About
Hi there! I’m Aaron Dowd. I play drums, shoot video, take pictures, produce high quality content for podcasts, social media, and other online platforms, and so much more. I’ve spent the last 15 years making cool things and helping other people build cool stuff too.
When I was 12, I decided I wanted to be a drummer in a rock band when I grew up. I had no idea how to do it, but that was the plan. I practiced obsessively as a teenager, played with a string of local Texas bands through my teens and early 20s, and in 2012 I helped rising Texas singer-songwriter Kolton Moore start Kolton Moore & the Clever Few, a rock band with a sound that was a hybrid of Texas Country, Grunge, Indie Rock, and Americana music. Six studio albums, hundreds of shows, and multiple cross-country tours later, we’re still at it and living the dream (it’s actually a lot of hard work but I love it).
In my early twenties as I was scheming about how to get famous as a rock & roll drummer, I got curious about everything surrounding the music. Audio engineering, web and graphic design, photography, writing, marketing, etc. I taught myself as much as I could, and eventually turned to working freelance helping podcasters around the world start and grow their shows.
When the band took an extended break in 2015, I continued producing podcast episodes and eventually got an opportunity to move into podcast tech. I joined Simplecast in 2018 as employee number 5, helped them build a customer support and success team, spent a couple of years working remotely, then took a job with Podcorn and moved to Los Angeles in March 2020. Unfortunately my timing for that move was terrible (I arrive in LA the day before lockdowns started), the office never reopened, and a few months later I decided to move back to Texas.
In October 2020 I joined Chartable as an account manager, working with enterprise publishers. Warner Media, iHeart, Wondery, The New York Times, Sony Music, Pushkin, QCODE, Axios, Pacific Content, and a long list of others. Demos, onboarding, daily support, and a lot of translating between what publishers wanted and what the product could actually do. I wrote most of the internal and public help documentation too, which turned out to be some of the most useful work I did.
Spotify acquired Chartable in February 2022. I stayed on as a technical account manager across Spotify, Megaphone, and Chartable, and ended up leading the Chartable customer experience team. Most of that job was sitting between publishers and the engineering and product teams: collecting feedback, chasing down technical issues, and pushing for the changes that kept coming up over and over.
I spent four years in that position, talking to podcasters at all levels every single day. The Chartable team changed how the podcast industry thought about measurement, and I got a front-row seat. SmartLinks and SmartPromos gave creators their first real way to see how effective their marketing was. Chartable was mostly closed down in 2024 and there still isn’t one product that replaced all of the features that Chartable offered.
These days, I’m still working with my band, playing drums and running the tech and marketing side of the business. Website, social, merch, design, whatever needs doing! We have more than half a million monthly listeners now, with more than 300 million streams across the digital platforms. Getting to be in the band and also build the business around the band suits me just fine.
Alongside that, I take on work I find interesting as opportunities arise: podcast production and consulting, session and live drumming, and photo and video work for people and brands around DFW. Most of my spare attention right now goes to short-form video, developing my skills in Davinci Resolve and trying to work out what resonates on social media platforms.
What’s next is the same thing it’s been since I was 12, just further along. I’m still working towards being a world-class rock drummer, on stage and in the studio, and I’d like to own a recording studio here in Texas before I’m done. I also want to continue develop my photography and videography skills and get good at social content. Not to post for the sake of posting, but to make stuff people are glad they stopped scrolling for.
It’s all one job as far as I’m concerned: Make something great that’s worth someone’s time & attention, then help others do the same.
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