just fine, that’s not why these bands want me to manage them.”

Dimenstein suggested they start a company together and hire what’s called a day-to-day manager to handle logistics so Jaffe could focus on the creative side of band management. They founded Another Management Company in 2017. Today, the company employs 12 people (including Jaffe and Dimenstein) and manages 24 artists, all of whom Jaffe is proud to support.

“I’ve found, even from WMUH days and Muhlenberg days and law school days, that I’m only good at assignments that I really believe in. Part of the reason I never worked for somebody else’s management company is because I never had a career ambition to be a manager. It wasn’t the job description that attracted me; it was the bands,” he says. “We're pretty selective. I’m proud of our roster in our corner of the music industry. Everyone that we represent is many people’s favorite bands, which is really special to me.”

After a weird year or so during the early pandemic, Jaffe’s work — and the work of the artists he manages — is largely back to normal. What that looks like in practice is a fair amount of travel, about 25 flights per year, to support his clients as they navigate things like negotiating record contracts or making important press appearances. The rest of the work can be done from his office in Upper Darby, a community just outside Philadelphia. But to call any of it work, Jaffe says, is kind of a misnomer.

“I’ve created a life where, on the one hand, I don’t have a 9 to 5 job — it’s a 7 a.m. to midnight job. But these are all my friends. Every band that I work with are close friends of mine,” he says. And he credits his time at Muhlenberg for setting him up for this job that doesn’t feel like a job: “I really say that WMUH was my major. It gave me both relationships and skills that directly tie into my day-to-day life here, and then it gave me sort of bigger picture life skills … I learned to manage my time and set goals for myself that were not just for myself, that other people relied on and depended upon. I learned how to be a manager of other people, of a staff, at WMUH.”

The goal of the class, according to its instructors, is to give students both the creative and technical skills they’d need to pitch and launch their own podcasts. If your reaction is “do we really need another one of those,” point taken — there are currently 4.2 million unique podcasts in existence, per Sullivan, twice as many as were available in 2020. But this proliferation in audio content is partly a reflection of increasing demand. And, the course teaches how to think about a podcast in terms of its marketability to an audience and to sponsors and how to produce a tightly edited file with good audio quality, putting students leaps and bounds ahead of the average would-be podcaster with a USB microphone and a prayer.

Intro to Podcasting as well as Audio Production, a course team-taught by Krempasky and Adjunct Professor of Media & Communication Gina Sierzega, help students build extremely in-demand skills. Today, it’s not just major podcasting companies and public radio stations hiring audio producers and editors. Traditional broadcast radio stations (like those owned by iHeartMedia) “have been jumping headfirst into podcasting,” says Sullivan, and Fortune 500 companies and other businesses are also looking to break into the space. 

“We tell our students: If you learn to be a very competent audio editor, you will be able to find freelance work in audio editing without a problem,” Sullivan says. “There is a huge need for that.” (Or, as Krempasky puts it, “If you can edit, you will never go hungry.”)

Students involved in WMUH who’ve also taken these courses have found the skills that they built in the station and in the classroom to be extremely transferable. Sydney Holliday ’23, who was station manager at WMUH and took Audio Production, is now an aspiring actor living in New York City. Her first job after graduation was starring in an essentially one-woman show at Hershey’s Chocolate World; she’s now training to be a Radio City Music Hall tour guide to support her as she auditions. What both roles have in common is the need to command an audience’s attention without much (or any) exchange of dialogue — strikingly similar to the experience of broadcasting on WMUH. She credits having to listen to herself through headphones while live on the air with helping her sound more polished during the interviews that led to these two jobs.

“I’m really hoping to get back into audio editing and interviewing again — they take a lot of work, but it’s so enjoyable,” says Holliday, who also was a host and editor for Muhlenberg’s Spotlight on the Performing Arts podcast as a student. “I’ve always got job alerts open for on-air personalities or audio editing, because I know that’s something I still have the skills for and I would love to be able to tack that on so [I can afford to stay in New York] auditioning.”

Gabe Walsh-Shore ’23, a former WMUH station manager who took Intro to Podcasting, is now working as a middle-school math teacher. One reason he got involved with the station and the course is because of his aspiration to become a voice actor, and he feels prepared for such opportunities thanks in part to his experiences in both places. His other career goal was to teach — he was a theatre and mathematics double major who also received his secondary education certification from Muhlenberg — and he’s now seeing how his passions intersect.

“I’ve had mentors and colleagues tell me that my way of speaking and teaching is very clear. It’s easy for students to follow me. I’m not [talking] too fast. Radio really helped me with that,” Walsh-Shore says. “Both [radio and teaching] are live mediums. No re-records.”

The podcasting course is only three semesters old, says Krempasky, so the number of Muhlenberg students who go on to directly apply their audio storytelling skills is sure to grow over time. But the fact that such a course is available at all — and that so many students are able to hit the ground running in it — is a testament to the continuing power of WMUH.

“There are so many exciting things that develop in and around having a student radio station,” Sullivan says. “It’s not just the station itself, which is important in its own right, but it’s all these other things that happen on the periphery of the station that demonstrate part of its value to the College as a whole.”