A few years ago, country singer-songwriter and guitarist Clayton Mullen ’23 was a TCU Neeley School of Business student playing parties with a band made up of fraternity brothers and looking ahead to a career in sales.

“We started playing cover gigs at tailgates before the football games, and one thing led to another,” he said. Soon, “500 kids were showing up to listen to us play on a Friday night.”

A music manager who worked for Josh Abbott, an Austin, Texas-based singer-songwriter and guitarist, called Mullen to set up a concert. “Our first real gig ever was playing the main stage of Billy Bob’s opening up for Josh Abbott.”

Mullen had been applying what he learned in marketing classes to music — uploading songs to Spotify and posting to YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

He spent months adding to his portfolio of original songs before accepting a meeting with Courtney Allen at Concord Music Publishing in Nashville, Tennessee. The strategy paid off: Allen offered Mullen a multiyear deal to write songs for other artists. He turned down a sales job and, two weeks after graduation, loaded a U-Haul and headed for Tennessee, gigging along the way.

Mullen said that 500 kids were showing up to listen to him and his bandmates play music on a Friday night. Photo by James Westfall

Today, Mullen divides his time between writing songs, performing and recording an album every year. This fall, he played five shows in Australia.

His latest EP, Take You Up on That, was released in August. On Spotify, Mullen draws 253,000 monthly listeners. His recordings have topped 35 million streams.

In addition to his degrees in entrepreneurship & innovation and marketing, Mullen said that his certificate in consultative selling, an approach in which salespeople focus on understanding what customers need and solving their problems, has helped him navigate the industry.

“I need to use that … to sell myself, to sell my tour, to sell my music, to sell my merch,” he said. “Any meeting I go into with a record label, it’s all about selling what I’m doing.”