Followers of the National Football League’s (NFL) social media accounts heard background music crafted and licensed by NC State alumni over the course of the 2025 season.

The music of alumni Joey Zen and Adam Sumner (‘22) was featured in multiple videos containing content such as weekly power rankings, highlights and short interviews with players designed to engage with fans.

Zen and Sumner both laid the foundation for their burgeoning careers in the world of music licensing during their time in the Department of Performing Arts and Technology’s Arts Entrepreneurship Minor, under the tutelage of Teaching Professor, Arts Entrepreneurship Minor Coordinator and Director of Entrepreneurial Studies in the Arts Gary Beckman. 

“With Joey and Adam, it’s really remarkable.”

“We have a lot of students who start businesses out of the minor,” Beckman said. “They’ve done really well. A lot of them are doing these kinds of things as side gigs, or integrating what they’ve learned in the minor into more traditional jobs. With Joey and Adam, it’s really remarkable.”

Joining Forces for a Label

Zen and Sumner, who both completed the Arts Entrepreneurship Minor at NC State, now work together running an independent record label dubbed 47 Eyez on Me. 

Zen began the label in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, seeking out connection and collaboration with other artists through the isolation that the pandemic brought. In September 2021, in celebration of his 21st birthday, he turned the label into a full LLC.

“Since then, I’ve just grown it and reached out,” Zen said. “I’ve always been friends with other musicians, I’ve always been a musician myself since about middle school. So I just reached out to my friends who were in the weird, amateur area where it’s like, you want to take it professionally, you don’t know what the next steps would be to take it professionally. It’s just ‘hey guys, we’re all in the same boat. I may not have all of the answers right now, but I’m going to do my best to find those answers, figure it out, and if you guys are willing to join me on the journey, I’d love for you all to be part of it.’”

The label started off with Zen’s close friends, largely other music students he met at NC State. At its highest, it had 14 members, and now typically sits around 10-11. 

Zen and Sumner met through several different areas at NC State, but mainly linked through a music app called Quadio, noticing that they were two of five NC State members on the app. 

Sumner, who transferred to NC State from Appalachian State in 2019, said that a desire to work with local artists on the Raleigh scene largely drew him to NC State, and led to his connection with Zen. 

“It took me a while to meet the right people, but after a while, I was engaged in this internship with Quadio,” Sumner said. “I had discovered Joey’s music and instantly became a fan. We exchanged some messages on Instagram, and then I came out to one of the shows that 47 Eyez On Me put on. I got to meet him and some of the other artists. It was a perfect situation. I expressed interest in helping to book shows at venues, because that was where I felt like I could provide the most support. As time went on and we got closer, I just kind of developed more and more responsibilities.”

Now, Zen serves as 47 Eyez on Me’s CEO, with Sumner operating as the COO. 

“We really handle everything, we’re really just partners in this at this point, and that’s where we’re at today,” Sumner said. 

Zen explained that the label’s name, 47 Eyez on Me, derives from the fourth and seventh chakras, representing the heart and the mind, in honor of a late New York rapper named Capital Steez. 

“He instilled this idea in my mind that your mind and your heart are always in a battle with one another,” Zen said. “Your mind is telling you one thing, your body and your heart are telling you another. If you can find the unification in those two battles with one another, you can achieve anything you want.”

Sumner added that the Z in the label’s name is also in honor of late rapper Tupac Shakur, and his album, All Eyez on Me. 

“It’s a very introspective, self-respecting name for the organization,” Sumner said. “You can think about it as ‘I have all of these eyes on me as an artist.’ You have to make sure you’re serving the fanbase, but also make sure you’re aware of what’s going on inside yourself, make sure your heart and your mind are aligned and that’s a whole other aspect in itself.” 

A Licensing Breakthrough

As the world of music business and arts entrepreneurship continues to evolve, the areas of profit have also shifted. 

With the new wave of technology now available, artists are also making profits through sync licensing in addition to avenues such as live shows and album sales. 

“Sync licensing is something that we learned about in Dr. Beckman’s classes, and knowing the differences between mechanical royalties, streaming royalties, sync licensing royalties and general royalties,” Zen said. “That really just lit a fire under us and put a battery in our pack of ‘Alright, this is something completely new. I would love my music in a commercial. I would love my music in a TV show.’”

So, Zen and Sumner set out to explore and enter the world of sync licensing. They eventually added three sync licensing agents to the 47 Eyez on Me team, and still work today with their primary agent, Quinten Beverly of Nashville. 

“He was totally just trusting in the vision that we had,” Zen said. “He loved the music that we were sending him, he loved our personal goals, things we were bringing to the table. And he believed in the system. So he sent out many, many emails to many sync supervisors around the nation, from different brands, different industries, video game companies, sports brands, sports leagues, random, different brands and areas in which we could see our music being utilized.”

Beverly eventually connected Zen and Sumner with United Masters, a distribution company that helps artists send their music to streaming platforms. They connected with Jacob Grossfield, the company’s head of sync licensing. 

He explained further details of the process of sync licensing to the duo, and provided them with a free trial account to put 30 songs on the platform, agreeing to pitch it to various companies. 

A few months later, with Zen on a plane to New York to meet up with Sumner and some other friends, Grossfield notified them that he had secured a sync licensing placement of two of their songs with the NFL, which were being used in social media promotional videos. 

“It was surreal,” Zen said. “It was funny, because I was on the plane and it was about to take off, and that’s when I got a text from my uncle about hearing our song. So for about 30 minutes, I’m trying to figure out how to use this airplane Wi-Fi so I can see what he’s talking about. I’m 30,000 feet up in the air, and I want to jump up and down and be like ‘yo, guys, the NFL’s using my song.’ Obviously I’m in the middle seat, and I’ve got people all around me heading to New York. My actual celebration was quite delayed, but, for the rest of the team, I know they were probably jumping around with joy.” 

Sumner was quick to confirm that sentiment. 

“I was ecstatic,” he said. “The fact that it happened while we were in New York, too, felt super special.”

A Journey’s Beginning in Raleigh

Sumner and Zen were both quick to credit their time in the Arts Entrepreneurship Minor learning from Beckman to the success they’ve been able to achieve with their record label and sync licensing endeavors. 

“The biggest part of it was the mentorship that we received from Dr. Beckman in particular,” Sumner said. “We’ve been blessed with the opportunity to work with someone who’s so intelligent. We’ve been lucky enough to keep in touch with him since we graduated, which has meant a lot to us, keeping that relationship alive. He’s helped provide us with so much guidance in terms of how to navigate the sync licensing industry.”

Beckman explained that NC State’s program is one of the largest dedicated arts entrepreneurship programs in the country, and strives to give students as many real-world examples and experience as possible in terms of how to be successful in the industry. 

“They need to know the stuff that no one will ever tell them and that they can’t get out of a book,” Beckman said. “That’s what we do for them. This is an arts-first entrepreneurship program. We have a very different product. There are other things that the students want or think they need; some students want models – do these five things and you’re Taylor Swift. It doesn’t work that way, especially for us, because our product has a lot of high aesthetic content. What we like and what some people like is not what others like, etc. So a lot of what I have to do is basically help them interrogate their art, understand how and why markets consume art, what’s their reason for doing it? That, I think, has proved quite valuable over the years.”

The Arts Entrepreneurship capstone project gives students the opportunity to work with local artists by providing free consults, giving them real experience in helping artists find new and innovative ways to monetize their products. 

Sumner reflected back on his own capstone consultation with the Raleigh Little Theatre, and the valuable experience that gave him. 

“It felt like we were transitioning from our college education into the arts industry.”

“It didn’t even feel like school at that point,” he said. “It felt like we were transitioning from our college education into the arts industry. He (Beckman) made that transition very smooth for us. It didn’t feel like a shocker whenever we got our first jobs. It felt like we had been through some very valuable experiences.” 

Over his 15 years as the head of Entrepreneurial Studies in the Arts program, Beckman has taken pride in maintaining relationships with alumni of the program, continuing to provide them with advice and guidance, and sharing how proud he is of them. 

When asked to provide advice to incoming Arts Entrepreneurship students, Sumner and Zen both encouraged them to take advantage of every opportunity, and make the most of their time in the program. 

“Utilize it as much as possible,” Zen said. “Ask those questions. If you’re an artist, don’t be afraid to ask Dr. Beckman or the people in your classes. If it wasn’t for me being up front and vulnerable with people, saying ‘I’m a college student, I’m trying to run my own record label while I’m in college,’ I probably wouldn’t have made the connections I have.”

Being able to provide an example of the success of alumni such as Zen and Sumner also allows him to show his students what they can achieve in the field. 

“It’s exactly what I would hope they would learn, which is how do you integrate your own creativity and your own desire for innovation and monetize it.” Beckman said. “It provides a lot of legitimacy for students who want to do what they do or be involved in the music industry. You can get people to come in, but to speak to them on their level, saying, ‘Hey, I was in this very room as you, and I had this dream, and I took a chance and did it, and it’s working.’ The underlying communication of that statement is really more about investing some time and believing in the process, because the process does work.”