About
I'm Caitlin. I've spent ten years in Australian independent music, and In Cahoots is what happened when I stopped picking one job and started doing the one that ties them all together.
I'm queer and neurodivergent, and I've built the studio to run the way I work best rather than the way an office once told me to, which turns out to be the same instinct that makes the work good: question the default, then build something that fits.
The path
Agencies, management, venue booking, touring, festivals, merch, ticketing. If there's a job in the ecosystem I've probably done it at some point, which means I've seen what good looks like from every seat in the room, and I've seen where it tends to fall apart.
How I work
Most places I walk into have good people doing good work, they're just not talking to each other. Someone's running ads, someone else is doing PR, and nobody's stopped to ask whether any of it connects. I'm the person in the middle making sure it all makes sense as one machine before it goes out the door.
Now
These days I work mostly with independent venues, festivals, labels, touring artists and arts organisations across Melbourne. I'm halfway through an MBA at Melbourne Business School, mostly the finance and operations side, which is why I'll sit in the pricing conversation as happily as the campaign one.
Where I am
I work from Castlemaine, up in central Victoria, so most of my clients are Melbourne metro and a couple are neighbours. Being out here means I know what it costs to get an audience to drive somewhere, and I know which shows travel.
What I care about
Start with whatever you've got
Some of my favourite campaigns started with almost no budget. I'd rather take a small, scrappy idea and prove it works than wait for the perfect launch that never comes, so I scope to what you can spend and grow it once the early signals show up.
Credit goes to the artist
The festival, the venue, the band, the label: they're the reason anyone turns up. My job is to make the marketing match the work, then get out of the way.
Workshops and in-house sessions
I run sessions for teams who have to do their own marketing, on a small budget, in a room where nobody has the title. At your place or mine, and you leave with the plan and the templates rather than notes.
Paid media that pays off
Running ads for shows, tours and festivals, and how to tell whether the spend is working, in plain English.
Marketing on almost no budget
How to start small, prove it works, and grow the spend once the signal's there.
Proudly in cahoots with…
Let's
