Independent Music Promotions
Promotion & PR Services for Music with Depth
So… with regards to getting your band signed there’s a lot that goes into it- but at the same time there is a very short process when it comes down to me deciding if your band is going to be worth signing. As an A&R guy, and generally a dude in the music industry for...
So say you do get on the record label of your dreams, or the PR company you’ve always wanted to work with, or the manager you’ve admired for years. These things do eventually happen if you work hard enough long enough. That’s awesome – it feels good to get recognition from the industry and for...
Record labels are frequently kind of grumpy. After all – they are supposed to work with entitled artists, that’s going to be an issue no matter what your relationship to them is. While I discussed before why this makes you less likely to get signed I also want to take some time to go into...
I just want to establish now and in perpetuity that you shouldn’t expect much from your label – especially if you are at the level that you need to be reading an article like this one. I know that sounds kind of shitty but it’s frankly true and sometimes a harsh reality that we all...
Record labels don’t want to sign your band because the odds are your band is fucking stupid. I know that’s really mean and some of you might feel ‘triggered’ but that’s the cold hard truth. Every day I hear about how a different has screwed over a PR friend, or how a manager has to...
360 deals are, whether you like it or not probably going to be the future of the music industry, or at least record labels, and honestly, I’m still unsure whether or not that’s a good thing. A 360 deal is when the record label gets a cut not just of the CD sales, but also...
I wanted to take a minute today to talk more about record contracts – this time in particular recoupment. Recoupment is a fancy way of saying “You are screwed forever” but not necessarily, only if you’re dumb and don’t properly take advantage of what your label has to offer. Recoupment is one of the most...
I know it’s hard to get a record deal, trust me, I’ve tried with countless deserving bands and ended up with nothing. I’ve worked countless hours pitching to guys in labels I count as friends and getting turned down. This isn’t always obvious and sometimes it can be a veritable sumbitch. There’s a reason for...
Record labels these days probably are almost never going to offer you an advance, nor are they going to offer you an exceptional percentage on royalties to make up for it. Of course, they can help you pay for merch and getting CD’s out, but even that isn’t that exceptional these days, when more musicians...
With a lot of the bands I handle one of the things I have to focus on is managing expectations. I guess this makes sense – there’s a lot involved here and depending on your awareness of the scene and your place in it, we should be able to figure out where each and every...
Why Record Labels Still Matter I’ve started to get an impression from a lot of independent artists these days that record labels are a bad thing. When bands like Radiohead and Metallica started to do stuff on their own people began to realize that they didn’t really need big labels to help make their work...
As some of our more metal-savvy readers may know, Century Media was recently bought by Sony records for a cool $17 million. It was a deal that had been rumored at for months but with fairly minimal details reaching the public asides from a few small interview pieces with Century Media owner Robert Kampf. Given...
