During her time as a Recording Arts student at Full Sail, Amy Houck loved participating in the ground-level creation of an artist's new track. What she didn't love, however, as she gained more industry experience, was how the energy of that creation got lost in the music's marketing.

"I felt like a lot of what I was witnessing in the studio wasn't being represented in real life in the way it was being made," she says. "I wanted to be part of the solution in finding how to take that energy and get it across to fans and the public."

After graduating, Amy got the chance to do just that when she moved to L.A. and took a job with Universal Music Group, helping create the mega-major's first comprehensive social media and online campaigns. There, she worked on branding stars like The-Dream, Mariah Carey, and Rihanna — but eventually, again she noticed the marketing divide between an artist and his or her "people."

"You might have nine or ten people copied on e-mails arguing over something like a logo or color scheme," she says. "At the end of the day I felt like it was the person with the most money or power who was getting to make the decision, and the artist would just go with the flow even though they didn't want to.”

So in 2009, she took the plunge and went into business for herself, creating her own company, 440 Artist Alignment. Named for the number of cycles per second signifying so-called "perfect pitch," Amy works with an artist to create just that in his or her online marketing. Part of the company's services include more traditional PR services, such as sending press releases and materials to bloggers and online journalists. But the core of it is a full-service branding campaign that starts with something as basic as logo and web site design, and continues into a comprehensive social media campaign.

Above all else, though, Amy cuts out the fat between artist and middlemen to best express the artist's vision. "When you're working for a big company, sometimes implementing a new idea can takes months instead of days," she says. "Now, if I want to do a contest with an artist, let's say, I can get it approved within the hour and have my team have it ready to go the same day by 5 p.m."

It's a formula that's worked. 440 Artist Alignment now has employees with two in Los Angeles alongside Amy, and two in London. In fact, it's among the former that she counts another Full Sail graduate, Helen Schmidt, 440's creative marketing director for the past year and a half. Business is so good that Amy now usually only takes clients by referral — and only if the music really moves her after a listen on her iPod, usually at the gym.

"If, when I leave, I have one of the songs stuck in my head on the way to the car, then there we go," she says. "When my brain stars moving a million miles a minute, I know the project is going to be successful."