Mark Adkison began his career in radio as an on-air personality and music director in 1990 working for various radio stations in his hometown of Charlotte, NC. In 1992, he worked for Frontline Music Group in Newport Beach, CA as a salesman earning the “Rookie Salesman of the Year” award later that same year.

In 1993 Adkison moved to Nashville, TN where he joined ForeFront Records as radio promotions & publicity manager working with dc talk, Audio Adrenaline and Rebecca St. James and eventually escalated to Sr. Director, National Promotion. In 1995 Adkison pioneered ForeFront’s first website at ForeFrontRecords.com and eventually moved to Parent company EMI Christian Music Group as Senior Director, New Media where he worked to centralized marketing & promotional efforts related to EMI CMG’s web properties.

While at EMI CMG he worked to establish the first-ever label based digital download subscription model at burnitfirst.com as well as other subscription models with other service providers. He then returned to ForeFront Records as Vice President Artist Development overseeing all marketing, promotions at the company with a roster of over 20 artists. After ForeFront was dissolved into the EMI CMG Label Group, Adkison assumed the role of Vice President Interactive Marketing aiding in the centralization of all web and consumer marketing strategy and established the innovative, new Christian music community site at hearitfirst.com.

In April of 2007 he was appointed to the newly created position Vice President Digital Strategy & Development working with all CMG labels and divisions to help promote synergy in all web development, strategy and sales initiatives. In June 2008, Adkison took the website he founded, HearItFirst.com out of EMI as an independent website to serve the Christian music audience.

The site, now controlled by Spinnaker Media currently boasts over 400,000 site visits per month with over 1.4 million page views and membership of over 184,000. Mark lives in Nashville, TN with his wife Julie, a songwriter, and his 5 year old daughter Sydney.