Labels: the Holy Grail?

Is working with a label the culmination of your artistic career? Maybe! Depends on what you want to do. Understanding and applying music business stuff is really important for the sustainability of your creative practice over the long term, but many artists just don’t want to deal with it. That’s where a label partnership can come into play, and can potentially allow you to focus on the creative side, while a different team helps out with the business side.

For this to work out for you, your label must be full of very smart and creative businesspeople. Many smaller labels are run by artists who might be passionate about the artistic side of the field, but they also might not be any better than you are at the business side of music. This is why the holy grail of the small indie label that also does well for their artists is still pretty rare in the industry.

Just because a label has released some music that you like does not necessarily mean they would be a good fit for you.

Like any complex relationship, you want to make sure that you and your label have laid out clear and agreed upon expectations for each party, as early as possible in your time together.

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You, as the artist, hold the power in any label negotiation. After all, if you decide to walk away, you’re in exactly the same position as you started in, while the label will miss out on the new content they require to maintain their business. The better labels will understand and appreciate this dynamic; the artist is not an employee of a label, you’re a collaborator with the label.

Several things must happen in your career, before you’re considered valuable enough for a label to invest in.

Amazing work

This is where you come in. Most artists stop once they’ve learned how to make amazing creative work-don’t! You must do all of the additional items to come, in addition to providing amazing creative work on a consistent basis. Our reality is that tens of thousands of people are making great music and putting it out there every single day, so additional work is required in order for you to stand out.

Great, exceptional content is essential as a starting point, but unfortunately not enough on its own in our current environment.

Organic, genuine reach

Running a label is rarely something profitable, especially in the short term. This means most labels don’t have the resources to develop an audience for you, from scratch, as was the case back in the day when The Beatles made it big.

Instead, labels want to invest in artists who have an existing audience and are serious, so they can expand from that starting point.

This means you will need to start this audience building process on your own, before you will become attractive to a label. Hint: on social media, large numbers of likes and followers does not necessarily equal genuine reach.

Business awareness

Indie labels haven’t focused on creating their own talent in a very long time, and I don’t think we want to go back to a place where multinational corporations are determining who is on the radio based on who is the most profitable. Instead, labels are looking for artists who can be their engaged and active creative partners in a business setting.

I never suggest bringing business into the studio for the writing of your songs. Creative honesty is your most important asset as an artist. I would never recommend an artist write a song a certain way because they think it will sell better.

But, once the songs are done and the album is finished, a label will want to know that you’re serious about releasing music in a sustainable way for everyone. Releasing music once every ten years if you’re an unknown artist makes that difficult for the label, while flooding the market with a full album of new material every single day isn’t sustainable for you as the artist. So, you’ll have to work together to find balance and a middle way that works for both parties.

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If you’re reading this and thinking, “gee, by the time I do all these things I might as well just run everything myself”, you are correct! The value proposition for labels is increasingly hard to justify, for smaller artists especially. And, we’re all about building smarter artists that run the system FOR artists around here.

But, remember, it’s all about what you want to do. Some artists want to be involved in the management and business side, many are happy to hand it off, and either can work.

What doesn’t work is being so oblivious to business realities that you allow yourself to be taken advantage of, or passed over by a label, and you will be passed over until you can demonstrate financial value to that label. Nobody wins when artists are forced to live in poverty, but it is only artists that have the power to change their own situations. So let’s get on that!