May '24 (edited) • Artist Stories
My record label experiences
In 2009 the band I was in decided to change its name. We had spent the past year with the sole goal of getting “signed”, cause that’s just what most musicians were programmed to believe was the path to success at that time. We had been turned down by a bunch of majors and indies. We still believed in our songs but at that point, we felt like all the labels that had passed on us were not going to listen to any new songs, we’d had our chance. So, we changed our name. We put 1 song up under the new name. We sent it to a bunch of blogs. And 1 influential guy with a lot of Twitter followers made one Tweet about it. And within a month, we were in a bidding war with Sony and Universal. I remember one of the A&R people who had turned us down before wrote to us and said how amazing the new production of the songs was. It was exactly the same demo we’d sent him 2 months before. We didn't sign with them.
We ended up signing with Universal for quite a lot of cash. And when we got that deal, we were also able to get a big deal from Sony Publishing as well. The team at Universal was great. They believed in us. They were spending lots of cash positioning us. But one month before we were due to release our first album, our A&R guy got fired. And the A&R director let all of his artists go. Except us… I think because a) they’d already spent so much money on us and b) there was some momentum from the French division of Universal for us. The A&R director became our new A&R. He stopped our release and encouraged us to “write better songs”. At the time this was hard for my ego to handle. I spent way too much energy getting in my feelings like “What does this guy know” and “he just wants us to fail to make our original A&R guy look bad”. So after 6 months of us not really trying to write better songs, Universal let us go. We then found a small indie label to release our first album. It didn’t do great. But at some time during those 6 months of limbo with Universal, our album got leaked. This was a time when illegal streaming was a big thing. And in Spain, a following had been developing without us knowing. We started to get requests to play in Spain. So we did. After a few years of building a good live performance reputation in Europe, we were offered a record deal with Warner in Spain. This time there was no advance, but they did offer a bunch of promotion support and paid for music videos. And most importantly, they helped get us on heavy rotation on the biggest radio in Spain and we even won a “best newcomer award”.
So, that’s the outline of the story. What I think about record companies, after being in several of the machines, is the following.
Many of the people in labels care deeply about music and they love it when an artist they work with does well. However, only about 5% of the artists signed to labels are making the company money. And effectively the other 95% are being supported by the top 5%.
Major record labels are just like any other big company. If you’ve ever worked in an office job, you know there are some cool people and not so cool people. Some smart people and not so smart people. Record labels are exactly the same. And if you sign with a label, and if you make it to the top 5% you are paying the wages of those people you don’t like. You are also supporting other artists on the label that you may or may not like (I really hope Lady Gaga likes me cause she helped me get a mortgage on a house).
As for publishers. I can’t imagine wanting to sign with one again. With Sony, we gave 50% of our author rights away for a chunk of cash. Sony did close to nothing after signing. We got 20+ syncs with our music. Zero of those came from Sony. They have a sync department, but they didn’t have any luck with us. I would only advise looking for a publisher if you need cash right now, or if you don’t believe in your music. It’s like taking out a loan with a terribly high-interest rate.
My advice to people at the beginning of their artist journey now is; act like record companies don’t exist. A record company will not save you from obscurity. It’s such a waste of time even thinking about them. It’s like wanting to build a house by saving up money to buy a bulldozer. I spent way too much energy writing songs to impress record companies. It made my writing inauthentic. Also, don’t focus on what “people” want to hear. If you do that, you’ll end up writing music that no one wants to hear. If you want to write a song for ONE person, that’s an idea I can get behind. That one person could even be you.
Now that I've spent a couple of years outside of a label, the only thing I miss is having a team. I do almost everything myself. Which is liberating, but it's also emotionally and physically draining. I struggle with cringe on self-promotion. It was a great feeling to have someone else big you up.
18
25 comments
My record label experiences
