From Fan of Blue to Director at Universal Music

“I have always been a music lover. My first contact with the recording industry? 
As a young girl. I was a fan of Blue and active in the first online forums. 
Thanks to this personal passion, I had the chance to come in contact with the band’s record company, EMI. And from there I said to myself: I have to do this for a living.” 

Eleonora Bianchi, 34, did just that. Today she is Digital Service & Consumption Director at Universal Music Italia, where she is in charge of all digital activities: from handling the supply chain to promoting content on platforms such as Spotify or YouTube. Bianchi is someone who never wanted to give up her childhood dream. After her attending a high school with a focus on classical studies (Liceo Berchet), she decided to enroll at Bocconi. “I’ve always had a strong affinity with numbers and analysis, so economics seemed like a good choice, even though I had always hoped to get into the music industry.” But this goal had become more difficult because of the crisis in the sector, and EMI was being bought by Universal.

Here are her words: “The people I met [at EMI] told me that there was no room for an intern, no matter how good. So I threw myself into my other skills. I joined KPMG with an internship in auditing. A very useful experience for the work I do now.” But Bianchi knew that this was not her path or her world. She says with a smile: 
“I used to take off my suit and go to concerts in tennis shoes, [KPMG] was definitely not 
my scene.”

Still looking for her career path, Bianchi explored another option in 2014 with an internship at Allianz Group in Munich, Germany. “I was looking at new areas where the company might be interested in investing from an insurance perspective. I was doing research, which was interesting because I was studying and analyzing trends and markets in an almost academic way,” she adds. For Bianchi, working with data, figures, and predictive models is stimulating. What’s more, her stint in Germany was an opportunity to learn the language and to work side by side with her manager. “I remember that at the end of the internship he said to me very frankly: ‘Eleonora, you want to work at a record company, right? Why don’t you go for it?’” 

From that conversation, and from her experience in Germany, where Spotify was gaining ground, Bianchi was inspired to write her final university thesis on streaming as a disruptive technology. 
“So, for the thesis, I reached out to my contacts at EMI for an interview that, ironically, took place in what is now my office. They told me about the possibility of an internship.
I couldn’t believe it!”

Four years later, thanks to her expertise in streaming and data, she is in charge of Universal Music’s entire digital team, which now numbers 18 people. “I always say I was in the right place at the right time, but without solid skills I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere, also because in the industry there are not many women at the top and not many young people. I was lucky to find an environment where there was a lack of digital skills and where my skills were a lever for innovation,” she concludes.