Music Business UK Q3 2019 by musicbizworldwide

Q3 2019

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EDITOR’S LETTER It was always bound to trigger some excitable consumer media headlines: the latest stats from the RIAA in the United States suggest that sales (technically, shipments) of vinyl – on a value basis – are on course to overtake those of the CD format within the next year or two. According to the data, vinyl generated $224.1m in the first half of 2019, with CD only marginally ahead on $247.9m. Cue much nostalgic navelgazing, and the odd bit of yah-boo-sucks in the direction of the music business itself. (You know the kind of nonsense: ‘The format they tried to kill is outliving them all!’ Zzzzzzz.) Digging a little further into the RIAA data shines a light on an arguably more interesting trend. Those $224.1m sales were created, says the trade body, by shipments of 8.6m pieces of vinyl – that’s an average per-unit retail price of $26.06. In turn, that average per-unit vinyl price was up, according to my calculator, by 6.3% on the $24.52 equivalent seen in the first half of 2018. This pattern isn’t only happening in the vinyl realm – the CD is seeing a small uplift too. The RIAA stats show that 18.6m CDs were shipped in the first half of 2019, generating $247.9m in revenue – an average per-unit price of $13.33. That was itself up slightly on the equivalent average in H1 2018 of $13.22. These figures – especially that material rise in average per-unit vinyl spend – arrives against a backdrop of streaming’s increasing global domination of the record business. Streaming services like Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music accounted for 80% of all US industry retail revenues in the six months to end of June, according to the RIAA – mirroring the kind of stranglehold that the format first secured in the Nordics a few years ago. And yet, in stark contrast to the world of vinyl, the average price paid for streaming subscriptions, per-user, continues to fall.

Tim Ingham

“UK superfans spend £180m annually on vinyl and CD. That’s 13.5% of the industry’s total revenues.”

Spotify’s premium ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) famously tumbled by 30% on an annual basis between 2015 and 2018. In other words, the average Spotify subscriber, globally, is now paying around $27 less every 12 months than they were three years ago. This downward trend has, of course, been brought about by Spotify (and other services) spreading into economically challenged markets around the world, as well as aggressive promotion and bundle deals, including Spotify’s own Family Plan and student discounts. Yet, with the RIAA’s vinyl numbers in mind, I can’t help but be drawn back to one of the most compelling statistics to come out of the UK recorded music market in recent years. According to the Entertainment Retailers Association, around 157,000 UK citizens continue to spend £400 or more on vinyl every year; another 292,000 spend the same figure on CDs. If, for the sake of argument, we propose that these are two entirely separate sets of people (which of course, in many cases, they won’t be), then that tots up to 449,000 humans – or about 0.7% of the UK population. Across those two formats, estimates ERA, these people spend £180m annually. Which, according to ERA’s most recent stats (for 2018), equates to 13.5% of the domestic market’s total yearly spend (£1.33bn). Let me just run that by you again: 0.7% of the UK’s population contributes comfortably more than a tenth of the total spend on music out there, including streaming. The point here is not to warn the industry against losing these super-fans forever by obsessing over the blockbuster numbers of global streaming – although that is an obvious danger. It is merely to remind you that hundreds of thousands of UK consumers still want to spend many multiples of £9.99-per-month on music. A smart industry would keep inventing new ways to help them do just that.

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WELCOME

In this issue... 12

Ted Cockle

Phil Christie

Merck Mercuriadis

Radha Medar

Sulinna Ong

Jon Barlow

Andy Musgrave

Mark Mitchell

Hannah Neaves

Mr Eazi

Toby Andrews

Steve Lewis

110

Simon King

Virgin EMI

Warner Bros

Hipgnosis Songs Fund

Metallic Management

Spotify

3Beat

Supernature

Parlophone

Tap Management

Artist & Entrepreneur

Astralwerks

Various

Covert Talent

EditorsV5.indd 2

13/09/2019 12:44

Contributors DAVE ROBERTS

Dave Roberts is the Associate Publisher of Music Business Worldwide and Music Business UK. Before joining MBW in 2017, Roberts was the publisher of Music Week from 2011, where he led its transformation. In this issue, Dave interviews the likes of Hipgnosis’ Merck Mercuriadis, 3Beat’s Jon Barlow and Parlophone’s Mark Mitchell.

PAT CARR

MURRAY STASSEN

Pat Carr is the founder of independent artist services company Remote Control. She was previously Senior Vice President of Marketing at BMG UK, and a key figure at Infectious, the independent label that signed and broke the Mercurywinning alt-J. She began her music biz career at Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment in the mid-eighties.

Murray Stassen is the Deputy Editor of Music Business Worldwide and Music Business UK. Stassen is a former Deputy Editor of UK trade paper Music Week. He has also written for the likes of VICE Media, The Line Of Best Fit and Long Live Vinyl. In this issue, he interviews the likes of Spotify’s Sulinna Ong, Mr Eazi, and Astralwerks’ Toby Andrews.

BEN WARDLE

RHIAN JONES

PETER ROBINSON

Ben Wardle is a writer and a lecturer in music business at the University of Gloucestershire. In a previous life, Wardle was an A&R at the likes of Warner, RCA and V2 – working with artists including Sleeper, Lethal Bizzle, Stephen Duffy, Aimee Mann, Ride and many more. He has been hired by Damien Hirst – and fired by Joe Strummer.

Rhian Jones is a respected freelance journalist who often focuses on the music industry. In addition to writing regularly for Music Business UK and Hits Daily Double, she is a Contributing Editor for Music Business Worldwide. In this issue, Rhian tackles the expectations placed on artists in an Instagrammable world, and interviews Tap’s Hannah Neaves.

Peter Robinson has been a music journalist for over 20 years, and keeps a keen eye on the global entertainment industry. Robinson has written for the likes of The Guardian, The Times, TIME, Noisey, i-D, Smash Hits, Q Magazine, Time Out, Attitude, Notion and The Telegraph, and runs his own must-read online publication over on Popjustice.

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TED TALKS

He runs the UK’s biggest record label, and works with the year’s biggest British breakthrough star. His singular objective: to stay No.1. But you shouldn’t mistake Ted Cockle for a careerist major label head because, as he’s happy to explain, his life in music began simply by wanting to find the most happening party...

ed Cockle was an ‘80s teenager, a home counties kid, and a huge music fan. Such a combination may conjure a well-worn showreel in your internal idiot-box – that of the insular small town boy, studiously piping The Queen Is Dead into his ears in bedroomdwelling solitude. The truth, in this case, is the polar opposite. From a young age, Cockle liked going out. Out out. His thirst for spaces where culture meets noise was forged in his hometown of Aylesbury (more accurately, close-by Wendover), where, on the cusp of his teens, his head was turned by the world of breakdancing. It might seem anomalous in hindsight, but there was a definite period in British culture where, for a few years in the mid-eighties, ‘B-Boys’ would descend on their local provinces – resplendent in day-glo skiwear, cranking up prototypical hiphop records on ghetto blasters, perhaps even showing off a spot of body-popping. Speaking to Cockle at his office today – amid his sixth year as President of the UK’s No.1 record label, Virgin EMI – it’s not always easy to visualise his role in Buckinghamshire’s take on the street culture of Brooklyn and the Bronx. But it happened, and he remembers it fondly. “When I was about 11, in the early eighties, life was all about breakdancing, watching films like Wild Style and Beat Street; it was about dancing, amazing clothes, sportswear – and all the music associated with that,” he says. From there, Cockle’s love of getting out the house – and closer to the nearest booming speaker – evolved throughout his teenage years just as you might expect. “There was nothing remotely cerebral to my listening to music,” he admits. “It was about being in places where people dressed up, where people were dancing, and where people were having fun and getting messy.” This carefree, follow-his-nose relationship with music led 13

Island life: Celebrating the success of Florence + The Machine's debut album, released ten years ago, with ex-label buddies Ben Mortimer, Darcus Beese and Tom March

Cockle to plenty of interesting places, not least running the Reaction Club at the Wellhead Arms in Wendover which, for a brief moment in the early nineties, became something of a hotspot in a fast-evolving house scene. Jeff Barrett, glorious indie hellraiser and legendary founder of Heavenly Records, held his 29th birthday at the venue, while the likes of Primal Scream, Paul Oakenfold and Andrew Weatherall all turned in DJ sets under Cockle’s watch. Cockle and Barrett formed a friendship, with the latter welcoming the former at a run of early Heavenly Social club nights at the Albany in Great Portland Street in 1994, where Cockle brushed shoulders with the likes of Paul Weller, Oasis (“Liam wouldn’t go downstairs in case he got his trainers dirty”), Tricky, Terry Hall and the Dust Brothers – later renamed as the Chemical Brothers. How did Cockle get from this nineties social circle (developed around people and places who said yes to “football, drugs and house music”) to his Presidential status today – on the 7th floor of Universal Music UK’s super-sharp Kings Cross HQ? We’ll let him 14

explain in a bit; fair to say, it wasn’t meticulously planned. What is better documented is the impressive professional run Cockle’s been on ever since he broke into the industry. His first music biz gig was a central sales role at Sony Music, before he was hired by Rob Stringer in marketing at Epic Records UK, where he played a key role in breaking Macy Gray and her smash hit I Try in 1999. In 2005, Cockle was poached by Universal Music to join Island Records in London, which he would run during a purple patch for the label alongside Darcus Beese, taking the likes of Amy Winehouse, Mumford & Sons, Jessie J and Keane to a million-plus sales each. Cockle was then named President of Virgin EMI in 2013, following UMG’s £1.2bn acquisition of EMI Music (and its then-Virgin Records subsidiary). At Virgin today, Cockle and his team work with international megastars including Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber, as well as UK-signed successes like Bastille, Emeli Sandé, Hardy Caprio and Lewis Capaldi. The latter, inarguably the biggest breakthrough British artist of the year, has now seen

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his debut LP, Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent, sell over a million equivalent units worldwide; Capaldi’s smash single, Someone You Loved, has done over six million. Here, Cockle explains why he believes Virgin EMI offers more than your typical UK major record company, and expounds his argument on what a label can bring to an artist’s career in 2019. But not before he informs us how a breakdancing kid from Wendover climbed to the top of the British record industry, without an ambitious bone in his body... In the early nineties, you became attached to the British ‘big beat’ scene at the Heavenly Social and other venues. Around the same time you were at University in Bristol, where you put on club nights that helped forge more industry relationships. How did you get from there to major label land? I started in telesales at Sony. My mum saw an advert in the paper, and I applied for it. And then, how things really started happening for me was that I went to a gig at the St Moritz Club on Wardour Street, where I bumped into [then-Epic Records UK boss] Rob Stringer and we got on. He was talking about records, I was buying the same records; he was talking about club nights, I was going to those club nights; he was talking about DJs and I knew those DJs, socially, just through going out. Rob ended up saying, ‘You should come and see me.’ So I went and had a chat with him and thankfully an opening turned up at Epic in marketing. That was ‘98 or thereabouts. They were having a bit of a moment at that time: George Michael, B*Witched and the Manic Street Preachers had all done a million domestically. What was Epic Records and Sony like back then? And what was Rob like as a boss? Listen, you can never fault Rob. There’s a balance and there’s an energy there; I think the main learning [for me] from him is you just felt a part of a team. And when he moved [to the US], people were happy for him and wanted him to do well. What was your career trajectory at Epic? I was there for a few months and then somebody left, so I took over on the product/artist side. And the first thing I did was look after Macy Gray. America hadn’t connected with her, because she had a bit of a hybrid sound. And me and her just got on, partly because she liked a night out; she liked a night out more than anything! We did one song, Do Something, and then we did I Try and it became enormous. From there we sold 1.6 million albums. Then you’d get other international acts, like Jennifer Lopez and Shakira turn up, and they’re like, ‘Oh, he's alright, he did Macy's first album.’ You get good fortune in this business or you don’t, and I was lucky enough to get some at Epic. Then Rob became the [Sony Music UK] Chairman and Nick Raphael came in is as the [Epic] MD. Thankfully, I got on just as great with Nick who, as you will obviously be aware, is a high grade lunatic.

What was that change in personnel like? Nick was very different to Rob. 50% of the time I still disagree with Nick to this day. But even when he’s wrong, what he prompts you to think about and discuss is always of value, and I love him. Nick’s got the biggest heart out there for a very competitive animal. He's happy for other people to be successful; he never tries to stop anybody being successful. How long did that run at Sony last for you? I was there for 10 years. [Sony] then merged with BMG, who were down in Putney. I liked the West End and Putney wasn't quite where I wanted to be. Then a combination of Lucian [Grainge] and Mr [Nick] Gatfield approached me to come over here [Universal]. I joined Island as General Manager. Again, it was one of those good fortune things; there was an artist that nobody really knew what to do with, Mika, and I had a little go with one song, Grace Kelly. I pulled Iain Watt in as manager – he’s a pal of mine who had been head of press at Epic. And then all of a sudden we did 1.4 million on [Mika’s] project. We also had Sugababes, McFly, Busted, etc. And then Amy exploded [with second album, Back To Black]. Do you remember how and when Amy Winehouse first came across your radar? And when you first heard the records that would make her a star? Yeah, Raye [Cosbert, live agent] is an old friend of mine, and he’d invited me to come and see her early. So I’d been to shows through the [first album] Frank days, just as a punter. And then, you just remember these demos arriving. But the thing is, nobody knows. I'm really fed up with hearing people go, ‘I just knew [it was a hit], as soon as I heard it.’ As a UK MD – and I’m going to sound cocky, but I mean exactly the opposite – I’ve been around as many things that have gone to a million [sales] as anyone. That’s just factual. And I’m telling you, on every one of those projects, nobody ‘knew’. I certainly didn’t fucking know. You have a hunch, you have a feeling, but you don’t know. And after Frank, it was like, that was quite a lot of money spent, and it did alright, but only alright. And then these [Back To Black] demos are coming in and, like I say, there was just this little feeling. And that’s as much as you ever get. When that happens, when there’s that first sign of growing confidence, what you do is, you make a few more calls; when somebody says no, you make them say no three or four times before you drop it. You don’t say, ‘Are you sure? Because I think this is going to do a million.’ You say, ‘Listen; I don't know, but I saw the gig the other week, and I've heard Love is a Losing Game… so are you sure you’re sure?’ And then we were there [Back To Black went on to sell over 12 million units worldwide]. And then Gatfield went and Darcus and I took over Island. 15

Was Nick not there for Back To Black? He was there at the start, but then it turned into a two and a half year record, and he wasn’t there by the end. And then, you know, we had that run: Mika did a million, Florence did a million, Jessie J did a million, Mumford did a million, Keane did a million. Many labels have particular highs, but – like Polydor had for a period with Lucian and David – we then had a great run with multiple successes; we had quite an amazing run all within our own four walls. Why did your partnership with Darcus work so well? Our MO was actually diametrically opposed; we are complete opposites. If an email came in, there would never be any confusion about who answered it. Basically, I answered 90% of them and Darcus may or may not have answered the rest [laughs]! And, once again, it’s good fortune. [Darcus] didn't like to do any of the shit that I did. And he had an energy and a different thing that I didn’t have. It was a thrown together partnership that just worked. What, roughly speaking, was the line of demarcation between you? I mean, I do a lot of strategic, administrative, organizational stuff, and I'm 100% fine with that. And Darcus likes to be more vocal, visual, front-and-centre. He’s that person who injects energy into the room, and I bring the detail of the plan to the project. It was easy, it wasn’t something that needed to be worked out between us, or discussed in any way; it existed already. But I suppose if you wanted to boil it down, when an artist or a manager walked into the room, it would be: ‘Oh, okay – there’s the dude who brings the vibes, and there’s the bloke who fills in the forms.’

to be 100% sure – otherwise you go with their idea, every time. Interestingly, at the moment, a lot of artists in that British urban lane have been incredibly active and successful at creating and defining themselves. So when they come in [to sign a major record deal], you’ve just got to go, ‘What are you planning to do? Tell us your plan, because we want to amplify and magnify what you do.’ Where record companies go wrong sometimes is when they try and create that thing; that doesn't work very well. What do you mean, exactly? You know, we keep coming back these days to people being critical about labels; ‘What the fuck do labels do?’ and all that. At a fundamental level: we amplify and magnify the best bits of what artists are already doing. We offer sweat and infrastructure to help them achieve their goals. And – I wish I could find another word for boring here, but it is what it is – we do a lot of the boring stuff. The magic is with the artists, the magic is with the music, and so much of that comes from the performers and writers themselves. But go through the big acts out there now [and you see a pattern]: Stormzy was doing a load of stuff on his own; Ed Sheeran was doing a load of stuff on his own; Lewis Capaldi was 300 gigs in, and had 500 people coming to his Glasgow [shows]. The skill of the label is to spot that talent as early as possible and provide the framework and support structures that enable it to prosper. The important thing is that [those artists had] defined themselves. If you arrive at a major record company having defined yourself as an artist, then major record companies can be amazing places as they, in the sporting tradition, tone and build the necessary muscles and help provide the laser focus.

“Record labels amplify and magnify the best bits of what artists are already doing.”

When you look back on the end of the Amy story, how do you reflect on it? And how do you think the industry should reflect on it? Amy was a troubled soul in a number of ways: she experienced a range of issues that often made life tough for her. Issues with self esteem, with relationships, with drugs and alcohol. You know, it’s incredibly difficult to save people from themselves. It was such a waste of such a phenomenal talent. We were aware of just how sensitive an individual she was and so we really took the foot off any pressure for her to support her records from 2009, in order that she could focus more on her health. On a less personal and broader business angle, what are some of the key lessons you learned in the Island days about working with artists? If you’re going to challenge an artist, or suggest a change, you have 16

How did your switch to Virgin EMI come about? Going back to the Darcus thing, what we were doing [at Island] was working; this world of Jessie J and Ben Howard and Mumford and Amy. People were saying our partnership had run its course – it hadn’t! I was very comfortable and very happy there. But I work for a company [Universal Music Group], and that company had bought EMI, and if you’ve shown you can do something [in one place], then maybe they’d like you to try and do it [in another place]. What persuaded you that it was the right move in the end? [Laughs] It was presented as a fait accompli! Pleasingly, I get on very well with Mr. Joseph, he’s very persuasive and very inspirational and so it was never an issue; there was no chucking toys around, but, yes, it was very clear that this would be the right direction of travel for me. The thing is, and this always comes across wrongly, but I don't have ambition, not like some people do. I really just want and

LEAD FEATURE

With Richard Branson celebrating the 40th anniversary of Virgin Records in 2013

need to be amongst stuff that I like in life. I don’t mind a pound note, but I’m not obsessed with a pound note, you know? What sort of shape was Virgin EMI / Virgin Records in when you took over? Emeli Sandé and Bastille were in their prime; both were doing great here and great internationally. And then, six months down the line, we took over the Mercury [label] and merged that [into Virgin EMI], so we had the Grange Hill/Rodney Bennet thing of putting the two [labels] together. I’d seen Sony merge with BMG, and there were a few aspects of that I thought were good, and a few things that were a bit hurried. The thing is [at a merged companies], nobody likes each other to begin with, but if you let everybody go down the park, let them

fight a few battles with each other, you’ll be okay. I put a few learnings from Sony/BMG into Mercury/Virgin. And we’ve had a process whereby, somehow, we’ve ended up being the [UK’s] No.1 company for seven years. Your brief was very clear at the time, wasn’t it? Be the No.1 label; stay the No.1 label. That’s right, and in that sense we [as major record label heads] are like football managers: you’re given a very small window in which to deliver. And if I look around at the people that have run the competitor companies in the time that I’ve been doing it, there’s quite a list of names, do you know what I mean? The fact that we’ve survived, and that I’ve survived, I sort of go, ‘Bloody hell, that’s alright.’ 17

Plus, we’re a broad-based label, so we’re going to be busy anyway. Nothing’s a bed of roses, there will always be some frustration, but, more often than not, I'd like to think all of our [artists] are given an excellent level of service. We achieved whatever we did in the singles chart [Virgin recently became the first label to have nine tracks from multiple artists in the Top 20 of the Official Singles Chart at the same time], and then Lewis still manages to come through. That tells you something. Is Lewis Capaldi the ultimate proof of your point about ‘nobody really knows’? There’s this Scottish bloke who, by his own admission, doesn't tick every conventional box. We heard the record, and I’d done a number of acts with Daniel Lieberberg [then head of Universal domestic labels in Germany, now with Sony, who’d signed Capaldi to Universal’s system] through Germany – that I'd been completely unsuccessful with, unfortunately! And then Daniel said, ‘I've got this dude.’ Lewis came in, and we were like, ‘Right, this is worth some serious time…’ It fits into that category you mentioned earlier. Not, ‘Here’s our next million seller,’ but, ‘Let’s make those extra calls, let’s push that bit harder’… Yeah, there was just this little feeling, y’know? And as you were around him more and more, you learnt he was always fascinating, and always a great conversation.

With Emeli Sandé

What have been some of the contributing factors to that survival? Hit records and market share, of course, but has anything else played a role? Hopefully we are a company that recognises the role of the record label. We’re about service, energy, activity, sweat and infrastructure. You don’t know what’s going to sell, no-one does – even those who say they do. But you know if something has value, and hopefully you have a network of managers [representing acts signed to you] who have some confidence that you are going to do the best for their artists. You know, we live in a world whereby the easiest thing to have a pop at Virgin [EMI] with, and people do, is, ‘They’re so busy.' However, what I very much hope that you do not hear is: ‘I've heard everybody has a really shit time with Virgin.' It’s just, ‘They’re so busy.’ If you sign here, I will say, ‘You have as much time as you need.’ But if you’re the only artist on a label [roster], everyone just keeps saying, ‘When’s your record coming?’ That’s a shit situation to be in. Lewis was given two and a half years [to deliver an album], because we’ve got other stuff going on. 18

Is this another one of those ‘British artists embraced by German media and fans first’ stories? No – this didn’t happen in Germany. There was a little bit of personnel change there [as Daniel Lieberberg left UMG] but, thankfully, we [in the UK] just kept pushing. As an example, I was with another label head, in October [2018], waiting for the BRITs Critics Choice to be announced, and I said, ‘I think it should probably be Sam Fender, Freya Ridings and Lewis.’ And this person goes, ‘What the fuck are you saying it should be Lewis for? You're the only one who thinks it should be Lewis.’ Well I did and I still do! Aside from a few bits, the album was done, helped by the time [Virgin gave Capaldi to write and record], and that meant we could really plan some steps. It takes a lot to get started, [but once] the energy’s there, the excitement’s there, if [an artist] is doing the album on the move, with all the expectation around them, things can get a bit shit. Much better to get the album done, and let them grow. Managers, sometimes, when they turn up [to labels], they’re just like, ‘I’m gonna take the highest bidder.’ And you understand that – ‘I’m fucking skint, my partner’s shouting at me about the mortgage payments, I can get 125 grand here or 250 grand there.’ But, empirically, for the success of an artist, you go where the passion is, and where you know people will give you time. And that’s what happened here.

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What's the plan now with Lewis? Well, pleasingly, he’s got global momentum now. Nobody's getting carried away, but there are the obvious places where you'd like somebody to be successful that seem quite poised and ready for him. I admit I had some concerns [ahead of the US push], in terms of how his vibe might work, a bit of a culture clash. But at the New York Irving Plaza show things were going down very well. And with Lewis, there’s always the songs at the heart of it. Can I ask you about Universal’s famously intense competition culture. Tom March, for example, worked with you for a long time at Island, and now you fight each other every day. Is there more rivalry with, say, Polydor, than there might be with Atlantic or another label outside the building? There is, yeah. I've become acclimatised to it. That's the life you’re in here. That culture of internal competition, say some, all comes from Sir Lucian Grainge – that it’s a deliberate tactic to keep Universal winning. The greatest attribute about Lucian, that David also fully backs, is that he knows a fair amount of stuff won't work, regardless of best endeavours. So an absence of fear of failure remains the biggest driver at the heart of this company. I've worked for two companies in my career and I can tell you that, here, you are just left to get on with something. People win a deal, and then they are allowed to make a pure record. Mumford & Sons [at Island] was a very modest deal, and they were allowed to make whatever record they wanted to make. That [process] is not mucked up by a load of other voices, or interrupted by a load of questions. If you had 10 good reasons at the time you signed an artist, Lucian’s in. There’s never a witch hunt. Plus, it means nobody else has got it – and he likes that! That said, if I do 10 things completely wrong, in a row, I'm not here anymore. That’s super clear. But, so far, [at Virgin EMI] we have an enormous number to hit [and] a certain market share to get, and for some strange reason we've been able to do it; we've been No.1 and the most profitable or whatever for quite some time.

[Virgin wasn’t involved in]. But I could also name a few deals I’ve done that are stupid; it’s a fair cop, we can all get caught up in it. How would you describe David Joseph’s leadership style here at Universal Music UK? David is the master of relationship management and has a fantastic intuitive read on people and records. However, alongside that he always has far wider agendas going on. He understands corporate responsibility better than most. His mission is for Universal to be as progressive as we can be, with the greatest amount of corporate responsibility, while embracing every role in the community and wider society that a company should. And he is also very, acutely aware of the cultural value of music. We [label heads] sink or swim ourselves. I'm sure it will come again, and I'll be an embarrassment at some point, but, after a decade or so of somehow working things out, I think there’s trust there [between Joseph and Cockle]. Particularly because [Virgin EMI] has had years when there have been good front of house glories, and other years where we didn’t have any front of house glories, but we were business efficient and made it work anyway.

“If you had 10 good reasons at the time you signed an artist, Lucian’s in...”

Talking of big numbers, are some UK deals getting a bit silly at a time when UK music, at a blockbuster level, is increasingly struggling to sell globally? Yeah, but I mean, you know, nothing changes. We've been through dance music taking a million quid for a one-off song, and, thankfully, that’s had its moment. Currently the British urban lane is the one where that kind of thing is going on more than in any other [genre]. I could tell you about one £1.6 million deal, or one £700,000 deal – which was for two tracks – which I’m thankful 20

Was last year one of those to some extent? Because there was a lot of Queen, there was groundwork for Lewis, but there wasn't much ‘front of house’? Yeah, that was a business efficient year. When you’re a non-A&R person running a [record] company, like me, I always say, ‘I don’t mind getting a bar job to make ends meet.’ [This, if it wasn’t clear, is an analogy: Cockle is saying he doesn’t mind doing the dirty jobs to get his label to hit its numbers.] With A&R people running labels, they feel everything [their label] does is a reflection of themselves and their dynamics, and they won’t do that. Whereas I’m like, ‘I know what my responsibility is, I’ll take the bar job and pay the bills.’ How do major labels go about discovering and developing talent these days? And what role do managers – and good relationships with managers – play in that? For a label of this size, it's the broadest range of criteria: there’s somebody [signed after playing] in the corner of a pub; there’s somebody on ridiculous streaming metrics; and there's somebody managed by someone that you're doing three other acts with. We use every single device for finding and accessing talent. Going back to that sort of ‘label-bashing’ that you spoke about earlier, managers now say they do more artist development than ever, and that labels want finished packages... It’s interesting: who does the development in those cases? Do the managers do the development? Do the artists do the development themselves? And, actually, doesn’t development then continue

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Lewis Capaldi

over a very long period of time? I’ll de-personalise it, but there are plenty of high profile examples out there, where the artist is saying, ‘I want to be independent, I want us to do the development, to do everything,’ and the manager’s going, ‘For fuck’s sake. I could really do with plugging into a [label] system,’ – because they’re having to sort out a radio plugger in France today and a press person in Holland tomorrow, with America looming in the background. Everything in this business happens because of a combination of characters – everything. [John] Lydon and [Malcolm] McClaren are the ultimate example, arguing about who ‘created’ the Sex Pistols. It’s like, don’t worry about the percentages, you’re always going to disagree on that, but the fact is, you both needed to be in the room; that, no matter what fallout follows, should be remembered. When it comes to success, it’s always a combination of people, and a combination of factors. But what about artists doing things independent of a frontline major label, or even secretly partnering with a major label in an arm’s length-type deal? Sometimes it’s about the narrative. [Some deals sought by

With now-Island Records US boss, Darcus Beese

managers] are literally, ‘Hang on, you want us to fund everything, you pretend you’re doing it yourself, but with no financial responsibility at all?’ It’s like: ‘You want to set up an independent coffee shop that looks really tasteful and distinctive, and which has a sign on the door about supporting local businesses – but you also want to be funded by Starbucks?’ Listen, I’m not being critical, I’m arriving here along the path of, ‘We’re all insecure [about this trend].’ But I just look at the facts; take the biggest examples of [independent artists], and none of [their commercial performance globally], I think, is par excellence. Plus, never mind record companies, some artists are tied to the most terrible management deals ever. And I go back to it – do you know what dullards like us do? The boring label bit, the sweat and infrastructure: ‘Are you alright Spotify?’ ‘Are you alright HMV?’ ‘Are you alright Apple?’ ‘Are you alright Deezer?’ ‘Are you alright Amazon?’ Can we keep you all happy – so that we can not just come to you with an album this year, but we can come back next year, and in five years, and in 10, and you’ll still be looking to support us? Excellent, job done; here’s another great record for you... Q 21

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ARE YOU PREPARED FOR THE POST-DATA STREAMING AGE? Instagram is considering binning Likes. Should Spotify kill off stream counts? When you think about it, it’s a lot like chocolate Rolos, says Peter Robinson... You know how parrots can talk but we’ve all grown so accustomed to the idea of one specific bird chattering away that we don’t ever really stop to think about how strange the whole thing is? Well, think about how we spend so much of our working lives inside the Spotify app, and now consider how blind we are to the absolute batshitness of song play counts being totally public. These are people’s careers, right there on our screens, down to the most minute detail! People have listened to the new Grimes & i_o song 1,395,792 times. Haven’t we always had charts? Well, kind of. But this isn’t like the days of having the notion that a one-week-at-No.1 song was generally more successful than a 10-weeks-in-the-Top-10 song; or that a Platinum album had obviously sold more than something that’d dragged itself to Silver (even if we never really knew how many times a CD was ever played once it had been bought — some went straight on the shelf then down the charity shop, while others are still rattling around in glove compartment CD wallets). The figures were once opaque, and it was left to us as fans to imagine what filled the space between chart position and reality. Now, everything’s hanging out. People have listened to the most popular single off Robyn’s last album 26,835,290 times. There are other metrics for success, of course: some genres over-perform on Apple Music, which doesn’t show play counts publicly; certain artists get their numbers (if not their revenue) on YouTube, which does; and you can add on another eight to 12 listens once you factor in Tidal. Some artists’ value — to brands, at least — is measured in Instagram engagement, while elsewhere there are heritage and even modern artists who can sell out arenas without troubling Spotify’s global Top 200 artists. But, if you’re looking for an all-about-the-music hint at what people are actually listening to, there it is, pixel

“We are now blind to the absolute batshitness of song play counts being totally public.”

perfect in the green and black streaming app. It’s harsh. 494,754,064 people listened to The Jonas Brothers’ comeback single; 8,241,990 bothered with one of their new album tracks. Speaking of green and black, let’s talk chocolate. When perusing the confectionery aisle we all, I suppose, have an inkling that the selection we see is based on how the industry is set up. We know Cadbury and Nestlé, for instance, are the Sony and Universal of the chocolate world, while something like Green & Black’s trumpets its independent roots, despite long since having sold to Cadbury, which I suppose makes it Ministry. But beyond that, we don’t see a Bounty as any different to a packet of Rolos, despite the former being Britain’s third most popular chocolate snack and Rolos somehow coming in 27th. At this point you might be thinking: ‘Fuck right off, Bounties are revolting and there’s no way Rolos are only the 27th most popular chocolate, they’re everywhere and everyone likes them.’ You think differently about Rolos now don’t you? Perhaps you 23

like them more: they’re the underdog and must be protected at all costs. But perhaps you now think of the Rolo as slightly pathetic. A has-been. A relic trading on former glories and name recognition, undeserving of its omnipresence. Does a Rolo taste as good now? Yet, here we are. Now, what if I were to tell you that The 1975 — that globe-straddling, Reading-and-Leeds-headlining, voice-of-ageneration pop behemoth — ranked on Spotify as the 361st most popular act in the world? An odd fact but, again, here we are. In theory I should just stream what I stream and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus, but it’s hard not to be swayed. Particularly, I expect, if one happens to be working in the illustrious field of A&R. An unsigned act whose last three tracks topped 4m streams a piece will look more attractive, at least in terms of a shortterm win, than an unsigned act whose songs are still in the <1000 bracket. Success is contagious. It makes Rolos taste different and it makes music sound different. I’m aware you can’t move in this industry for people who insist that good old-fashioned instinct (luck) is what holds the music industry together, while managers half their age book artists into sold-out shows in Wrexham based purely on a keen interest in data. And I’m not saying data isn’t important, but I wonder how much data needs to be visible to everyone. Or, in fact, anyone. There’s a reason Instagram has been experimenting with removing Like counts from posts. And, yes, that reason is almost certainly, somehow, money, but there are other reasons too. It’ll be better for everyone. Anyone who’s used social media knows how much better they feel about a post that gets good numbers, and how bad they’d feel about the exact same post if it got bad numbers. In music, what does an artist do with bad numbers on a good song, or good numbers on a bad song? I wonder if this all, in some way, has some connection to The Chainsmokers. One day, of course, Spotify will remove its play counts. I say this based on no inside knowledge and instead on the fact that everything I find interesting or useful is usually dicked around with in the name of progress. But, if public numbers go the way of the headphone jack, maybe that’s no bad thing. In fact, I say we don’t stop there. Here’s what I’m proposing. Firstly, Spotify removes all public play counts, follower counts, or indications of success. Every social network follows suit. When 24

No, it actually is a popularity contest – but should it be?

“Everyone is in the dark. Absolute blackout. We go postdata.”

artists announce tours, they list dates by town/ city, rather than by venue: London, for instance, could mean the O2 or the Camden Assembly, with the venue only being revealed 24 hours before stagetime. The other option is to cancel all live performances. Actually, let’s do that, it’ll be good for the environment. Royalties are withheld for even longer than they already are, to obfuscate individual songs’ success. Radio? Without any feedback on how popular songs are, it will have to revert to total instinct mode. All listener feedback is banned, of course. Shut the whole thing down. All data is hidden. From everybody. Everyone is in the dark. Absolute blackout. We go post-data. This will be a pop Ice Age – and let’s throw in some scorched earth while we’re at it. Nothing will be the same. Leave it like that for five years, allow music to reset itself. Then, and only then, can touring start again. Or, we could just go the other way and be done with it: heatmaps showing precisely when people give up on listening to an album; a Top 50 of the most-skipped new releases; a chart of artists whose latest singles bombed. I prefer my first idea, though. Who’s in? Q

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WHAT’S THE VALUE OF A MAJOR UK RECORD LABEL IN 2019?

Record companies have arguably never had to prove themselves to artists like they do today. But according to Warner Records UK boss Phil Christie, the best in the field are now demonstrating their value in an assortment of ways...

t’s been three years since Phil Christie stepped up to the position of President of Warner Records in the UK. Since then, the London-based exec and his team have racked up some sparkling achievements – not least the global success of domestic signing Dua Lipa, who has won Grammy and BRIT Awards, while accumulating multiple billions of streams worldwide. Warner Records is also the record label partner of Liam Gallagher, whose head-turning comeback with 2017's No.1 album, As You Were, was recently crystallised in the WMG-backed biopic, As It Was. These are optimistic times at Warner Records. Following a recent rebrand from the company's former name (Warner Bros. Records), the label is being led in the US by two heavyweights of the Stateside industry, Chairman/ COO Tom Corson and Chairman/ CEO Aaron Bay-Schuck. Christie and his UK team are focusing on breaking developing domestic prospects like Griff, J Rick and JC Stewart, in addition to being the best partner possible for established talent like Foals, Michael Bublé, MIST and Royal Blood. Meanwhile, Liam Gallagher is back with a new album (Why Me? Why Not.), while Dua Lipa is understood to be busy in the studio working on new material. Alongside the global successes which have taken place under his watch as President, Christie tells MBUK he’s learned a lot about the contribution that a UK-based major label can make to an artist’s career – especially in an ever-changing global marketplace in which US artists seem to be expanding their domination daily. Christie came into the world of major labels with his eyes open to evolution. Before initially joining Warner Bros Records / Parlophone as Head of A&R in 2014, he was UK A&R Manager at Warner Chappell Music, where he signed the likes of London Grammar, Michael Kiwanuka and Royal Blood. (To this day, Christie is obviously drawn to artists whose idiosyncrasies are

apparent in their songwriting.) Here, Christie outlines the factors which he believes makes a major label the most valuable partner possible for artists in 2019 – and how Warner Records UK is meeting the challenge of making its mark in a hugely competitive, streaming-dominated global landscape... 1) International muscle The UK population is a fifth of the size of that in the United States, and less than 5% of the 1.4bn-plus populous found in both China and India. For Christie, British artists won’t get a better chance to break through globally than with a major label – so long as, he says, that label is plugged in to a collaborative global system. “The basic logistics of what a major label can provide globally are obvious, but nothing new,” he comments. “However, what has become essential more recently, particularly for UK artists, is that if you are just reliant on [your local market’s] streaming consumption, you’re only going to punch as hard as the size of your territory – which, in the UK’s case, is around 65m people. “Previously there was cultural cachet for an artist in breaking first in the UK, which you could then export elsewhere. A touch of that still exists, but you’re now in a streaming marketplace, where you’re immediately benchmarked by 'gatekeepers' in terms of sheer body mass – how many streams has this artist got vs. that artist. And to achieve the kind of numbers we have on Dua, you have to attract international success. “So for a new artist, how do you get simultaneous international success and a co-ordinated international campaign? The only place I see that happening today is at great major labels. That requires a fantastic international marketing team, and I think we have the best in the business at Warner Music Group, but it also requires an understanding between the international label heads that we’re going to pull together to break each other’s acts.”

“UK artists are now benchmarked by ‘gatekeepers’ in terms of sheer streaming mass.”

Dua Lipa

He adds: “There’s much more synchronicity between Warner Records in the US, between Tom [Corson] and Aaron [BaySchuck] and [the UK company], than there has been in the past. Our relationship is super-tight – artists on the label feel that, and artists we’re pursuing feel that. “But it isn’t just about the UK/US relationship here; so many of the other [international Warner HQs] are repertoire centres for music that reacts. I have relationships with my international contemporaries that’s probably way closer than previous generations [of label UK bosses], because not only can [international MDs] make a meaningful difference to artists we’ve got signed here, but they might also deliver a hit record on any given day.”

JC Stewart

certainly at Warner Records, there is a hunger and appreciation for artists that do something different, musically. There’s less of that cookie-cutter approach to songs here, it’s much more about artistry, which in turn lends itself to an A&R-heavy marketplace. Doubling down on forensic, full-contact A&R gives our artists the best chance of overcoming the increasingly uneven playing field of the global streaming market [where the biggest territories have the advantage].” He continues: “A shining example of what I’m talking about is the job Joe [Kentish] has done with Dua. He navigated a UK pop act into international territories very early on, and put her into important writing rooms and at the top of the list for big incoming songs. But it was all done in a way that didn’t dilute, and only enhanced, her musical message; it was all totally in tandem with Dua and her vision for where she wants to take her music. It’s been a really sympathetic, supportive and ambitious job, and the results speak for themselves. Dua’s had single global hits, with nearly four million albums sales, plus tickets and branding deals – the full gamut of someone moving culture. And you’ll feel

“Forensic A&R gives our artists the best chance of overcoming an uneven playing ﬁeld.”

2) ‘Forensic’ A&R Says Christie: “It’s getting increasingly challenging to cut through on an international level, and to become a global British superstar. So let’s focus on the things [the British industry] can over-index in, through best-in-the-world service. I would argue that in the UK, 28

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Liam Gallagher

MIST

the quality of the A&R job on the second album campaign when we get going, too; it’s world class. “There’s something about the UK where we’re able to strike a balance between the importance of an individual song – which is largely how the US market works, where so much is song-based – while still placing real value on the artistry, the story of the artist and the character of the artist. That’s the Dua campaign, where there’s real engagement [from the audience] with the artist she is, the personality she has and the story she’s representing, as well as the music itself.”

that collaborative environment, not only in the A&R department but across the board. “Frankly, it’s bad management to leave people to their own devices, to say to your team, ‘Crack on until you start getting it right.’ There’s always going to be trial and error in this business, songs are very unpredictable things. So why would you leave your team to develop by trial and error as well? You have to put your arm round them and coach them through situations. This is such a complex and emotional business that we all have to impart and share the knowledge we obtain through experience.”

3) Fresh creative ideas Christie is well aware of the dog-eat-dog mentality which exists in some A&R departments, but, he says, he believes the best results come from a label A&R team which displays real unity. “It’s been very important to me over the past three years at Warner Records to establish a very collaborative A&R department,” he says. “It’s not a kill or be killed culture internally here – the opposite. We’re super-aggressive and ambitious when it comes to signings, but as a team we’re a collective, and that’s deliberate. If different people here keep finding opportunities for songs, or have an opinion which can positively impact on someone [else’s] campaign, we really encourage that. We’ve deliberately created

4) Playing the market According to Christie, the smartest release strategy for artists today tends to be one of hyper-productivity – something diametrically opposed to the way things used to be. “You need to put out more music across an initial period today, from the moment you sign an artist through to them having hits, delivering an album, or both. Today’s market demands more content, and audiences demand more music. “You need to stay front-of-mind – constantly engaging with your audience. That benefits an artist’s emotional connection with the audience, but it also has a positive effect on the basic [streaming] algorithms too: more songs mean more monthly 29

With Dua Lipa and Joe Kentish at the BRIT Awards 2019

listeners. Algorithms aren’t the reason any of us got into music, but it would be wrong to deny that they play an important role. “If you’ve got an artist that’s just going to deliver 12 songs [for a debut album] in 2019, and that’s it, you’re going to struggle to break them – unless you get incredibly lucky. You’re given more options from an artist who is constantly making music. It’s all about riding the crest of the wave; when to keep [promoting] the song you’ve already got out and when to switch it up. Working that out is a constant business of reading the data, and not cutting a song off before its potential. But it’s also about not sticking with something too long, thrashing away at it because of your own preconceptions of what a hit is. Today, you get songs into market, monitor the consumption – and let the audience tell you what’s a hit.” Christie cites Warner Records’ work on a new developing artist at the company, JC Stewart. “He definitely fits with the idea of constantly creating, and his songwriting is just getting better and better,” says Christie. “By the

end of this year we’ll have six or seven songs in the marketplace from [Stewart]. But we’re only really looking at the top of next year to think about putting ourselves into contention to have a hit; that’s when we’ll [engage] ‘traditional’ media, radio, and activate some of the songs in the traditional space. And, in the meantime, if [a song] pops before the end of the year, we’ll react to that and get behind it. “This year, [Stewart] will go from 8,000 Instagram followers to 100,000, with a million monthly listeners on Spotify. He’s just sold out four Islington [Academy nights] and will be doing a Scala in May. I’ve had artists in the past where that would represent the end of the campaign, but the modern world means you’re hitting those metrics just as you’re getting going.”

“Algorithms aren’t the reason any of us got into music, but they play an important role.”

5) Expert data reading “The artist development period has definitely got longer, but I like that, because it’s the most exciting bit. We as a label can add so much value at that point; [early stage A&R] has got more

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important, more scientific and longer. A few years ago, in the physical market especially, you only ever quantified your success when your album was out; then you could sense how you’d done in the previous two years. That seems very outdated now, when we know exactly how we’re doing every day on every artist. “In spite of a fragmented market, we have a huge amount of insight and data and the ability to be completely flexible. You just have to keep your spend in check so you don’t blow your [budget] on a new artist too early; you want to have money coming in from streaming, as you’re spending money on a developing artist so your P&L is robust. Of course, it does still happen that you run out of financial road with an artist, but the goal today is for every artist on the label to be constantly building towards a profitable situation.” 6) Going the extra mile for artists the label truly believes in “You make a commitment to every artist you sign,” says Christie. “It’s no longer good enough to say, ‘Here’s an advance, now bugger off and come back when the record’s done.’ It’s a total false economy to be signing stuff you’re not sure about; you’ve got to be in the trenches with these artists, working together to deliver something that cuts through and stands out. “If you don’t think an artist has the talent to do that, or a label doesn’t have the energy or means to help them, you’re putting both yourself and the artist in for a shit time – and that doesn’t serve anyone right. You’ve got to be honest.” Adds Christie: “We’re lucky to have Max [Lousada] running this company [as Warner’s global Recorded Music CEO], because he believes in A&R Presidents, he was one himself, and it makes a massive difference. Max is both A&R-focused and significantly younger than people typically in his position [of CEO of a major record company]. Both of those factors are hugely important: music is a young person’s game, and it’s becoming a younger person’s game. Max has the authority to speak about the future of the music business because he has a lot of road ahead of him as a CEO. You also can’t deny his track record in A&R, or the growth of the Warner company.” 7) Never standing still “Over the past three years, I’ve made it part of my MO to constantly question what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and whether we’re getting it right,” says Christie. “When you feel like you’ve mastered something, you get complacent. The market is moving incredibly fast out there, and there’s no accounting for where youth focus is going to go over the next decade. “We’re still a bit of a trad industry in some ways, so we have to pedal double time to stay in front of where audiences are going. For a [modern label President], the job of refining your operation never ends, because, thankfully for all of us, the music industry is constantly evolving. The label we were three years ago already seems archaic compared to where we are now. And that wasn’t because we were a bad label three years ago – far from it – but the rate of change in this business is exponential.” Q

THREE TO WATCH MBUK picks out a trio of recently-signed artists to look out for from Phil Christie’s Warner Records UK in the remainder of 2019 and into 2020… GRIFF Signed to Warner Records on both sides of the Atlantic, British artist Griff (pictured) released her debut single, Mirror Talk, to much critical acclaim in July. Having grown up just outside Watford, she's being tipped for big things by I-D Magazine, Annie Mac and other tastemakers. Says Christie: “The talent this 18-year-old girl has is remarkable. She wrote, produced and performed her latest release singlehandedly. A superstar in the making.” GANG OF YOUTHS Five-piece alternative rock band Gang Of Youths were a huge hit in their homeland of Australia – where they are signed to Sony – before they moved to the UK earlier this year, and signed to Warner Records for the world (ex.Oceania). Their second and latest album, Go Farther In Lightness, went to No.1 in Australia after being released in 2017, and won no less than four ARIA Awards – the Australian equivalent of the BRITs. Says Christie: “I think they’re the most exciting alternative band in the world right now. I was a huge fan of their last album and frontman Dave [Le’aupepe] is a force of nature.” JC STEWART 22-year-old Northern Irish singer/songwriter, JC Stewart, already has a number of songs with million-plus stream counts on Spotify, including 2019 singles Have You Had Enough Wine? and Bones. In addition to his artist credentials, Stewart is a behind-the-scenes songwriter for the likes of Lewis Capaldi, having co-penned the Scottish star’s recent track, Hollywood. Says Christie: “Rarely am I so confident of an artist’s future success. JC has it all; voice, looks, songs, attitude and a personality that is undeniable.” 31

MY MANIFESTO What, you thought he’d be worried about a stage set designed to suit Instagram posts? If you did, you haven’t been concentrating. No, Hipgnosis founder Merck Mecuriadis’ manifesto is nothing less than a five point plan for a revolution in power, wealth and ownership…

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as anyone in the industry talking about Merck Mercuriadis a couple of years ago? Well, yes, of course they were, albeit in a comparatively genteel, low-level kind of way. “There goes Merck Mercuriadis,” they’d whisper in the Soho House bar. “He’s managed both Morrissey and Axl Rose, and he ran Sanctuary – must be a glutton for punishment!” Or perhaps, simply: “There goes Merck Mercuriadis. If you want to blag Nile Rodgers tickets, he’s your man.” These are not the most immediate descriptions that come to mind about Mercuriadis today. The modern set of Soho/Shoreditch industry gossip-mongers are more likely to observe: “There goes Merck Mercuriadis, the man who keeps buying bloody everything in sight.” Or, in the case of the industry’s formerly-acquisitive parties: “There go the copyrights I wanted, snapped up by Moneybags Mercuriadis… again.” Yet to glibly illustrate Merck as a mere music biz big spender doesn’t quite do justice to his evanglistic belief in the value (and future value) of songs. He might be backed by hundreds of millions, he might have acquired catalogues from Benny Blanco, The Chainsmokers, The-Dream, Dave Stewart and everyone in between – but, according to Mercuriadis, there is a wider point behind his relentless thirst for deals. As the Hipgnosis Songs Fund founder explains below in his five-point manifesto – aka the things he’d change about the music business tomorrow – he’s aiming to shake up the very power balance this industry is built on... __________________________________________________ 1. Redress Where Songwriters Sit In The Economic Equation There is an imbalance that exists between what is paid to the recorded music side of this industry and what is paid to songwriters; it’s not fair and equitable as it currently stands. In the old days it didn’t matter, because when I started, which was the old days, 90% of signed artists wrote their own songs. They knew who they were, what they wanted to be, what the album cover should look like, what the stage show should look like. And the job of someone like me [as a manager] was to (a) believe in them and (b) put a strategy in place to bring their ideas to fruition. Well, today, 90% of signed artists are still really talented people, but almost every song you hear on the radio is written, at least in part, by an outside songwriter. If you’re Zara Larsson and you have access to these songwriters, you’re top of the chart. If you’re Iggy Azalea, and five years ago you had the biggest song in the world, with Fancy, but now, for whatever reason, you no longer have access to these songwriters, you’re nowhere. Because the song is the currency on which this business trades. And yet the songwriter is not being treated fairly and equitably, and we need to redress that imbalance. Right now, the Jonas Brothers are on tour in America, making millions of dollars, and what the crowd really want to hear from

them is a song [they’ve heard] that Ryan Tedder wrote. I’m not suggesting that Ryan should be getting [more] of the money that the band generates from live, but it highlights the imbalance between what the record company gets and what Ryan gets. It’s important to be clear, this is not about re-dressing the balance between what the artist gets and what the songwriter gets, because, as we know, the artist is on a sliver of what the record company gets anyway. This is about the balance between what is paid for recorded music and what’s paid for the song. That change starts with the CRB ruling increasing songwriters’ share of the pie by 44% [in the US] over the next four years. It should then continue with the Department of Justice dropping the consent decree laws that affect both ASCAP and BMI in the United States, and it should roll on from there. __________________________________________________ 2. Create A Truly Powerful Songwriters Guild I want to use what is currently half a billion dollars’ worth of assets, and what will be billions of dollars’ worth of assets acquired by Hipgnosis to, again, change where the songwriter sits in the economic equation, but also be the catalyst for a real Songwriters Guild. Not what we currently have, because there’s no real advocacy at this moment in time. There isn’t anyone advocating for the songwriter. The three big companies can’t, because they’re owned by big recorded music companies. The performing rights societies can’t, because they’re bound by the consent decree rule – and they’re also very cash rich organisations that don’t want to upset the applecart. I want to end up with a scenario similar to the Screenwriters Guild where, on behalf of movie writers, every three years they march into all the studios and say, ‘Hey, I don’t care if you’ve got Reese Witherspoon or George Clooney to star in this movie; if you don’t get a script, there is no movie. And you’re not going to get a script unless you pay the writers properly.’ So, every three years, they scream and shout at each other, they call each other names, they threaten to bring production to a standstill, but at the end of the day they figure out a way to pay the writers more money – and everybody lives happily ever after. Or at least for three more years. I want the songwriters to be represented in exactly that way. It’s a six or seven-year plan, but I intend Hipgnosis to be the catalyst to make that happen. If you think about what we’ve done, we’ve established songs as an asset class, and an asset class that is now recognised by the most important investment communities in the world as being as good as gold or oil. That’s amazing for Hipgnosis, but it’s amazing for all songwriters. It will benefit everyone. I can’t own all the songs in the world, but I can play a part in making sure all the songwriters in the world benefit. And that’s where this Songwriters Guild, with real teeth, will come into play. 33

FEATURE

3. Artists Should Get Their Masters Back The system that exists currently [in record deals] is not right. It is basically: we’ll lend you money to build the house, you’ll pay that money back, we’ll still own the house. It doesn’t mean that those companies that fund artists can’t be involved for the long-term, but once the artist has paid for their records and the company that made a capital investment has been able to make a great return, the artist should get the rights back. There can be long-term distribution deals, there can be longterm licensing deals, but that system of lending the money, getting paid back and then still owning the house, that has to change. I’m a big believer in the value of the major companies and the best of the independent companies out there. Because the one thing as an artist that you’re never going to want to do is create that infrastructure. Right now, there’s someone working for Universal, Warner or Sony in Brazil who knows who the best DJs, most influential journalists are etc. I’m never going to know those things, so I’m always going to want to be in business with those companies and I’m always going to value the incredible work they do. But, the economics of it, in terms of who ends up owning these assets, needs to change. That’s not to say there can’t be some hybrid, but it can no longer continue as it is. We’re talking about a long hard road towards this, and I would say we haven’t even begun yet. Because part of the problem, and this informs points 1 and 2, is that it’s very easy for people to live in a paradigm that has existed for 75 or 100 years. You sit there and think you can’t do anything about it, until someone comes along and does do something about it. As regards points one 1 and 2, that’s exactly what I’m doing – being that catalyst and demonstrating to people that these things are possible. Eventually we’ll get to 3 as well.

The split on that [pool] will favour the record company when the artist is unrecouped. Then, as time goes on, it becomes more even, more like 50/50, and then the more successful an artist becomes, the more the pendulum swings in their favour. What exists at the moment is that you sign to a [frontline major] label and they might give you an advance of £200,000, but you might also have to pay them 20% of your publishing as part of your 360 deal. Then you go out and make a publishing deal for £500,000. Suddenly you’ve got to give the label £100,000 [of that publishing money], which is fair enough. But that £100,000 becomes a profit centre for the [record company]; you’ve given them £100,000, but you’re still £200,000 unrecouped [on your record deal], not £100,000 unrecouped. So I want to revolutionise 360 deals and create fair and equitable payment structures for artists whereby the more successful you get, the bigger share of the pie you get. __________________________________________________ 5. Value Managers Properly And Fairly The role of the manager needs to be reconsidered, particularly by the legal community, which seems to want to marginalise it. One of the key issues is that managers should get paid for the work that they do in perpetuity. That’s not to say they should get paid on an entire contract, but whichever songs or albums that come out during their tenure as manager, they should get paid in perpetuity. It’s no different to a producer. Your manager could be someone that you spend 10 hours a day with, and a lawyer’s telling you, ‘Don’t pay this person.’ Whereas you could go into a studio tomorrow with someone who you’ve only met once and who you’re never going to work with again, and you would owe them their royalty forever. Why should a manager be expected to put their life, their heart and soul into an artist and not be rewarded for it in their later days if they’re successful – when [the opposite is true] for a record company, publisher or producer? Managers play an incredibly important role – the good ones. There are plenty of bad ones, I’m not speaking on their behalf; I’m speaking for the ones that can quite rightly be credited with a huge part of an artist’s success, who are prepared to make other people believe in their acts, who are committed to their artists and who put the time and the effort in to do great work. As things stand, they’re far too easily cut out of the picture.

“We'll lend you money to buy the house, you pay us back, we still own the house.”

__________________________________________________ 4. Revolutionise 360 If you look at the great British labels of the sixties and seventies, the one thing they had in common is that they identified talent and then went to work with that talent; they would make a capital investment in that talent. But then they would spread that investment across many income streams, so it was not unusual for those labels to manage the artist, to handle merchandise for the artist, to book the live shows and to publish the artist. When they did that, they effectively created a pool [of money]. What I want, going forward, is that if there is going to be a concept of ‘360’ in today’s [record] business, that concept should be one where all the money from those income streams goes into a [central] pool. 34

Q Hipgnosis is based at Tileyard London, located in Kings Cross, Europe's largest community of artists, studios and businesses, all revolving around music, ideas, collaboration and creativity.

INTERVIEW

‘I HAVE AN A&R BACKGROUND, SO THERE WAS NO WAY I WASN’T GONNA ROLL MY SLEEVES UP...’ Radha Medar is managing one of the UK’s hottest new stars in Polydor-signed Mabel, who is enjoying success in her home market as well as the USA and beyond. Medar is putting her own major label experience – and her experience working with proudly independent MC Skepta – to daily use...

hether amply-compensated major label exec or ramenmunching songwriter, the fitness industry has all sorts of tricks to inveigle hard-earned money from our clutches. Guilt and self-esteem; now there’s a killer combination to keep you paying a monthly subscription. (Probably more killer than New Music Friday and This Is: Zedd, to be fair.) However, one of British music’s fastest-rising managers, Radha Medar, owes the keep-fit industry a beer. In 2011, Birminghamborn Medar had started a work experience gig at Warner/Atlantic’s Asylum Records in London, and was keenly searching, as work experience people do, for a way to stand out. One evening, she was invited by her sister to join her at a Zumba class, where she heard something that was to prove life-changing. “I listened to this track, and was like, This isn’t really my taste, but it’s definitely different – and it could be really big,” she recalls. That track was Sam & The Womp’s Bom Bom, a left-field novelty house hit which went on to top the UK Singles Chart seven years ago. Cannily, Medar jotted down the song’s title, confirmed its major label-less status online, and presented it to Atlantic UK boss Ben Cook and Asylum A&R chief, Ed Howard. In the end, Bom Bom was licensed to Warner Music UK, as opposed to any individual label, but Medar had proven herself internally: she knew how to spot a hit, and she wasn’t afraid to raise her hand when it happened. This moment, Medar believes today, was something of a big break in her career. “It gave me the ammunition to ask for a proper position,” she says. And, sure enough, soon after, she landed an A&R consultancy gig at Atlantic/Asylum, where she stayed for five years. That experience taught her to think big for

her artists, and when Medar joined Grace Ladoja at Metallic Inc. in 2015, to co-manage Skepta, she did so with the belief that, with the right guidance and strategy behind him, Joseph Adenuga Jr could not only change the game for UK rap, but for an entire community of independent artists, too. (He did just that, of course, with the Mercury-winning, Ivor Novello-winning, Goldselling album, Konnichiwa.) Another slice of serendipity came along in 2016. So struck was Grace Ladoja by a young model appearing in I-D Magazine, that she sought her out and persuaded her to appear in the video for Skepta’s skull-rattling single, Shutdown. That model, it transpired, was also a very promising young artist – Mabel (aka Mabel McVey), whom Medar has managed to great heights ever since. (To atypically altitudinous heights, actually, when compared with the paucity of British R&B-leaning music elbowing its way onto the world stage right now. But, hey, who’s juxtaposing.) Since releasing her debut track, Know Me Better, in 2015, Mabel has secured three UK Top 10 singles – Finders Keepers (No.8) and this year’s Don’t Call Me Up (No.3) and Mad Love (No.8), both released on long-term label, Polydor. In more globally relevant terms, Mabel has been streamed over half a billion times to date on Spotify, while Don’t Call Me Up nestled in at No. 66 on the Billboard Hot 100 (and No. 16 on the Billboard Mainstream Top 40) earlier this summer in the States, where she is signed to Capitol Records. And it’s fresh off a plane from the US – where Mabel has just played a run of headline shows across New York, Los Angeles, Boston and beyond – that MBUK catches up with Medar to hear all about the manager’s story to date, the ever-escalating levels

“Mabel is really fucking smart. She takes her craft very seriously.”

Attending the BRITs with Mabel in February

of her career achievements, and her complete assurance that, in McVey, we have a British superstar-in-waiting on our hands... Before joining Atlantic/Asylum, you worked at a couple of indie labels – including One Little Indian and Deadly People – before taking on your first management clients in Radio 1’s Monki and DJ/producer Melé. From there, you got a job at Atlantic/Asylum. Why did you take that job, and what did you learn from it? I always had an itch to learn how the major record label machine worked. I definitely feel that Ben [Cook] and Ed [Howard] taught me what to look for when signing records, how to mix records 38

– and that if I need to get to mix 28, I’m gonna get to mix 28! It doesn’t matter, as long as the record ends up sounding how it should sound. I worked very closely with Ed and he taught me about work ethic, and the importance of having a structure: getting to work at a certain time, taking a lunch break, leaving at a certain time. If you don’t understand that concept it can be really easy to slip out of it and just work round the clock. I was maybe 23 when I started, and kind of scared. He really took me under his wing and showed me a lot. How did you end up working with Grace Ladoja and comanaging Skepta at Metallic Inc?

INTERVIEW

Skepta

Grace is a very good friend of mine – we’d known each other for over 10 years when we started working together, just kind of meeting randomly through going to the same parties. She knew that I worked in music and called me towards the end of 2014. She had been hanging out with Skepta, he had asked her to manage him, and at that point she wasn’t so experienced on the music side, so she said to me, ‘I’ve got a proposition for you: do you want to manage Skepta with me? I told him I can’t do it without you.’ I felt like I’d kind of reached my ceiling at Asylum, and I thought it would be a new challenge for me. We got our start in 2015 [with Skepta] and straight away, there was so much work to do. I think working with a new team really helped him, ‘cause we had fresh ideas, things we wanted to try, and he was all for it. When Sam [Burton, Boy Better Know] came back into the picture [who’s worked with Skepta from the beginning], the three of us were working as a team to rebuild, rebrand and put out music the way Skep wanted. We changed his whole live setup and his agent. And then, obviously, Shutdown came out and everything just blew up.

Yeah. I didn’t actually meet Mabel that day. Grace started doing creative work with her, and a few months later she called me and was, like, ‘I just told Mabel that I think you guys should meet up and you should listen to what she’s got.’ I met with her, she played me some music and then was just like, ‘I’m looking for a new manager, would you manage me?’ And it was quite a shock because I didn’t know her. There were some good demos she played me that day, like a really rough [early version] of Finders Keepers, and Come Over, which ended up as the first track on her mixtape [Ivy To Roses, 2017]. She was obviously super-talented, but I also knew there was a lot of work to do, and that thought was quite overwhelming. I didn’t know anyone at Polydor; I’d spoken to Ben Mortimer a little bit ‘cause he had commissioned some remixes from Melé in the past, but I went and met them and it all went from there. I remember seeing my first [Mabel] headline show and immediately had all these fresh ideas.

“We had fresh ideas, things we wanted to try, and Skepta was all for it.”

So, Mabel’s in the Shutdown video – is that how you started managing her?

What needed to be worked on in the early days? All the articles about her would say, ‘The New R&B Princess’ and stuff. But I was just like, ‘The music that you’re putting out 39

Mabel’s Finders Keepers has topped a million sales in the UK

isn’t really R&B; you hardly have any black fans, so that’s kind of weird.’ At the same time, from the day she played me those demos [through] working on the mixtape, I knew that the way she writes songs was special and she had a lot to say. We needed to connect the dots, to almost rebirth her; to have her kind of come from something. Up to that point, she never really fitted with any kind of scene or culture – and I knew that was one [area] where Skepta really won. It always makes sense for the consumer today to digest an artist when they have a kind of reference point. Like, ‘Okay, this artist sits with this artist and that artist; I can understand where they’ve come from.’ How were you able to join those dots? When she played me Finders Keepers, I started thinking about Not3s, Kojo Funds, J Hus, Stefflon Don. All those artists fed into a scene, a new cultural movement; afro-swing, or afro-whateveryou-wanna-call-it, was really happening in the UK at the time. At the time Kojo wasn’t on [Finders Keepers], but it made sense to put him on that track. One, because he already had a couple of massive underground records and people knew who he was, but also it would automatically connect Mabel to the scene. [Kojo Funds eventually appeared on the single version of Finders Keepers, released in May 2017, which has now sold over a million equivalent units in the UK.] 40

Part of it all was a confidence thing. Mabel’s mixtape is bloody great, I love it, but I knew she had more to give; I just wanted her to go through the process of putting out a body of work like that. So then, second time around, with the album, her confidence would be boosted. [For the album], she was talking about different things and the music sounded more mature. You’re a manager who thinks quite deeply about A&R, by the sound of it. Yeah, I have an A&R background, so there was no way I wasn’t gonna roll my sleeves up with Mabel. When working at Asylum, Ben and Ed really taught me how to get under the skin of a song, and how to finish records. I’ve taken that knowledge and applied it all to Mabel. Also, Mabel was so young when she started, and so didn’t always know how to articulate what it was she wanted to do, or the music she wanted to make. She was surrounded by a lot of men that probably couldn’t always understand what she was trying to say. So I think it helped for me to come in as a fresh addition. We work so well together. Sometimes she hates it when I push her, but she knows I’m pushing her for a reason. I’m heavily involved in the A&R. Even down to sequencing the album; that was me and Mabel. [We] work hand-in-hand with Ben [Mortimer]; he signed Mabel early on and I know it is such a passion project

INTERVIEW

for him, and really important to him that she succeeds. The fact that we have the entire Polydor team behind us and supporting us massively has been so key.

determined to make it [in the music business], so I didn’t want to move back to Birmingham and then just commute down; I knew I had to be in London to network and meet people.

Without giving the game away, is there any wisdom you can share in how Mabel has broken in this ‘attention economy’? Firstly, it starts with the talent: Mabel’s super-talented. But also, and I know it’s really basic but it’s true: she works really hard, she listens to people and she isn’t afraid to try new things. She works with the team at the label and [elsewhere], where everyone cares and genuinely wants her to win. That makes a huge difference. Everyone in the team goes that extra mile, they’ll stay an hour later at work, or take a late night phone call – those things have clearly made a difference. I’ve built up a great relationship with Ben [Mortimer] and Tom [March] over the past few years. They never had any reason to put any trust in me ‘cos they didn’t know me when I started managing Mabes, but they took a chance on me and thankfully it’s worked. They’ve really invested so much time in Mabel and myself.

What was the experience of working with Grace? We don’t work together anymore, but we’re still really good friends. She taught me confidence. I remember she said to me, ‘Don’t ever think that you’re not allowed to sit at the table with anyone else.’ I’ll never forget that advice. Just the fact that she called me to ask me [to work with Skepta] and told me that she couldn’t do that job without me – there was so much in that. She made me believe in myself more. What’s your professional setup now? Are you managing Mabel independently or working with another management company? I’ve had a bunch of people ask to me to go into their company, but right now I’m solely independent. I have two assistants, and I’m not managing anyone else but Mabel at the moment. There’s just been so much work to do in the past couple of years, and there was no way that I was going to take my eye off the ball. I personally feel that the worst thing a manager can do is spread themselves too thin and take too much on; that’s risky. I knew I would never let anyone, if [Mabel] wasn’t a success, say, ‘Oh, it’s because Radha’s not focused. She’s got too much going on.’ But the [Mabel experience so far] has shown that I can work really well under pressure. The Mabel project is like my baby, so I have put all my effort, blood, sweat and tears into it. But now the debut album’s out and she’s already started on album two, I’d maybe one day like to take on [another artist] that is in the position Mabel was three years ago, and build that up using what I’ve learnt.

“The worst thing a manager can do is spread themselves too thin.”

Outside of her musical talent, what do you find most impressive about Mabel? How truly smart she is – she’s not just a pretty face, she’s really fucking smart; she’s always educating herself about something and it’s really refreshing. She takes her craft very seriously and her professionalism is impeccable.

Why did you want to break into music in the first place? My dad is very musical. When I was a kid, he had a small record label, and even now he runs a community radio station in Birmingham. So I grew up with music in the house – he would always buy us instruments and get us to listen to music all the time. I also have an older sister and an older brother and in the nineties, when R&B music started to really come through, with Mary J Blige, TLC, Jodeci... my sister would play all of that music and I was also just always in her hair, obsessed with her! And I fell in love with it, helped by TV shows like Trevor Nelson’s The Lick and different pirate radio stations in Birmingham. I studied popular music at college in Birmingham, and then moved to London when I was 18 to study audio engineering, ‘cause I thought I wanted to be a sound engineer. I graduated, but by the end of the course I’d realised that it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. It didn’t go to waste though, as I’ve been able to apply what I learnt studying into the record making process. Then I got stuck in that working-to-live cycle, and worked in retail for a bit, before doing work experience at One Little Indian. I worked in Carhartt, Ted Baker, Replay, Paul Smith, Maharishi… all these retail shops just to make ends meet. I was

What’s the hope for what Mabel can mean in the States? She’s signed to Capitol in the US and they have been incredible. They’ve created so many opportunities for her like performing on Jimmy Fallon and doing the Teen Choice Awards a few weeks ago. The radio guy over there, Greg Marella, has been absolutely incredible and really, really pushed her track. With Mabel, the sky’s the limit. She could really break through in the States and that’s obviously a dream – for her to become a household name. It’s going to take a lot more work, but she’s definitely moving in the right direction. And there’s no sign of her slowing down, because she absolutely wants this. Presumably, you believe that she can be that next big British breakthrough, globally? There’s not one single doubt in my mind. Q 41

INTERVIEW

‘IT’S IMPORTANT FOR SPOTIFY TO HAVE A GLOBAL REACH, BUT A LOCAL TOUCH’ Sulinna Ong has 16 years’ music biz experience, with her career spanning live, management, international marketing and digital music. Now, as Head of Music for the UK & Ireland at Spotify, she hopes to have a bigger impact on artist careers than ever before….

ulinna Ong quit her job in 2002 and relocated to the other side of the world. “I decided that I was going to move from Australia to the UK,” she explains. “I had these ambitions of working in the music business – and I figured the UK was one of the world’s biggest music markets and home to some of my favourite artists.” Spotify’s recently appointed Head of Music, UK & Ireland says that she moved to London that year with “about a thousand quid” in her pocket, saved up from working as a marketing assistant at Sony Electronics. “I didn’t know anyone at all [in London], didn’t have any family here, no friends. I had exactly zero contacts,” she says. Ong explains that music and technology have always been the two “great and constant loves” in her life. She also played in bands growing up. “I was a pretty self-contained, nerdy, mixedrace kid, and I moved around a lot living in different countries and cities and always felt like an outsider,” she says. “Music provided a form of escape, and it was really my only outlet for experimentation, creativity, and of course, rebellion.” After working various temp jobs when she arrived in London, Ong landed a role in International Marketing at Sony Music. There, she worked with artists like Kasabian, whose management company, The Family Entertainment, Ong subsequently joined. She then went on to work in live music as Director of International Marketing & Artist Development at Live Nation, before founding artist management / marketing strategy firm Silver Horse Entertainment. And then, in 2016, she joined Deezer, where she worked directly with labels and content creators as Global Vice President of Artist Marketing. Now, in her new role at Spotify, Ong is responsible for leading both the company’s local Artist & Label Services (ALS) and Music Culture & Editorial (MCE) teams.

were really terrible. And thanks to having brutally honest parents, I was at least self-aware enough to realise I wasn’t talented enough to be an artist. I figured out that I had to find another way to make music my full time career. I really didn’t know what that meant and what the options were; I just knew that I wanted to always listen to and talk about music, and work with openminded, creative, smart people who also felt like outsiders. My parents were immigrants and not from the creative industries at all. I had absolutely zero contacts and absolutely zero knowledge of the business. While I was at university, I volunteered to write for a music ‘zine. I was also a general dogsbody and runner for a local promoter. Basically I put my hand up for anything and everything, just to get started and to try and build a network. So you moved to London to work in music and you ended up working at a major record company, so it’s the ultimate success story, right? Yeah, I can remember the day I got the call telling me I had the job, I was actually on my way to Glastonbury for the very first time. That was also my first experience of Glastonbury Festival. And I couldn’t believe that I had actually got the job, because it took me 12 months to find a job, 12 months of grafting, of doing crappy temp jobs, living in bedsits. And I just didn’t feel the end was ever in sight. And then all of a sudden, I got this call saying, ‘Oh, you start on Monday.’ That was a really important moment for me.

“I was a self-contained, nerdy mixed-race kid; I always felt like an outsider.”

What kind of music were you playing when you were in bands? It was grunge. I also played in a death metal band. Both of them

What was it like working at Sony; what was the company culture like and who did you work with? Sony was a great introduction to working with major artists and also new artists as well and that major label system, especially international marketing, where you’re responsible for developing an artist outside of that domestic market. Brian Celler was the person who hired me, and still one of the people who I really respect. I learned a lot from Brian. 43

Ong previously worked for the likes of Sony, Live Nation and Deezer before joining Spotify

At the same time, I met Rob Stringer and Robbie McIntosh, who are all still in the business, and also many other people that I still work with now [who work] in various different companies. That time also was really interesting, I started [at Sony, in 2004] before the big recession or the impact of peer-to-peer file sharing. Then nine months/a year into the role, the industry was heavily impacted and it really did feel like a light switching off. You really felt that disruption, and the music business obviously went into a deep recession and a period of upheaval and uncertainty, where you just didn’t have the budgets that you used to have. That was a really interesting point to be at a major record label, to see all this upcoming technology. And really the uncertainty of, ‘What is this? Where is it going to go? How’s it going to impact our business, and how are we going to deal with it?’ It solidified my instincts that technology was always going to be important, even more so as we went along. After Sony you went into artist management full time with Kasabian. What did you learn? My time in artist management has been so crucial to my career, because it’s infused it with an understanding of the innate challenges in developing artists. It taught me the importance of how to work with artists successfully to protect and amplify their creative work and to help them achieve their goals. It taught me the importance of the whole picture and relationships with every key stakeholder, whether record label, streaming platform, publisher, 44

live agent, promoter, merch. There really is not one person or one thing solely responsible for breaking an artist. It’s really a team effort. And also the importance of fans. [I use] all of those key learnings in my everyday approach, in my current role at Spotify. I have experience managing platinum arena-level artists as well as very new artists. It’s the centre of how I think about streaming and how we work with artists and their teams, how we support an artist at Spotify by way of editorial and artist marketing has a direct impact on our campaigns and I don’t take that lightly or for granted. Then you worked at Live Nation... Live Nation was super important, especially working with heavyweights like Michael Cole and Bob Ezrin at Live Nation Artists. Live Nation Artists was the recorded music division of Live Nation at the time, and also one of the early multi-rights, 360-degree entertainment business models which led to the big deals with Madonna, Jay Z and Roc Nation. Having previously come from artist management, I understood the importance of live to an artist’s career, both in terms of generating revenue, but also the development of their career and also developing a fan base. But I gained even deeper insight and experience working within the Live Nation juggernaut. And, because Live Nation Artists was one of the first of its kind in terms of new business models, being on the frontline of that disruptive thinking and new ways of doing things was really important.

INTERVIEW

You founded your own artist management and marketing agency after that, and then went in-house at a startup. Why? I felt that [my experience] was very music-oriented and what I was missing – and where I saw everything going, really – was towards technology. The next step was [to gain] experience at an early stage startup, so pre-series A, working directly with programmers and developers to build a product. I [wanted to know] what it was like to build a product for different platforms: iOS, Android, desktop, Windows, Mac. How do you get users? How do you deal with investors and fundraising? That was the experience I really sought out, which led me to joining a very early stage startup that was based in Dublin [WholeWorldBand]. That was a real pressure cooker environment. All of the things I wanted to gain experience in, I certainly got that and more. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do – the pace! Being a group of six people and having to build a product, deal with fundraising was really invaluable experience. As I said, a pressure cooker. It was harder than I ever thought it would be, but it was so valuable. That led me onto Deezer. Obviously music streaming was on the rise and was something that absolutely interested me. I was the Global VP of Artist Marketing at Deezer, responsible for leading artists’ marketing globally, so setting the strategy, working directly with labels and content creators. One of the things that I worked on closely at Deezer was launching Deezer NEXT, the artist development program. Really thinking about how streaming can contribute to developing artists in a meaningful way. What does that look like? How do we do that internationally? How do we do that locally? My time at Deezer gave me a great overview on streaming across the world [and how it] varies greatly from country to country. You can be a market leader in one territory, but a challenger brand in another. And in some markets, like for example, Japan, streaming is very much in its nascent stages. I also learnt the importance of localising content for each market, and how valuable local knowledge and expertise is by way of your editors, the curation, the artist marketing personnel that you have in each market.

The Head of Music role oversees all music teams at Spotify. And that includes the four teams under Artist and Label Services as well as Music Culture & Editorial. My days are really quite different. It’s never really the same day to day. I’m not a morning person. I know it’s fashionable to say that I get up at 4:00am and have a run. I don’t do that. My job involves a lot of late nights and gigs, so it’s usually quite late to bed, but I still have to do early meetings in the morning. What I enjoy about my job is the variety from one day to the next. I’m always checking data, checking how our playlists are performing, particular song releases that might be trending, where they’re doing well. It’s always a challenge to make sure that I [factor] in time to listen to music, but that’s an important part of my day as well. There is such a huge volume of music going on Spotify every day that it must be quite a lot for you to keep up with.... There is, but one of the things that I feel very fortunate about at Spotify is having Spotify for Artists, because it enables an artist to pitch directly for playlists. And we see those pitches come in. All music teams are able to listen to music from all sorts of artists. So it’s not just about the artists who are signed to major labels, who have people asking you to listen to [their] new material. We listen to music from artists at all levels. Spotify for Artists really enables us to do that, to be able to discover artists from other sides of the world, or artists we would have not really have come across otherwise. That’s one of the most exciting things that I find about being in streaming.

“It’s not just about major labels – we listen to music from artists at all levels.”

How does Spotify respond to the challenge of localised editorial content? What’s important for Spotify is to have a global reach, but a local touch. You see that in the expertise and in the curation, and that’s on our editors, the human curation side. That knowledge base, in terms of what’s culturally relevant, is really important, which is why having the right team on the ground by way of editors and artist relations personnel, is really key. What does your current role entail and what does your average working day look like?

What is your advice for emerging artists, music executives or artist managers? Number one, understand the importance of the follow-through. Do what you say you’re going to do. It’s about being accountable. Secondly, confidence is good, but it’s got to be backed up by knowledge and results. Don’t get comfortable, ever. There’ll always be challenges along the way, especially if you want to succeed, but if you aren’t being challenged on a weekly, or even a daily basis, then you aren’t pushing yourself enough out of your comfort zone. And there’s no magic formula when you think about dealing with challenges, because by their very nature, they’re always new and different. You have to stay flexible and learn as much as you can about the stuff you don’t know. And don’t be afraid to ask people for help. One other point: no-one owes you anything, so be as resourceful as possible. Integrity goes a long way. It really does. You’ve worked in various marketing roles in the music industry. What are your views on how marketing has evolved since you started? The biggest change is streaming. It’s an obvious one, but it really is 45

when you’re talking about the fundamental difference in marketing. Streaming is now really at the centre of all marketing plans when you’re thinking about a release. It also opens up avenues for artists who would never have had a shot previously, pre-streaming. Also with streaming, you can react quickly, momentum can be built very quickly, and then you need to know how to parlay that. One of the biggest challenges is the fight for a person’s attention, because the channels to grab [that] attention have multiplied exponentially. You’re now competing with all sorts of content. It’s not just music content, you’re competing against video games, you’re competing against social media content, as well as with more traditional television and radio. You need to know how to harness and co-ordinate those multiple channels of communication [in addition to] streaming. If momentum takes off in one area, the challenge for the modern marketeer is how to keep that going, and how to work the other channels as well. How to cut through the noise in a world driven by technology is one of the key challenges for the modern marketeer. That said, the challenges are also big opportunities, because when you’re talking about social media, those are also channels of promotion. [That’s] allowed artists to have a direct communication and contact with their fan base and to develop that to get that story across. The same thing with streaming; it’s allowed artists to see early results, to reach a wider global audience. On Spotify, one of the things we’re focused on is podcasts, and that’s another interesting development for artists in terms of communicating their story.

anyone that looked like me when I was starting out. And that’s not to say that I didn’t have great people who shared their knowledge with me; I did. But I also didn’t have anyone that I looked to and thought, ‘That person’s like me.’ That’s important, to have representation, both in terms of the talent side and the business side. More women working in the music business, in all areas of the industry, as well as diversity. You’ll have seen some of the initiatives that Spotify has launched, The EQL Directory, particularly, in terms of production side – there are very few women in those sectors. Less than 5% of all audio professionals are women, and that certainly needs to change. And through The EQL Directory, any person around the world can add their name and enter into a network, a creative network of professionals in the area. Do you see a lot more diversity now in the music business, whether it’s artist management or record labels or anywhere else? It’s definitely moving in the right direction. There’s still a lot of work to do. I mean, every time I read gender pay gap stats, as an industry we’re not at that point where we have enough representation, equal representation. There are positive changes that have happened. We’re talking about it, for a start. I would have never been asked this question a couple of years ago. And there are a lot of companies now who do take [this subject] seriously, and there’s a social responsibility and pressure to do that, which is a good thing. So, yes, it’s better, but it can be better still, and as an industry we have a lot more work to do.

“Telling artist stories and building fan bases – that’s central to the role Spotify can play.”

What are your hopes or ambitions as Head of Music at Spotify over the next few years? It’s very hard to make grand sweeping predictions when you’re working in tech, because it moves so quickly. That’s one that I always preface my answer to. That said, my hopes, and certainly the things that we’re going to focus on at Spotify UK, is really continuing to work with artists and their teams closely, really thinking about the meaningful part that Spotify plays in an artist’s journey, telling that story. Yes, playlists are important, but there’s also what I call ‘looking beyond the playlist’ – telling that story and building those fan bases. Those are the things that are really central to what we think about in terms of the music teams, and what role Spotify does play and can play in that. The other thing I would say that I’m personally very interested in, as well as my role of Head of Music – and it’s also something that’s very dear to the Spotify mission – is diversity and inclusion. Yes, everyone’s talking about it right now, and they should, but it’s something, for me as a woman and also a woman from an ethnic minority, I didn’t see a lot of. You asked earlier, well, ‘Who were your mentors and who did you look up to?’ I really didn’t see 46

You mentioned the term ‘social responsibility’. How important is it for a company, whether it’s Spotify or any large music company and its employees, to be aware of the social responsibility they have? It’s important. I mentioned earlier about understanding the level of impact that [we] have on an artist’s campaign, in terms of when the music teams at Spotify provide editorial and marketing support. It really does impact the campaign. We don’t take that lightly. We really don’t. We think about it deeply. In terms of the social responsibility side, it is important for all companies and for employees to think about how they approach their work, and how they can [do so] in a way that furthers causes, and what their role [in that] is. That’s something that we do at Spotify. I mentioned The EQL Directory and we’ve also got a partnership with a non-profit called Sound Girls. There are other things that we’re discussing internally as well, and that’s an ongoing process. It’s always a process of reviewing your place, the impact that you can make, and really looking at making meaningful contributions. Q

To our friends at 3beat Congratulations on 30 years in the business

From everyone at Universal Music

‘WHATEVER SUCCESS WE’VE HAD HAS BEEN THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS’ Pioneering UK independent label 3beat is celebrating 30 years in the business of breaking dance records and providing a launchpad for artists ranging from Skepta to Sigma…

onestly, no-one’s advocating getting expelled. A permanent exclusion isn’t necessarily a sure-footed step on the road to success, we get that. But, sometimes, in a roundabout way, it just sort of works out. It did for Jon Barlow, founder of 3beat Records, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. The label (which started life as a record shop) has, he admits, always been based and propelled “on a whim and a prayer rather than a strategy”. And its back-story begins with him being expelled from school “for being a bit of a rogue – persistently annoying rather than any one very bad thing”. The result, he explains, was that his mates were a year ahead of him at Liverpool University – and had got the lay of the land. “One mate in particular had done the halls of residence thing, and told me to skip that, he’d find a flat instead. So I followed him to Liverpool and moved into this lovely old five-bedroom house. “On the first day, the doorbell went, and it was these three Scouse girls saying, ‘We've heard you got three bedrooms to spare, can we come and live with you?’ Okay, sure, come in – I’m already loving Liverpool! “The next day, I was coming back from the shops and I could hear The La’s, There She Goes, coming out of the flat. “Obviously I thought someone was playing the record with the windows open, but I opened the front door, and there was the band, The La’s, in my front room, playing There She Goes. This is my second day in the city! “It turns out 48

they’d been booted out of their practice room and the bass player, John Power, was going out with one of the girls from the day before, so they’d turned up at ours. You couldn’t help but feel something was happening – a right place/right time kind of thing.” A certain serendipity did seem to be at play with, as Barlow recalls, “the whole acid house/rave/drug thing also hitting Liverpool at the same time, and everyone getting swept along with it, including us”. Part of that culture was digging out rare dance records that had been heard in clubs, which, for Barlow and his mates, meant “traveling to Eastern Bloc [Records] in Manchester every single week – and when we got there, half the people in the shop were people we knew from Liverpool”. Cue light bulb moment, or maybe fluorescent glow stick moment: the demand is in Liverpool, but the shop everyone loves is in Manchester, so… 3beat opened in 1989, when Barlow was still at University; when thoughts of 30 years later were nothing and plans for the next weekend were everything… Was the shop successful from day one? Nuts. So, so good, queues out the door. There was just this youthful vibrancy in the air and, honestly, if we’d only made it through the first 12 months it would have been worth it, because it was just such great fun. It was a place to hang out, a sort of community centre, as much as a record shop. How did the transition to being a record label come about? Well, that was pretty fortuitous as well, and, again, it was to do with it being a place to hang

INTERVIEW

Phil Southall (left), David Nicoll (second left) and Jon Barlow (right) in 1990. Second from right is Hywel Williams who, whilst never a partner, was instrumental in the evolution of EHDW DQG RYHUVDZ WKH ðUVW HYHU ODEHO deal, with FFFR

out. Young kids would come in the shop and say, ‘You guys seem to know what you’re doing, can I play you a record I’ve made, please?’ And could we help them release it. Through a conversation along those lines, the very first record that we ever put out on the label went to No.12 in the charts. What was that? New Atlantic, I Know – they were literally a couple of young lads who walked into the shop with this track that they’d made. And how did you know what you were doing? Well, obviously, you’re on the periphery of it yourself as a record store, so we had the basics – we pieced it together. Then we went to No. 12 and thought, God, we must be good! We didn’t have another hit for quite a while after that, of course. But even that’s a lesson that’s served me well: you’re gonna have hits and you’re gonna have periods without hits – definitely don’t think you’ve cracked it after one No. 12 single [laughs]. What was the ambition when you launched the label? I don’t think we had any proper vision or ambition, because we were just having such a good time. I think the biggest thing at the time was, This is a lot of fun, let's see where it takes us.

It was just wanting to be involved in music somehow. Of course, when you do something and it’s successful, that’s nice. But actually, when you do something and you see the joy that it brings, not just to the people who are loving the music, but to the artist that you’re working with, who was dreaming of getting that music out there, that’s special. I’m not saying we were purely philanthropic, of course not, but what was never lost on me, especially in the early days, was that were helping carve out careers for people who, I don’t want to sound rude, but who would otherwise have been painters and decorators, or just doing something they didn’t particularly love. That was actually quite spectacular. When did the label start to leapfrog the shop in terms or revenue and priority? Probably when we did our deal with Ministry of Sound. When was this? 2002 to 2007. How did that deal come about? We were on their radar, having the occasional hit, and there were a lot of records breaking outside of London that they were missing 49

happy birthday 3beat The Mersey3beatof today! Congratulations from all of us at Music House

AGNES ALEXANDRA STAN ANGEL CITY ANTON POWERS BERRI CAHILL CALLUM BEATTIE CHERYL DARIO G DUCK SAUCE FUSE ODG GEKO HIGH CONTRAST INNA JON BARLOW KUNGS MAJESTIC MARK MCCABE MARTIN JENSEN MARTIN SOLVEIG MIKE MAGO NEW ATLANTIC PEZZ PHILIP GEORGE PIANOMAN SAK NOEL SIGMA SKEPTA STYLOG TIM CONDRAN

INTERVIEW

out on. We were kind of the epicentre of stuff that was happening up in the North West, so we were a good fit. But Lohan [Presencer] was very honest; he didn’t want to fund a record label called 3beat without owning it, and I didn’t want to let him own 3beat just for the sake of a short-term deal. So we created a new label, Boss Records, and during the time we were with Ministry we had five or six very big records. Is that because of the extra clout of Ministry, or were you just getting better at what you were doing anyway? I think it was at least partly because I took myself out the shop, I brought a dedicated A&R person in, who’s still with me, Anton [Powers], and we actually started to run the record label as a full-time entity. And at this time your output is still mostly singles? It’s virtually all singles. In fact, if I just dial back a little bit, our first ever label deal was with [London Records imprint] FFRR, and we had six Top 10 singles when we were with them. That was a great era at London: Pete Tong, Tracy Bennett was in charge, Nick Raphael was my label manager, Christian Tattersfield was there.

Then Nick and Christian left, and I went with them. But what we did at NorthWestSide didn’t really work for us or them. They signed some pretty good things, they signed Jay Z(!), and they did Another Level, but they were never quite settled, and I was never quite settled, and that’s when we went to Ministry.

Callum Beattie

Fuse ODG

And what were the big records in that Ministry era? Mason Vs Princess Superstar [Perfect Exceeder], which went to No.3; Ian Carey, Get Shaky was a good one; Aaron Smith, Dancin’ was another. Why did that relationship end? Their business had changed. When we signed with Ministry, Lohan was just the MD of the recording division. He became Chairman of the group, and Ben [Cook] became head of A&R, and then when [Ben] decided to move on, that whole thing – I thought that was pretty unnecessary and pretty nasty, they [allegedly] demoted him to post boy [duties] when he said he wanted to leave [for Atlantic subsidiary label, Asylum, in 2007] – and then there was litigation. It became a not very fun place to be. It wasn’t a nice atmosphere to walk into. Our deal was coming to an end anyway, so it felt like the right time to go. Lohan and I had a dinner one night where he tried to say, ‘Please, just let the dust settle, it’ll come good.’ But, without sounding too romantic, it is a little bit like when you split up from a girlfriend; there’s no hard feelings, there doesn’t have to be any massive row – sometimes it’s just time to move on.

“We pick the people ﬁrst, then do the deal, rather than [focusing] on the money.”

Interesting times?! Oh yeah, the last of the rock n roll labels – behaviour wise. I was a 20 year-old kid who was winging it a bit, and I’m sitting round the table with some characters who were bloody good at what they did. Tracy gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever had on how to make a record. Again, FFRR wanted us because of the Northern thing, because there was a real distinction between what people were listening to down south and up north, and I don’t think Pete really got it, or liked it. Nick, on the other hand, was actually a DJ in Leeds, so he was playing the records we were making, and he was heading back to London saying, ‘We have to do it, these records are massive.’ More than once he had the courage to lock horns with the bosses on my behalf, at a time when I didn’t perhaps have the courage or confidence that he had. He forced quite a lot of our records to be up-streamed, and without his tenacity, some of the records we signed might not have gone on to get the full backing that they got.

And you fell into the arms of Universal! Were there other options though? Yeah, there were. But I’ve always prided myself on not being that guy that just prostitutes himself, going from one Chairman to the next, to the next, to the next. I’ve always wanted to be certain that when we decide to work with somebody, we pick the people first, and then do the deal based on that, rather than just trying to get a deal because of the money involved. I’ve always believed that success in this business is going to come through the relationships you have, which is why our decisions have always been based on people rather than deal points. Actually, the first deal we did with Universal was through All 51

COP CONGRATULATE YOU ALL AT 3 BEAT FOR 30 YEARS OF SMASHING THE HITS ! (and “Carrying on” with us for the last 10 years!)

Love from us all at Copmedia: Steve, Jonathan, Jackie, Jasmina & Adrian

www.copmedia.co.uk

INTERVIEW

Around the World. And then we just outgrew that situation – the amount of hits we were having and the amount of records we were releasing, it no longer felt like we were a satellite, but that we had to be plugged into Universal directly. How has the Universal experience been for you? Honestly, I adore working with Universal for a number of reasons. One is that the bosses have been consistent throughout my entire Geko time with them. Something that sometimes enables us to win deals is the fact that people know that I’m a permanent fixture, and I think that’s so important and something we benefit from at Universal. [Universal Music UK CEO & Chairman] David Joseph was there from the first deal I did and he’s still there now. We know each other, we’ve spent time together and he has this great balance of always being there with whatever support or advice we need, but also completely believing in us and trusting us. He’s got many skills, obviously, but one of M-22 the biggest is that he’s confident enough in the deals he does and in the people he does those deals with, so that he can let you get on with your job. Ministry micromanaged us to some extent, but at Universal, as long as we keep having good years, which so far we do, we have the freedom to do things without needing permission or approval every step of the way. The biggest parts of what we do are all in-house, operated from Liverpool: A&R, promotions, etc. In that way, Universal treat us just like one of their self-contained frontline labels. David and his team see us very much like Polydor, Virgin or Island. We have the same international path, we have the same [central Universal / Globe] people looking after our branding and our syncs, we have the same admin team looking after royalties and we have the additional weight of their digital sales team as well as our own. We have the benefits of an indie environment, that speed and nimbleness, but where necessary we also have that muscle. Certainly when we did the Sigma album, for example, which was a huge success, we leant heavily on the expertise of Universal to deliver that, because that’s the level they work at – TV advertising, product in supermarkets, things that an artist and album of that scale need.

You mentioned Sigma, what have been the key artists and projects you’d pick out from your time with Universal so far? The top three would have to be Sigma, Skepta and Fuse ODG. Every single one of those, we took to album stage. Fuse ODG’s album [T.I.N.A., 2014] went Silver and had five Top 10 singles. Sigma’s album [Life, 2015] is north of half a million units worldwide, two No.1 singles, BRIT nominations. And Skepta, that was the first artist deal that we did after we’d signed with Universal, a two album deal, and I remain incredibly good pals with him and his management. How did you come to sign him? Well, first up, he was – and obviously still is – one of the brightest and most forwardthinking artists that we’ve ever worked with. I’d heard his self-released record, Bad Boy, which I loved. And from day one, I never thought it was a London MC thing; I thought it was a nationwide thing. So I decided that the first time I wanted to see him doing a gig was outside of London. He was supporting N-Dubz, and I went to see him in Manchester and Newcastle. N-Dubz were huge, and these were their headline shows, but the biggest cheer was for when Skepta walked on stage. It’s easy to be big in your own postcode, but who’s got the talent and ambition to look further than that, to go nationwide, to maybe become big internationally? With Skepta, that was all there from the start. And within 10 minutes of meeting him I knew what he was capable of.

“David [Joseph] is conﬁdent enough in the deals he does to let you get on with your job.”

What was he like to work with, him and his team? It was honestly like working with the ultimate punk rocker. He was anarchic, he was militant, he was everything that you would want a pure artist to be. But that meant you could get a telephone call where everything that you’d decided the day before was out the window, and he was going to do something completely new and completely different. That was the brilliance of it and that's part of what’s made him as big as he is, for sure. It also makes for a roller-coaster journey for a record company! Did you always know he was going to move on? Yeah, we did. The good news is our relationship – our business 53

relationship – ended with the song That’s Not Me, which I think might be the most important song that we’ve ever put out, because it wasn’t just his breakthrough record, it was a really important record for British music. It was a landmark record for some very important years that followed. Skepta broke down barriers, and we were a part of that. Also, as well as the fond memories and a great friendship, there’s the fact that at least he didn’t go to another record label; he’s doing it on his own. How did the Sigma relationship come about? Well, Sigma was one of those lovely moments where it was almost textbook in a way. We got them to do a couple of remixes for us, and we just knew they were special producers. The remixes were brilliant, Skepta was one of them, Duck Sauce was another one. It was easy to position those remixes, because the tastemakers were already very into them. And then we met them and we just knew we could work with them. They didn't have a finished record when we signed them, they certainly didn't have Nobody to Love. They had a couple of drum and bass records that were good and, in a similar way to Skepta and Fuse ODG, being part of a scene was really important to them. I think again, slightly different maybe in terms of cultural

importance, but certainly in terms of playing a role in taking drum and bass to a mainstream audience... Rudimental obviously will be up there, but even if they’re not number one, they’re number two or three in terms of success. It’s funny actually, the Sigma story, because they were both in relationships and neither of them were the main breadwinners, and I think that they had decided they were going to quit. They just did a few more DJ sets, and made Nobody to Love for their own DJ sets. It was a record heavily sampling a record that had only just recently been released [Bound 2, by Kanye West], so they literally made it with no consideration whatsoever as whether they were making a hit record or not. They just made a record that they thought would work in their set. And like I say, I honestly think that if that record hadn’t taken off, they would have called it a day. But, yeah, thankfully, it was just one of those records that put a smile everyone’s face [the single went to No. 1 in the UK]. Bringing things up to date, what are the highlights of 2019? In business terms, we’ve signed our latest deal with Universal, a three-year deal, but with an automatic add-on of two years. We chose to do the longest deal that we’ve done with them, because we're now in a borderless industry and there are times when all of

CONGRATULATIONS TO JON AND ALL AT 3 BEAT -69 (4(A05. @,(9: Let’s break more artists together! your-army.com 3VUKVU ࠮ 3VZ (UNSLZ ࠮ :`KUL`

INTERVIEW

a sudden Britain feels quite small within the global market. We used to sit there in our release meetings thinking what have Ministry got, what have Positiva got; now we're competing against every single record out there. So, in actual fact, the thing that has possibly been curtailed is the one-off track; they've become harder to do because, rightfully so, artists are blocking up the airways again. And in that environment, we knew we needed to go on a journey of becoming a label where the vast majority of our output was artist-driven, whether that’s in terms of a front person or a dance producer – it’s about multiplerecord signings and multiple-hit artists. And we know the best way to go on that journey is with Universal. In terms of the roster [today], we’ve got M-22, Sigma, Geko, Callum Beattie. We've signed a wonderful new artist called Jetta, we’ve got High Contrast – we’ve actually got about 8-10 artists that are either in cycle of just starting on cycle.

Sigma

Skepta

What difference has streaming made to you as a label? Well, we had to relearn our trade. We had to re-educate ourselves. I think we’ve always been lucky in the music industry, to work in an environment that constantly changes, so it never gets dull. But certainly in the last few years, there’s been more change in a smaller period of time than at any point previously. It was streaming and the end of pre-orders, that was where we really needed to re-learn our trade. Because all of a sudden, instead of having eight or 10 weeks to campaign a record, to convince people it was worth backing before it came out, we’re now doing all of that [from the moment] the record has been released. Certainly if you’re starting a record from zero, or an artist from zero, and that's really difficult to do. But yeah, it’s wonderful, we’ve now got an infinite amount of playlists to put our records on, and we know full well our music is traveling globally, whereas previously you weren’t too sure about that. We will sometimes get 20 to 30 New Music Fridays, and that can be in Australia, the Philippines, Singapore, America... We still rely on the power of radio, and the audience that radio can give you is still important, but each radio station has 24 hours of programming, that's it; they can't change that. And each radio

station can only add X amount of new records every week; they can’t change that. In the streaming arena, there are no limitations. So our productivity is able to be a lot higher and our reach is a lot wider. Somebody told me the other day just a mad stat, based on the streaming numbers that we do: every second of every day, somewhere, someone in the world is listening to one of our records. I’ll take that! What are the most important lessons you’ve learned in the last 30 years? Always be nice to people – respect and decency, whether that’s the person on reception or whoever, anyone and everyone. Sir Lucian Grainge wasn’t always Sir Lucian Grainge, you know what I mean? That’s served me well over the years, because the most important elements of whatever success we’ve had has been through relationships. Sometimes that means rolling your sleeves up, or having people roll their sleeves up with you, or winning deals. I always say it’s the music industry, not the industry of music. If you can be respectful about the fact that you're dealing with people, you’re dealing with artists, and if you can be kind and generous about that, that will stand you in good stead.

“Skepta is the ultimate punk rocker – anarchic, militant, everything you want a pure artist to be.”

What’s been the highlight across the three decades? I’m a bit of a festival-head, I still like my lost weekends in the middle of a field. And one of the great joys is seeing a massive crowd reacting to one of your records, or seeing the development of an act to the point where they claim a rightful place on a big stage in a big field. Looking forward, what’s exciting you about prospects for 3beat over the next few years? I tell you one thing, as excited as I am about artist development, I’m equally excited about the next wave of employees I’m going to develop and work with, some of whom I haven’t even met yet. We’re going to be employing sub-25 and even sub-21-year-olds. I use too many football analogies, but there’s that one about how you can’t win anything with kids. Well we know that’s not true, you can win everything with kids. And the future of 3beat isn’t just about the next generation of artists, it’s about the next generation of employees. Q 55

IT’S NOT HARD TO SEE WHY ARTISTS WANT TO CONTROL THEIR OWN STORIES Superstars have faced criticism in some quarters for editing their own media. Rhian Jones says they’re responding smartly to unique modern pressures... Just imagine, for a second, that the ins and outs of your messy period of transition from child to teen to adulthood were made public for the world to see. Fashion choices, unrefined opinions, illicit romances and embarrassing behaviour – all laid bare to be judged, criticised and laughed at, mostly by people who are further along in their evolution as human beings, and therefore have had more time to learn about life. It would be pretty tough to take, wouldn’t it? Perhaps you’d adopt a devilmay-care attitude and give ‘the haters’ even more fodder to entertain themselves with. Or maybe you’d retreat from the spotlight to try and work out what you’d done to deserve such fierce judgement. That’s the reality of a young pop superstar today. Their lives are studied feverishly under a forensic microscope. When news hit of Miley Cyrus splitting with Liam Hemsworth, reports were quick to accuse her of being the cause of the breakdown by cheating. This accusation contained not an ounce of truth, she wrote in a mature social media post – a post which, by its very existence, shed light on the ridiculous levels of justification about personal choices demanded by a life in the limelight. “I can accept that the life I’ve chosen means I must live completely open and transparent with my fans who I love, and the public, 100% of the time. What I cannot accept is being told I’m lying to cover up a crime I haven’t committed. I have nothing to hide.” Detailing her teen antics – the wrecking ball, a penis cake, experimentations with drugs and transgressions in past relationships – she concluded: “I’ve learned from every experience in my life. I’m not perfect, I don’t want to be, it’s boring. I’ve grown up in front of you, but the 56

“It’s not surprising that artists are taking steps to construct tighter boundaries.”

bottom line is, I HAVE GROWN UP.” An interview with Taylor Swift landed a day later in The Guardian, where the star discussed the reason behind her reluctance to talk politics during the 2016 US presidential election. It transpires it was due to dealing with personal challenges, as well as mass public scrutiny following spats with Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj and Kanye West, criticism over her relationship with actor Tom Hiddleston and a court case for a sexual assault claim. It’s not hard to imagine why Swift found it impossible to find her voice, but it is hard to understand why the fact she hadn’t was a subject of public discourse. Justin Bieber has spoken to NME of being held to a “different standard” than other 19-yearolds, while facing intense media scrutiny as a teenager. He pointed to a tendency for headlines

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to knock stars when they’re down – as can be seen in the Amy Winehouse documentary, and the building up and slamming down of Jade Goody, who found herself in the middle of a global racism row that resulted in a completely disproportionate amount of tabloid flagellation (as the recent Channel 4 documentaries show). Yes, fame and fortune gives as well as takes and the road to stardom has always been a very public footpath. The very existence of fame is said to be due to an evolutionary trait, which is that, as humans, it makes sense to pay attention to people at the top of a hierarchy so as to learn the behaviours and achievements of something we aspire to be. Gossip, some suggest, started as a protection mechanism to weed out the selfish people in a tribe who might put the others in danger. But there’s a deeper undercurrent going on here, a fierce lack of understanding and empathy to the fact that our pop stars are, in actual fact, complex human beings who might be dealing with some sort of trauma and are most definitely going to make a few mistakes. And let’s not forget social media, which, as pointed out by Tap exec Hannah Neaves in this issue [page 64], is particularly hard on female artists. “Social media has created massive opportunities but also leaves you wide open for criticism,” she says. “Constant pressure, constant judgement. The need to be on point at all times. Your Instagram account is your publicity machine and you can’t put a foot wrong. I have seen such horrendous trolling and the effect it has on a young woman’s confidence and self esteem can be incredibly destructive.” Which is perhaps why it’s not surprising that artists like Swift, who has disabled the comments function on her Instagram, are taking steps to construct a tighter boundary around their public image. Beyoncé is famously a master at doing just so — instead of subjecting herself to the decisions of click-bait loving advertising (and perhaps editorial) interests, she edited last year’s iconic Vogue September issue herself, controlling how an interview she did with a journalist was presented – a discussion which covered important issues like race, body image and pregnancy. Beyoncé also wrote, directed and executive produced the documentary for her own Super Bowl performance. Taylor Swift did something similar with Elle, writing a frank and self-aware article on the 30 lessons she’d learned

Taylor Swift recently penned a feature on turning 30 for Elle

“There is a shift away from a media landscape lacking in empathy.”

before turning 30, while Florence Welch chose to share her battle with an eating disorder and recovery in a personal essay for Vogue. Instead of being tantamount to censorship (amongst criticisms levelled at Beyoncé’s Vogue issue), are these perhaps signs of a long awaited shift in power away from a media landscape often lacking in empathy and understanding? Media is rightfully there to hold power to account. But perhaps it has been taking that role a bit too seriously when it comes to young musical talents, who often find themselves held up as aspirational figures, but are, in reality, just as gloriously flawed as the rest of us. Q 57

INTERVIEW

‘IT’S NOT ABOUT FINANCIAL GAIN. IT’S NOT ABOUT CHART POSITIONS. IT’S ABOUT HELPING THE ARTIST TO REACH THEIR GOALS, WHATEVER THEY MAY BE’ Andy Musgrave runs London-based management and artist development firm Supernature, with a roster including West London-born hip-hop star AJ Tracey. Here, Musgrave tells MBUK about how he got started in music and management and shares his views on independence...

ndy Musgrave is pouring coffee, mid-morning in late August. “I was working till about 3am, so I’m a little bit tired,” he tells Music Business UK. He’s working late, he says, because the last couple of weeks of August are “kind of the most hectic time of the year”. With the festival season winding down, and our interview taking place just two days after AJ Tracey’s back-to-back Reading and Leeds main stage performances, you might expect the manager of one of the UK’s biggest rising stars to be giving himself a bit of a break. But while others are sleeping, Musgrave is hard at work behind the scenes at Supernature, his artist management and artist development business under which he manages Tracey, plus Manchester producer and artist Murlo, Lil Yachty producer MISOGI and composer Sega Bodega. And Musgrave is determined not to lose the summer’s momentum. “I’m a real believer in kicking off autumn with some sort of direction,” he explains. “I use August as preparation. When most people are probably off on holiday, I’m just here pulling my hair out trying to get everything in order.” Musgrave’s methodology is based on team Supernature’s acute awareness of seasonal public perception in the modern age. “There are two points of the year where the public realign and say, ‘Right, cool, I’m going to get back to work.’ And that’s early January and straight after summer,” he observes. “People usually feel a bit guilty about overeating, or overdrinking, at Christmas, and [then also] not doing much work in the summer. That makes them more receptive [following these periods] when you’re announcing stuff and talking about what you’re doing as an artist. I like to capitalise on those moments.” The results of Musgrave, AJ Tracey and Supernature’s collective work ethic over the past few years are clear to see. AJ Tracey’s self-

titled debut album hit No.3 in the UK Album Chart in February, with standout single Ladbroke Grove – a UK garage track, no less – hitting No.4 in the Official UK Singles Chart with over half a million sales equivalents to date. This success has been achieved completely independently, bar a distribution deal with ADA. “Do you think a record label would’ve allowed us to put that amount of work into a UK garage record?” asks Musgrave of Ladbroke Grove. “It never would have happened.” Musgrave’s music career started as a hobbyist, DJ’ing and collecting garage records in the late nineties. He also insists that he’s “never had a proper job in music”. “I mean it,” he emphasises. “No-one’s ever given me a job; I’ve never been employed. I got into music as a young child and around the age of 11 or 12, I would just start hearing songs I liked on the radio and would go and buy cassettes at the weekend. “I remember listening to the radio and hearing this really repetitive, monotonous dance record on the radio. It was Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust [1998] and I hated it; I couldn’t stand it.” Around this time, an older cousin had become a big fan of French dance and hip-hop and taught Musgrave about those music scenes. As a result, he was introduced to artists like Cassius and DJ Alex Gopher – and soon changed his mind on Stardust. “Once I understood the scene that this record had come from, I suddenly really appreciated it,” says Musgrave. “Now it’s probably my favorite record of all time. It was an early lesson for me in how the context of music can change your appreciation of it.” Musgrave’s interest in dance music grew and he started collecting records and DJ’ing in the town he lived in, Worcester. “I used to go and DJ for 30 quid in little wine bars on a Sunday night, just so I could play my house records on a slightly bigger sound system than I had at home,” he remembers.

“No-one’s ever given me a job; I’ve never been employed.”

He was training in visual art at the same time, and then went to study graphic design in Bristol in around 2003. After he finished his course he started working at an architect’s firm, designing brochures, before putting on his own events under the brand of Crazylegs – which also became the name of his first record label. About seven years ago, Musgrave took on Rinse FM founder DJ Slimzee as his first management client outside the work he was doing with Crazylegs. Slimzee, says Musgrave, is “arguably the man that united grime as a sound”. Since then, Musgrave has built Supernature into a “holistic” artist development business, not only offering management, but also creative, marketing and label services. He’s become a passionate advocate for artists choosing an independent route to market. He argues that “streaming has created the potential for a healthy career” for any musician who has the patience required. “In the old days you were either a star or you were unknown,” he says. “Now there’s a huge healthy middle tier of artists who earn £50,000 or maybe even £100,000 a year from doing a couple of low-level tours, having all of their music independently delivered to streaming, living a happy creative life. Not megastars, but also not having to work a day job. “I want the message out there. I want people to know that it’s totally doable if you’ve got that tenacity and if you can just find the selfbelief as a new artist…”

While a lot of the time I feel like I’m sometimes at a disadvantage because I have not worked in music business environments, at the same time I wouldn’t change it for the world. My approach to this is, and I feel like this is how all managers should approach their work, it should always be absolutely 100% geared towards achieving the goals of the artist. A lot of the time [in the wider business] it isn’t. Are you talking about artist management, the label side or something else? Oh even more so from a label side. Remember, when you boil it down, a label is just there to generate money from a set of rights they’ve acquired. A label only has one avenue of earning money from an artist so it’s going to squeeze every penny out of that. It’s going to squeeze the life out of it. The old model of separating all of these revenue streams and having management [operating independently] from these different parts of the business is outdated. You really need someone, I don’t know if you would even call it a manager or a label, but you need [one] entity that has a holistic input over the whole thing. That’s how I’m building my business. I started Supernature as a management company, but I very quickly decided to build other functionality into it. We are effectively a distributor, so we can deliver the full service of a record label for our artists in-house without having to go out there and work out who’s the best partner. You’re never going to get that long term strategic mindset from a partner who only has a vested interest in the artist for a short period of time. Management, for me, is open ended. If I do a good job I’m here for their whole career. So I’m out to make sure that there’s longevity. That’s so crucial.

“The old model of separating an artist’s revenue streams is outdated.”

Where did you get your philosophy about artist management from? Did you have any mentoring or did you see the way anybody else was operating? Philosophy? Jesus. I’ve got no idea how my philosophy came about. I never had any formal training and the fact that I’ve never worked in a formal music business environment meant that I never picked up any bad habits. I never had any ideology forced on me; I actually consider myself to be quite non-business minded. I’m very artistically-driven and that that is why I have such a good relationship with the artists that I work with. I’m able to understand what they’re trying to achieve in a way that a lot of the music business people just can’t. I’m not here to take a piece of art and figure out how to sell it. I’m here to understand who the artist is and what they want to achieve in their life, and help them to strategize getting to that point. What does success look like to you? It’s not about financial gain, it’s not about chart positions. For me it’s about helping the artist to reach their goals, whatever they may be. If that is financial gain, cool we’ll go for that, but in a lot of cases I have artists whose dream is to be able to sit at home and create art – to live a comfortable, humble life and just be a working artist. That’s some people’s goal and if I really appreciate what that person is putting into the world then I’m on board. I don’t care if it’s going to pay me well or not. 60

How did you meet and start working with AJ? I found him through Murlo. I was already aware of him because I was generally aware of the grime scene that was bubbling up at that point. There were a lot of MCs on radio and keeping busy, Mez, Capo, all of The Square lot and Novelist. I was aware of AJ, but I hadn’t seen anything from him that made me think he was [extra-special] at that point. I wasn’t aware enough. Then one day Murlo actually said to me, ‘I sent some beats to that AJ Tracey.’ I was like, ‘Really?’ Because Chris [Pell aka Murlo] is notoriously selective about who he wants to work with. Chris said to go check out Wifey Riddim on his SoundCloud. That song showed me AJ’s ambition. It showed me his willingness to think outside the box a little bit. I got in touch and we met up in Brixton. We went and got some Caribbean food, sat outside McDonald’s and chatted about ideas and went from there, really. I’ve never started managing anyone with a formal, ‘Let’s sign [this contract] and go’. It was more of, ‘I’m here to help. Let’s

INTERVIEW

Credit: Ashley Verse

AJ Tracey’s Ladbroke Grove has racked up more than half a million sales equivalents

move forward and anything you need help with, I’m here.’ Quite quickly we went to meet Rebecca [Prochnik, Earth Agency] who was already doing live bookings for Slimzee and Murlo for me at that point. During that meeting, Rebecca was keen to take AJ on and she said to me, ‘Are you going to be managing him?’ And AJ was like, ‘Are you?’ And that was basically it. Rebecca very quickly started getting the shows in and we were working. What was it like running an independent campaign like the one around AJ Tracey’s album? It was an insane amount of work. It was terrifying, incredibly high pressure. I didn’t sleep a lot for three to four months. October/ November last year was a very intense period of time. And then the opening weeks of 2019, where we were quickly getting the last bits delivered, yeah, it’s quite a process. You come to understand why so many people [are employed] at labels when you realize how many people’s jobs you’re doing as an individual. I learned a lot from it. I always say this, but I’d much rather the artist was able to make the decision and be wrong, than [for them] to have no say and lose control of their own ship. There were points in the campaign where AJ on a whim decided, ‘I want to do this

at this point.’ Unless I think it’s a really bad idea I’ll accommodate that. Sometimes it’ll work and sometimes it won’t but I’d much rather be in a position of being able to accommodate those things than being in a label deal where we don’t get a say. Back to what I said before, the artist’s happiness is the most important thing. Why did you decide to go with ADA as a distribution partner? I had got to know Howard [Corner] from ADA quite well over the month before that. Like a lot of people, he’d shown interest in AJ quite early, but he was never too pushy with it. He was always just cool and very forthcoming with help and information, and I just liked him. It just felt like the natural next step. It was also good to know that they’d just done Stormzy's album to such a high standard as well. [ADA] handle the sales conversations, do the delivery and product stuff. But the marketing and the strategy, that’s all the result of conversations between me and AJ – and Howard’s opinion on that is valuable as well. I chat with Howard a lot; it’s useful having him on our side, because he can tell me best practices… and then we can decide whether we want to do the best practice or not! And he really knows how the industry works. Yeah, ADA are brilliant. 61

Watching interviews with AJ, it seems like he has a very clear vision of how he wants to run his business, and where he’d like to end up. He’s quite a spontaneous character. If you ask him what he wants to do or how he wants to execute something, it can change from one day to the next. But I came to accept that’s who he is as an artist and that he connects with people brilliantly; the unpredictable nature of what he does musically is one of his biggest assets. It keeps people guessing. I don’t think you’d be allowed to be quite so spontaneous if you’re a signed artist. You’d be pushed down a route of trying to fall into a certain sound or to be putting records out that sound like the last one. I’m a big believer in consistency in art. Both visually, musically, a consistent message is really important, but I came to learn with AJ that the consistency doesn’t have to be in the genre or a visual style. Consistency can be in other areas. It can be in the message of the artist: what they say, what they communicate, what they stand for. That’s an important thing for me to always remember with AJ: his character really drives this whole thing. So if he wants to experiment and put out a UK garage record in 2019, then I need to back that because, as we’ve seen this year, anything can happen. What did you think when you first heard Ladbroke Grove? 62

MISOGI

I loved the bravery of it. I loved what it stood for and I loved the idea of going all-in on a single campaign for a UK garage record in 2019 because UK garage is my music. That’s what I love and always have done. It’s so, so rewarding to be in this situation where we have contributed a lot to renewed interest in this genre in 2019. I think we’re going to see a few more artists put garage records out this year and something bigger could happen [as a result]. What does AJ’s global potential look like from your perspective? How are US audiences and the US industry reacting to the music he makes? They like him. They like who he is; they like his character. We’ve never tried to rush it over there. We’ve always been present, we’ve always been working with American artists, we’ve obviously got records with people like Jay Critch, Denzel Curry and Clams Casino. We’ve collaborated in a very authentic way with various American artists. AJ certainly exists out there at a cult level. A lot of your more underground hip-hop heads out there know exactly who he is and are fans of him. And that’s the best position, I believe, to be in. I would never want to be introduced to America via a big radio campaign or anything like that. I want to come in at ground level and build upwards, build through word of mouth. It’s just going to be a long process.

Credit: Prexactly

Sega Bodega

INTERVIEW

What do you think about the general state of rap in the UK? How strong is it, where it’s going, how you see it developing? It’s amazing. It’s clearly the most important kind of cultural movement of the last few years. Black music is right at the forefront [today] and I don’t think it’s a phase; it’s here to stay in the same way that it happened in America however many decades ago. I believe that black music is finally embedding itself in British culture and it’s amazing to see. It’s not just that rap/hip-hop/grime or whatever artists are [becoming] successful, it’s also the fact that young solo creators are able to go from being unknown to having a track on GRM [Daily], have a million streams and end up in the UK charts. That’s testament to what streaming has done for the music industry. Artists can release something via Distro Kid or CD Baby, they don’t even need a proper distro deal, let alone a record label. But people can genuinely create independent success just by having a talent and working hard. You and AJ Tracey are clearly both fiercely independent. Would you ever consider entering into a record label deal in the future? It’s never a closed door. I’m always having conversations. There’s some great people heading up certain labels. I’m just quite aware that the major label model is not really built for the way the music industry is today. They’re scrambling to rearrange their services and make it more artist-friendly out of necessity, but really I believe that it’s the newer companies like Kobalt, Ditto etc., it’s these companies that have been founded in the streaming era, or come to prominence in the streaming era, that are going to be the best positioned to service the artists of today, because they don’t carry the weight of decades of the old music industry. There are ideologies that still drive the major labels that, in my opinion, don’t fit very harmoniously with the idea of artistic independence. They’re still based on the model of purchasing rights, buying rights from an artist – not just the rights of material that’s been recorded but buying all the rights of that artist, so anything they record is automatically owned by the label. [That approach] just doesn’t work anymore, it’s not necessary. If we were to do a record deal it would have to be something much more modern. We would not be selling our recording rights, we would be licensing selected recordings for a term. And that may or may not even be in the best interests of the label [in question]. The fact is that with AJ we’ve managed to build his business to a point where we can see all the benefits of doing this yourself first-hand. We can see the monthly royalty statement and we can do the math, so we can say, ‘Hang on, the amount

of money we were being offered six months ago we’re now turning over in the space of two, three months.’ So it just gives you the sense of like, let’s hold out, let’s keep going. Because all the things that we thought we couldn’t do, all we did is exercise patience and found out we were able to do them. What effect did that ‘Alex from Glasto’ viral video have for AJ Tracey’s streaming numbers? It was great. It was at a point where Ladbroke Grove was already in a hard upward spike and that just amplified everything. You can literally see the spike in our streaming numbers on the day it happened; it moved our base level daily streams up a significant amount. It’s such a funny thing because actually AJ was meant to be there that day with Dave. We had done two days at Glasto. We weren’t staying over, we were driving there and back. We’d gone Friday and we’d come and done Ladbroke Grove on stage with Jorja, we’d come back on the Saturday, we’d done our own set on Saturday evening. We had promised Dave’s team that we would come back on Sunday and come and do Thiago Silva on stage with Dave. AJ had lost his voice, essentially, after the Saturday night and on the way back he was like, ‘You know, I don’t think I can go tomorrow.’ And I was like, ‘Oh come on. It’s going to be such a moment.’ But he didn’t do it in the end and, yeah, that happened. So, no regrets! If I’d had my way, he would have performed with Dave. So that’s definitely a little ‘I told you so’ moment between AJ and I!

“We’ve built AJ’s business to where we can see the beneﬁts of doing things ﬁrst-hand.”

Do videos from Glastonbury or other festivals improve visibility generally? Do you see the spike from those, too? Massively, yeah. All it takes is a good 30 second video to go online. It’s driven by the internet, it’s not really driven by the audience there, but if you can get a good clip of a song going off at a festival it can go mad. The view counts we’ve been getting on videos from festivals this year have been crazy. We used to put stuff on Facebook and you might get a thousand Likes if you’re lucky. We’ve been putting stuff up now and it’s getting 30, 40 thousand Likes and a few million views, just a clip of AJ on stage at a festival. What was the significance of Stormzy headlining Glastonbury? It’s enormous. Stormzy has been kicking doors open for all of us for years. You could argue that he’s played a big part in creating this moment for everybody. He’s such an important cultural figure. It’s hard to even call him a musician at this point because he’s so much more, but the way that middle England has embraced Stormzy is incredible and it’s a testament to his message and his ambition, his vision, his work rate. The way that he’s been embraced just means that anybody from a similar background or with a similar story can [aspire to reach] that level as well. Q 63

KEY SONGS IN THE LIFE OF…

Mark Mitchell The Parlophone co-President presents a song-driven journey through a career that’s taken him from an indier-than-thou record store in Birmingham to the hot seat of one of the most famous labels in the world…

ark Mitchell is one of the reasons Warner can get away with calling itself ‘the biggest independent’. And that description is the reason he was persuaded to join Warner in the first place. It’s a virtuous and self-fulfilling circle. Mitchell is a major label exec who truly loves music, respects artists and values cachet more than cash – but is very much in the business of having hits. It was the company’s now-global CEO of Recorded Music, Max Lousada, who persuaded Mitchell to join him at Atlantic, in 2009, assuring him that the major prioritised and championed artists as fiercely as any indie.

PLAYLIST

Having worked on records by artists such as Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, James Blunt, Jess Glynne and Clean Bandit, last year saw Mitchell become co-President, alongside Nick Burgess, of Parlophone: a label with an unparalleled history of combining the commercial with the credible, often in the same package – once, of course, in the perfect package. Mitchell’s ‘Key Songs’ choices below, he explains, “are some of my favourite tracks of all time, of course, but more importantly they are pivotal songs in my career, they’re part of how I got here”. The majority of them also reflect that leftfield/mainstream balance that defines Parlophone, moments when underground movements don’t just bubble up to the surface, but take off into the stratosphere. And they are all linked by the power of a song to affect change, culturally or personally – or, sometimes, simply, to startle. 1) Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit (1991) This is actually a double, but they both put the same point across. In 1991 I was working in an independent record shop in Birmingham called Plastic Factory and part of my role was to import all the US punk stuff, which I loved, that was my thing. There were two records that year, from that genre, which were just huge in the shop. One was an album by Slint called Spiderland, on Touch and Go, a tiny little indie label.

It landed in the shop, I put it on, and it sounded like nothing else. It was the kind of record where every time we played it, we’d sell a copy. I remember one day, I phoned up SRD, the distributors: 10 more copies please. And the guy said, ‘What are you doing?! You’re selling more than the Rough Trade shop!’ That really taught me the power and impact of people just hearing something and reacting to it. Later that year, we all trooped off to Reading Festival and about half way up the bill on the Friday, about two or three in the afternoon, were Nirvana.

Two weeks later, there was an import CD available, a radio promo thing from Geffen – so it was £10 or something, which meant there was no way you could sell it back in those days. We got five copies in the shop and sold them all that day. And, again, we played it in the shop and everyone went, ‘That’s it, that’s that song,’ and they’d immediately buy it. That was Smells Like Teen Spirit, of course, and as much as that might be the most obvious choice, that track, from being played at Reading, just changed everything. 2) The Dust Brothers, Dust Up Beats (1994) In 1994 I was working at RTM, which was the arse end of Rough Trade – distribution – doing telesales, and one of the labels that went through Rough Trade was JBO, Junior Boys Own. One day this track came in, it was only their second release, I think, by this act called The Dust Brothers, later to become the Chemical Brothers. It was a track called Dust Up Beats and it was pretty much the first punk dance record. It was a real kitchen sink track, with this massive beat. We sold loads of it. At the time they were doing a residency at what would become the Heavenly Social, in a tiny little dive bar in Great Portland Street, and we always used to go there, on a Sunday night, and get completely… it was a hedonistic time.

“They are all pivotal songs in my career, they’re part of how I got here.” I was well aware of Nirvana from their Sub Pop days. By this time they’d signed to Geffen but they hadn’t released Nevermind. Half way through the set, they started playing this song, and a quarter of the way in, I looked around, and everyone was just losing their shit. And none of us had heard it before. Three days later, someone walked in and said, ‘Have you got that song Nirvana played at Reading?’ And I was like, ‘You mean half way through the set, right?’ That Song! But of course I had to say, ‘No, sorry, I don’t actually think it’s even been released.’

And the Dust Brothers were just these two kind of speccy, very normal but very smart lads who played Curtis Mayfield next to Aphex Twin next to whatever. It was an amazing time. 3) The Band and The Staples Singers, The Weight (1976) In 2001 I was at Vital Distribution, now [PIAS], which had several labels under its umbrella, one of which was Southpaw, a label run by John Niven, who of course went on to write Kill Your Friends. We signed Mogwai and a bunch of other stuff. They were pretty hedonistic times as well actually, as you can imagine. One day, after a BRITs, there was no way we were going into work, so I went round to John’s, incredibly hungover, and he put on The Last Waltz, the concert/documentary about The Band. Obviously I knew who The Band were, but I’d never seen the film. I remember sitting there absolutely openmouthed, agog at Robbie Robertson’s guitar playing and the pure musicality of these guys. I think it was filmed in late 1976, at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, and then in early 1978 that was where the Sex Pistols played their last gig. It’s funny to think how far apart but how close together those two events were. Ironically, because the film is very much a whole concert, the track I’d pick out is when they cut away to a sound stage in Hollywood, where The Band play with The Staple Singers and they do a version of The Weight. It is just the most pure and perfect soulful, bluesy, gospel thing of beauty. The sound that comes from Pop Staples is biblical. I will still sometimes sit an artist down and play them that, because it is so pure, it’s magical.

was an appetite for it, the pre-orders were very healthy. On the Tuesday morning I rang the OCC to get the midweeks, as you used to have to do in those days, and Nadia, who was there at the time, just said, very matter of fact, ‘Yeah, you’re number one.’ Wait, what? It’s number one?! She was like, ‘It was always going to be number one, you knew that, right?’ It was one of those moments, that you still get now, where you have total belief, but you somehow, simultaneously, don’t actually believe it will happen. I remember I was walking to the Domino office and I didn’t really know what to do. So I rang Laurence, not realising he was in New York, because it was the week after the release of the second Franz Ferdinand album, which had gone Top 10 in pretty much every territory in the world. He’d just got back into his hotel room having been out celebrating with the band. I told him the news, and he said, ‘Well I suppose I’ll have to go and drink another bottle of Champagne then!’ Four or five months later the album came out, 360,000 units week one, national news. That was probably my first experience of being in the eye of the storm – being part of a moment everyone was talking about.

“That was probably my ﬁrst experience of being in the eye of the storm.”

4) Arctic Monkeys, Fake Tales Of San Francisco (2005) By 2005 I was working with various independent labels, helping out mates as much as anything, and one of them was Laurence [Bell], at Domino, who had asked 66

me to work on Franz Ferdinand. I’d heard Take Me Out and thought, Yep, this is going somewhere. But the track I’m going to pick is actually by the Arctic Monkeys, Fake Tales Of San Francisco, which was actually their first single [independently released] and is my favourite track of theirs. Laurence had signed them, there was a huge buzz, everyone had heard the tracks, because they were all available via file sharing in those days. The first Domino single was I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor. We knew it was going to do something, we knew there

5) Jay-Z, Empire State of Mind (2009) I never really wanted to work for a major, but I met Max [Lousada], who I kind of knew from his independent days, who asked me to come to Atlantic. I had this incorrect idea that the majors were more driven by commerciality than creativity. In the independent sector it was all about supporting whatever the artist wanted to do, and I thought the majors would be very different. I always remember Max saying, ‘No, this will work, because we’re basically a big indie.’ I was sat in his office, I looked round and said, ‘I don’t think you’ve been to many independent labels recently!’ But, after a while, I knew what he meant, because the culture and the value

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system was, and is, very similar to what I experienced in the independent sector. One of the first records he gave me to work was Jay Z’s Blueprint 3 album. I got a full copy a week before release, and I remember hearing Empire State of Mind and thinking, this is going to change everything. It was one of those songs, regardless of genre, that was just going to cross over. The day the album came out, by 11 o’clock that morning, Empire State of Mind was No. 1 on iTunes; it hadn’t even had a radio play. It was just that ferocious and that urgent. It was the kind of track where, for the next week, every person you met, the first thing they’d say was, Have you heard it?

authentic from the artist, it can work. And, going back to the major vs. indie thing, that was a great example of a major supporting and backing an artist 100% when they wanted to take a radical left turn.

6) Plan B, Ill Manors (2012) In 2012 I was working with Ben Drew / Plan B and we’d had massive success with the Defamation of Strickland Banks album. Ben’s probably one of my favourite artists that I’ve worked with – but certainly not the easiest. The great thing about working with him is that he has a vision, not only for the music, but the artwork, the videos, the complete package, so ultimately what people saw and heard was totally authentic and always came from him. And it was always over budget and always late – but it was always real quality. So, he was coming off the back of 1.3 million albums, BRIT Awards, the lot, and I remember he came in with a very cheeky grin and said, ‘I want to make a record that’s going to scare the mums who bought Strickland Banks in Tesco.’ And then the first track I heard was Ill Manors, which certainly was pretty scary. Lyrically it was massively ahead of its time – including probably the first mention of Boris Johnson in a track, well before Stormzy! I remember thinking, Not only will this scare the Tesco mums, I don’t even know if it’ll make it onto radio. Apart from

7) Hamzaa, Hard To Love (2019) We signed Hamzaa [to Parlophone] on her 19th birthday. I saw her on Later… and I thought how authentic her voice was, but what I didn’t realise was just how free she was. When she sings, she can go anywhere. Very seldom do you get an artist who you can put in pretty much any environment, just with a piano or with an entire band, and you have total confidence that they’re going to smash it. Hamzaa is one of those artists. She’s a huge priority for us, and we’ve done a lot of work this year, sending her around the world, playing introductory gigs, and every time she does it, the next day I get those calls: ‘Oh my God, she’s so special.’ Everyone who’s seen her absolutely loves her, but we need to get that base wider before we go for a big radio push. For instance, we’ve just put out a five-track EP, none of which we’re particularly pushing to radio, nothing’s particularly a single, this is more to give people just a taste of who she is before we start on the more traditional, commercial route of radio- and streaming-led tracks. Debut album… probably some point next year. But right now it’s about getting people to hear her, getting people to see her live, and getting people to realise just how free and how great she is. The track I want to pick is called Hard To Love, there’s an incredible performance of it on YouTube that everyone should check out. You know what, it’s kind of similar to The Weight, with The Band and The Staples Singes, you see this performance and she’s just free. She’s one of those artists where when you see them perform, you know that nothing else matters to them. Q

“Every time she plays, the next day I get these calls: Oh my God, she’s so special.” anything else it was such a departure, so hard, so visceral. I was incredibly impressed with what a brave move it was to… not exactly turn his back on commercial success, because he certainly wanted it to be successful, but to approach it in a completely different way, on his own terms. It came out, Radio 1 were hugely supportive and it was a Top 10 hit. That was a moment that taught me that you can take risks, as long as you present it well and with confidence, and as long as it’s

INTERVIEW

‘WE ARE WORKING AT A GRASSROOTS LEVEL, DEVELOPING ARTIST STORIES FROM DAY ONE’ With impressive experience from major labels like Mercury, Polydor and Atlantic, last year Hannah Neaves joined Tap Management ahead of the company’s launch of its own record label. As she explains, her love of artist development is once again being nourished...

ost music industry executives claim to have accidentally fallen into the business, following a path laid out for them by fate alone. Not Hannah Neaves. When asked to pick two possible future career choices at school at the tender age of 12, she plumped for Product Manager at a major label (the other choice was youth worker). That’s exactly what she ended up doing some years later at Mercury, working on the international side of Rihanna’s evolution from a “shy teenager” into the pop powerhouse that she is today. Before we go into the steps that came before and after, how did a 12-year-old come to discover the existence of that very specific role? “I have a jazz-obsessed father so I was put into clarinet and saxophone lessons when I was about eight and got quite advanced with that. I realised as I got a bit older that I loved playing music but didn’t want to be a performer and started investigating the business side,” Neaves, who is now Head of Marketing and Artist Development at Tap, answers. “Then I met this really glamorous blonde woman at a dinner party when I was about 11, who was a PA to Maurice 'Obie' Oberstein – an industry legend [who ran CBS UK and PolyGram]. She said, ‘If you don’t want to perform, why don’t you do the business side?’ She sent me a leaflet about courses that you could do in the music industry and that’s when I decided.” Neaves spent her early teenage years “crying to Alanis Morissette” before deciding to allow some joy into her life, becoming a raver thanks to The Prodigy (her first ever gig) and falling for Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaataa and, amongst other jazz artists her dad was into, Herbie Hancock. While studying at the University of Westminster, she did a work placement at EMI Records in marketing, which is where her career started, upon graduating, at the turn of the millennium as a Marketing Assistant. EMI had an eclectic roster of artists including Robbie Williams, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Hot Chip, LCD Soundsystem and the Positiva singles, as well as cool indie artists under Heavenly Records, like Doves and The Vines. Thanks to a department full of “proper

music nerds”, Neaves absorbed a level of attention to detail, which stood her in good stead for the next step of her career (and realisation of a childhood dream) as Product Manager at Mercury. While there, as well as learning how to live up to the high standards of her “tough” boss Jason Iley (who had a point to prove as the new label head), she cut her teeth in the urban world, working with DJ Semtex to build tracks up through clubs into radio, as opposed to the press and live-leaning entry routes of the indie and dance music she worked on at EMI. A six year stint at Polydor followed, which at the time was the biggest and most successful label in the country, where Neaves had a roster that included credible crossover artists like La Roux, James Blake and Ellie Goulding, as well as international releases. She joined as Senior Product Manager and left as Head of Artist Development. “I was working for Orla Lee-Fisher, who was almost like a legend of artist development, so I learned a huge amount from her,” Neaves says. “She’s one of those people that never writes anything down and remembers every single detail of every record she’s ever worked. I learned from her that everything takes time and that there’s always a lot of work to do — which was her favourite saying.” Her next move was across the high street to Atlantic UK, as Director of Marketing, where Neaves joined a core team of four, running the label alongside Mark Mitchell, Ben Cook and Damian Christian. While Polydor was all about nurturing slightly left-of-centre artists into mainstream successes, Atlantic had a more direct pop sound finely honed with Ed Sheeran, Jess Glynne, Anne-Marie, Charlie Puth and Rita Ora. Neaves explains: “Atlantic is quite data-driven, because you are not benefiting from the nuances of a buzzy artist that has come through from another area. You have these artists, huge pop records are made for them, and then you are going to radio and streaming. “So we always had a bit of a point to prove on our artists, they may not have been the most [left-field], but they were definitely some of the most successful. The culture at Atlantic is one of

“We always had a bit of a point to prove on our artists.”

Annika Rose

success, it’s very nose to the ground, making stuff happen.” Three years (and one baby) later, Neaves was a key hire for growing London-based music company Tap last year, as the firm prepared to launch its own label following success with management clients Dua Lipa and founding signing Lana Del Rey. (Tap Records signings so far include Annika Rose, aboutagirl, Barny Fletcher and OkLou.) Over a year into the job, Neaves has played a key role in the addition of a major new Tap management client in Ellie Goulding, with whom the exec has professional history dating back to her Polydor days. Goulding is now well on her way to having a second big radio hit in the US with Juice Wrld collaboration Hate Me. Dua Lipa, meanwhile, is in the studio recording her second LP, which promises to be “a lot of fun”. Neaves adds: “She’s definitely not making a dark second album!” On the management side, Neaves also works closely with Hailee Steinfeld who has “brilliant new music coming”, plus breaking Island-signed Irish act Dermot Kennedy and Polydor signing Grace Carter. Here, we chat to Neaves about the decision to leave the major label world, the challenges of artist development in 2019 and her ambitions at Tap. Why did you decide not to stay at Warner? 70

Barny Fletcher

I had a baby and I think things change for you in that capacity anyway. I had reached a point where I’d gone so far up the ladder that a lot of my time was taken up with meetings and HR and I wasn’t really doing any artist development. Tap called me and [founders] Ben [Mawson] and Ed [Millett] have such an incredible reputation for breaking the artists that I love, who are slightly left of centre but still having mainstream success. It was also an opportunity for me to have a more flexible job and to get back to sitting in a room with an artist, helping them develop their vision and taking that to market, which is something I love doing, while working on a smaller roster and team. What changed for you after having a baby? Energy levels! I think taking any time out of an industry that is so fast-paced is quite intimidating. It takes a minute to get your confidence back, and that was definitely something that I experienced, but it was easier to do coming into a smaller company where I could find my way again, while knowing that I had the experience [required]. I think going back into a label where I’d missed eight months of very fast-paced action, probably it wouldn’t have made any difference, but to me that felt more scary. Also, I weirdly became more ambitious after I had my child,

INTERVIEW

Dermot Kennedy

Ellie Goulding

because there is someone else I need to provide for, and you take stock of what you are going to enjoy — if you are not going to spend every day with your child then you need to be going in and doing something you are really thrilled by. That was a big reason for taking the job at Tap. What are the biggest differences between working for a major label and your current role at Tap? It’s much more artist-focused. We are working at a very grassroots level where a lot of the time we are putting out an artist’s very first release. Quite often it’s going from cold, developing that artist story from day one and making sure that they are ready. A lot of artists don’t sign [a label deal] now until that development has been done; we have the time to sit and work out which levers need to be pulled then go and do it, rather than having to stop and wait, or run those ideas through a big group of people. So we can be quite nimble. I can’t rely on a huge building full of data analysis and in-house radio, all of that stuff;

we are literally doing everything ourselves, so it’s a lot more involved. I’ve learned a lot more because I’ve had to step back into the detail of it all. What have you learned about artist development in today’s streaming era during that time? The streaming world is constantly changing so much, and the more information and data we can consume [at Tap], the more confident we are about our ability to break our artists. Previously you’d have to launch a pop artist straight into radio, whereas now you can launch it via streaming. We focus on every bit of data that shows us there is a route to market, as well as the artist development proposition.

“If you’re not spending every day with your child, do something you are thrilled by.”

What’s the current state of the playlist ecosystem? There are a lot of theories at the moment about developing playlists and how you don’t want to put too much pressure on your 71

artist for the first few releases. Trigger cities are what everyone is currently obsessed with, so the theory that you can break a song in territories where there is a rabid pop audience, like South East Asia, and that will start to affect your algorithms and therefore help you get added to your own territory’s pop list. It takes the pressure off an artist, rather than getting a New Music Friday on your first release and getting skipped a lot and therefore your algorithm’s suffering. We’ve just started to test that with our first artist. It changes every week, there are always new theories coming up, and those are so crucial to us because we don’t have the big levers of a major label to break a new pop artist and we have to go slowly, carefully, and make each release really count.

Hailee Steinfeld

Like everything in the music industry, the nature of marketing is constantly evolving – what do you see on the horizon? The basics are the same – you want an artist with a unique vision and proposition who you can engage an audience with – but there’s going to be more data for us. The levers that you can pull are changing, which makes it more interesting because music marketing was the same for a long time, and if you are pulling those same levers every day it can get a bit boring for everyone. Now there is so much more to learn. Having an artist with a great social media presence and voice is really important, but if they haven’t got it you’ve got to help them develop that. So the granular detail is vast. In the old days it was a lot quicker and simpler, but now it’s a lot more interesting. Do you have any personal mantras when it comes to marketing and artist development? Just that every act we have is a priority, which means being across every release and every artist to the same level of detail is something that is key. That’s definitely the way we approach every single artist we have. They are a total priority, every single one of them. What’s the most challenging thing about working in the UK music market in 2019? What we want to do is break artists globally that have cultural influence. That has always been the most challenging thing and it still is now.

and Ellie. Are there any specific challenges in working with female acts? It’s a really busy market for female pop, it always has been. There is definitely a disconnect between playlisting and DSPs and the actual artist themselves and the song. It’s a pretty faceless platform and you need to stand out if you are on a playlist, but you don’t want to stand out to such an extent that someone skips your track because you don’t fit in, so it’s hitting that fine line of a great song with a unique voice but still [sitting in with] everything else that’s around it. People don’t believe in female artists as quickly and it’s much easier to prove a male artist’s credibility, I think that’s just how pop fans are, and you need a few tracks before you really get up and running, like you do with any artist. Also, pop girls are a bit more expensive, because you need hair and make up and styling, there’s a lot of investment, and a pop show is expensive to put on. You also need features and to be dropped on other people’s tracks because that’s the way that people break these days. It’s all of that stuff really.

“Trigger cities are the thing that everyone is currently obsessed with. ”

Are there any changes you’d like to see that could make that easier? The editorial teams within the DSPs are still very small and that’s fair enough, it’s the way they do things, but there is a lot of music to get through. We are in a lucky position to have those connections but you want to know that everything great has been listened to and I honestly don’t know how they get through it all. It’s incredible to me that those teams are so tiny because they are the gatekeepers, and there aren’t many of them. Tap has two of the biggest UK female artists right now in Dua 72

INTERVIEW

Lana Del Rey

What do you wish you’d known before entering the music industry? I wish I’d been more confident about what I could achieve. There is a really interesting book called The Confidence Gap, which is about how men and women are different on a very fundamental level, about how they approach their careers and the ability to win the job that they want. I just wish that thinking had existed when I was in my early 20s. I don’t even know if I’d have gotten further, but I think being confident about my own capabilities would have been good. I probably would have fought a bit harder for things that I believed in, for the artists as well as myself. What would you change about the music industry and why? I think the industry is very tough on young artists, it always has been. [Developing acts] can be a long, expensive process and that’s tough on anyone. Streaming has vastly increased the number of gatekeepers so it’s a much more democratic landscape, but streaming moves very slowly and in most instances you need to release a lot of music before you break. Working with so many young, and especially young female artists, it’s a very tough industry and social media makes life very difficult at times. It’s created massive opportunities but also leaves you wide open for criticism. Constant pressure, constant judgement. The

Moby Rich

need to be on point at all times. Your Instagram account is your publicity machine and you can’t put a foot wrong. I have seen such horrendous trolling and the effect it has on a young woman’s confidence and self-esteem can be incredibly destructive. I wish there was more protection for them. I think that would be the one thing I’d change, although I don’t know how you’d stop trolls. That is probably the darker side of what everyone goes through when they are becoming a nice shiny pop star. I’d also like the dissemination of data from DSPs to be more favourable to small companies. We don’t have the infrastructure to easily analyse deep data like the majors do and it’s a long and frustrating process at times. Finally, what are your future plans and ambitions? To break the artists signed to Tap Records as well as management. We’ve only been going a year and a half so we are on our way but that’s definitely the ambition. I’m equally excited about all of them — Annika Rose, aboutagirl and Barny Fletcher all have huge songs coming and OkLou is stunningly cool. For me to be able to, as part of a very small team, break brand new artists would be much more meaningful than breaking a brand new artist as part of a big major label machine. I would feel like it was much more down to me. Q 73

‘I’M BASICALLY BECOMING THE UBER FOR AFRICAN MUSIC’ Lagos, Nigeria-born Mr Eazi is undeniably one of the most visible ambassadors of African music, having generated more than 900 million streams worldwide and collaborated with the likes of Beyoncé. Now, splitting his time between Ghana and London, the Afrobeats star and music executive is on a mission to empower the next generation...

r Eazi never planned on being an artist. “When I finished high school, I just wanted to be rich,” he jokes, speaking to Music Business UK over the phone from Dubai. “I thought I would either be a pilot or an engineer.” And so, explains the Nigeria-born star, he proceeded to study Mechanical Engineering at university in Ghana to follow in the footsteps of his successful uncles. Five years on, however, and Mr Eazi (aka Oluwatosin Ajibade) has married his entrepreneurial sensibilities and tech startup experience with a distinct artistic identity to become one of West Africa (and the wider African continent)’s biggest contemporary pop stars. By blending hip-hop, Ghanain high-life and dance-pop via his signature ‘Banku’ style of music – a “mix of Nigeria and Ghanaian styles”, named after the Ghanaian dish of the same name – Mr Eazi has played a key role in the global explosion of Afrobeats. He’s amassed more than 900 million streams, including over 226m plays on YouTube alone, while recording guest spots on the likes of J Balvin & Bad Bunny’s Como Un Bebe, Major Lazer’s Tied Up and Beyoncé’s Don’t Jealous Me and Keys to the City. The 27-year-old dabbled in a number of business ventures before settling on music, with his portfolio to date including the launch of a “taxi concierge service”, a telecom startup, participation in several tech incubators and a stint in the gold mining sector. He entered the music business while at uni, where he ran a successful live promotions business. This led to him going into the studio to record music himself as “a hobby”, and eventually released his hit, Bankulize, in 2013, followed by his breakout track, Skin Tight (featuring Efya), two years later. “I would do parties and concerts every two weeks,” he explains. “I became really successful at that, and that would make me hang out with loads of emerging artists and established artists from Nigeria and Ghana.” By March 2016, Eazi had been invited by Lauryn Hill to play at King’s Theatre in New York and it was during this period, thanks to a visit to London to play the O2 Kentish Town Forum, that

he decided to make music a full time career. He recalls the exact date of his epiphany: “[It was] July 22, 2016. Everything was just blowing up so fast. I had to make a call between continuing my [telecoms] business and doing music full time; I had, like, 14 outlets and 20 staff [in my company]. But only music brought me to London. It just made me realise.” Eazi then enlisted his old school mate, Doregos Camillo, his “right-hand man”, to manage him. Camillo had just left pilot school and needed something to do “to pass the time”. With the help of Camillo and a small, core team, Mr Eazi’s business remains fiercely independent. In spite of his global success, the artist has signed only three licensing deals, for singles, in the US (Mad Decent), the UK (Columbia) and South Africa (Universal Music Africa) so far. Putting that independent mindset into practice beyond his own artist business, Mr Eazi started emPawa Africa in November 2018, an artist and label services company that provides distribution, publishing administration and marketing for independent African artists and labels. “I had always wondered how to mix my tech days [with] VC-type funding [for] music,” he explains. “I saw music artists as startups, and labels – or ‘label services’ companies – as sort of VCs. I wondered if I could apply the same thing where I invest in an artist [as if they were] a startup. I just want maybe max 20-30% stake in the artist’s business. I wanted to see if I could do that for music.” Eazi’s multi-faceted company launched with the #emPawa100 initiative, which awards grants of $3,000 each to 100 emerging artists from 11 African countries, with 10 of these acts then selected to take part in a talent incubator. “I [was] like, wait, I’m already funding 10 artists, why don’t we increase it to 100? Why don’t we fund all these 100 artists and pick 10, bring them into a master class where they get incubated for a while. [After that] I pick one or two or three to give them a sort of VC-type funding deal.” Nigerian star Joeboy and Ghana’s J. Derobie became two of the artists to progress to the final stage of the #emPawa100, receiving

“I saw artists as startups, and labels – or label services companies – as VCs.”

INTERVIEW

Speaking on stage with Lyor Cohen in Lagos in July, as YouTube unveiled an initiative to support emerging talent from Nigeria

an investment of $50,000 each to grow their businesses. Says Eazi: “Once we started to see success [with Joeboy and Derobie] we were like, ‘Yo, we’re onto this,’ you know? If it works, why not?” Eazi adds that emPawa Africa doesn’t recoup on all of the artists it funds, but he is proud of the fact that these acts all own their masters. He says that he “feels good about helping the artists”. “I’m indirectly building their businesses,” he says. “I’m basically becoming the Uber for African music, that’s what we want to be. We don’t need to own anything. But if you want an African producer, you should be able to reach out to emPawa Publishing. If you want to book artists, you should be able to reach out to emPawa Live. “There is not one company that is 100% focused on just distributing African music, just servicing African music, working with African artists. If emPawa can be that, if the artists can feel free, and we can give them good services, then I’ll be in business for a long time...” You studied mechanical engineering at university, then went to work for [oil company] Schlumberger, right? Yes. I was studying mechanical engineering and, of course, I wanted to be really successful, so every holiday I would apply to intern at Schlumberger, in order to gain practical experience. The plan was to intern every summer so that by the time I completed 76

uni, applying to be a trainee engineer would be just quick, because I had already gone through the system. But whilst working there, I decided I wanted more of a life; parties had made me savvy at life and entrepreneurship and that [lifestyle]. You know, gambling with different businesses. This one time I used my school fees to buy a taxi. There was no Uber [in Ghana] then. I started what I would call a taxi concierge service. Just running that business led to successes, and at that point I didn’t want to be an engineer anymore. I would have only [gone back to that] if everything failed. I just wanted to go the entrepreneur route. So you didn’t plan on becoming an artist? What happened when you first went into the studio? I might have been [receiving] training [in recording music] that I didn’t realise, because every time an artist came to play at my concerts or my parties, they would want to record locally, so I would take them to the studio and just watch them [working]. Then I started becoming friends with emerging artists in university. They were inviting me to the studio to come watch them. As a matter of fact, my roommate wanted to be a rapper, so he was [often] recording in the next room. One day, I’m in the studio with I don’t know who, and he was recording and I was like, ‘No, that’s not how you do the backing vocals. You do it like this.’ He was like, ‘If you know so much, why don’t you just go in there and do it?’ I went in there and did it, and

INTERVIEW

everybody thought it was [good]. It was so funny, the producer would then not let anybody else come to record because he just wanted me. He just wanted to record me, because I was better than the rest of them. They were wasting his time. I would just go [to the studio] every Friday instead of going to the club. And I’m trying to graduate because I’ve been partying all through these four years; I’m trying to run away from the clubs, but I wouldn’t [study]. Instead of reading, I would just go to the studio. Can you tell us about your Banku music label and how you ended up signing a licensing deal with Universal Music Group? I had always been signed to myself [as] Banku Music. For two years since 2017, I [have been] obsessed with taking my music global. I started coming to London a lot, and last year I was like, ‘You know what? I need a team to work on Africa for me.’ There were two options: hire a bigger team to work my music across Africa whilst I focused on working my music globally, still independently, or I talk to a [global] label. My manager was like, ‘You know, let’s talk now, with the label.’ We had been talking back and forth with Universal; we even met Sir Lucian [Grainge] at some point. We did a [UMG] licensing deal for the last mixtape, Leave Us Alone, but just for South Africa – we didn’t end up doing it for the rest of Africa. There’s a disconnect between the South African music industry and the rest of Africa. I thought, Let me just work with the partner who kind of understands that market, and give it a shot.

Decent, it’s always been direct with whoever is running [the company], and calling the shots there. It’s like businessman to businessman. I just keep learning from all of them. How did the licensing deal that you signed with Mad Decent come about? I was doing a college tour in the US [in 2017]. Then I saw Diplo playing one of my songs and I reached out to him. We started DM’ing. I was in LA and we hung out, we didn’t record anything, we just kind of became friends, and maybe a month later I went back to LA. We recorded some more music that we’ve not even put out. I always wanted him to remix Leg Over. By the time he agreed he’s like, ‘Okay, you know what, why don’t we help you put out this remix?’ I wanted to try, because before then, my only deal with a label was All Around The World in the UK for Dance For Me. I wanted to try something in the US, without having to spend [too much]. We did that, and things beyond putting out that record, like touring together. Could you tell us about emPawa Africa? How did it start? There’s two sides to that story. A couple of my friends put money together to help me fund my very first two music videos and I just felt a calling to help some of the kids, and so right from when I got my first big paycheck, I just planned on helping [local artists] that I see on Instagram or Twitter. One of the first artists I funded a video for was Kwesi Arthur, a rapper from Ghana. At this point my manager was like, ‘These videos you’re funding for people, why don’t you make it more structured?’ Just structure it and give 10 people funding – and that’s how Empawa Foundation was founded. So I said, ‘Okay, let’s fund 10 videos,’ and before we knew it, that became 100 videos. It’s just grown from there. I wanted it to be across Africa because I tour across Africa. On the business side, I’d always been trying to brainstorm on how to [progress] beyond the music. I don’t want to be singing [on stage] for the next 50 years, so I would study hip-hop and reggae. Afrobeats artists have been performing for like 10, 20 [years] and I’ve always known that at some point it will [grow] beyond the [sub]-culture. I was just wondering how to position myself, or have a company that can be in the mix of things, from now, when Afrobeats is growing, [to] when it gets to the mainstream. I have a label, but I didn’t want to ‘sign’ artists, because I wanted to give artists the kind of deals I would accept myself. I’ve always wanted to [develop] artists like myself, artists who know what they’re doing, and own their masters, and get into business with them, on a business to business level. Sort of like an aggregator. The main spark for me was when I wanted to drop my last mix, I wanted to give it to a label to work it globally, because I didn’t

“The producer just wanted me, because I was better than the rest of them.”

What’s it been like working with Universal, specifically Sipho Dlamini [MD, Universal Music South Africa and SubSaharan Africa]? You know, Sipho is more like a friend. Sipho understands where I come from. He [appreciates] that, okay, these guys are entrepreneurs. He’s not just looking to just give me songs or sign me. Even right now, I’m not doing any [active] business with Universal, but we still talk about business. I still run ideas by him, we go back and forth, you know? It’s kind of like he doesn’t realise he’s one of my best friends! Every now and then, when we are in the same city, we just sit down, catch up. He tells me what’s going on. We never know where the relationship [will end up]... whether there’ll be some more business between us. It’s the same kind of relationship I have with Ferdy UngerHamilton from Columbia. That’s why I licensed London Town [to him]. I licensed two records to Columbia UK, just for the UK last year, and it is the same kind of relationship. It’s funny; the three times I’ve signed licensing deals, with Ferdy for the UK, with Sipho for South Africa, and Jasper [Diplo] from Mad

want to spend my money. But I couldn’t find a deal that I liked, and I didn’t feel like a lot of the labels I was talking to really and genuinely understood the genre. I could tell that no-one was going to put in 100%, a priority effort, because they don’t even understand [the music]. I think people just wanted to be in the conversation. People just wanted to make bets, like okay, just in case he pops, then we’re going to be in the mix of things. I said, ‘Okay, I’m not going to do a traditional deal.’ Especially because I would see things in the deals [being offered] like exclusivity; I can’t put out another song [elsewhere] until 12 months after the project drops, which to me was insane, because anybody who knows Afrobeats will know, just like dancehall, culturally, we’re meant to be [releasing] music as often as possible. That was the main thing for me. I went back to my distributors and was like, ‘Okay, you know what, let me take things into my own hands.’ So I drew up the marketing plan. I wanted cash from my distributors, like an advance to push the project. But my distributors, rather than just giving me an advance, started asking me for my publishing, asking me for an exclusivity period [in return]. It was so much and I was like, ‘Wait, you know what, fuck all of this, man. I’m just going to do this myself.’ At this point [emPawa] is distributing, I’m helping some [artists] distribute via my distributor. I’m also helping some of them collect on the publishing, via a couple independent publishers. I’m helping some [artists] get bookings [via] booking agents I work with. I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m going to set up all of this.’ I co-own a festival, I’m doing live events, and I didn’t [initially] realise that [I was building a multi-faceted music company]. When I did, it was like a wake-up call for me. When we started the emPawa project, I ran into to a YouTube page called KondZilla. It’s a Brazilian page. This YouTube page has about 50 million subscribers. It has multiple videos with a billion views, and then it’s also a record label. I’m like, ‘Whoa, this is my business model right here.’

the next three years, and see where we want to take it. I’m happy with the initial successes; the artists we’ve given VC-type deals, or the music we’ve put out where we’ve pitched them. We’re still building, so we’re on track. Can you tell us about the importance of YouTube as a music distribution platform in Nigeria and in Ghana? YouTube is arguably the platform with the [lowest] barrier to entry for music in Africa, not just Nigeria and Ghana. The only barrier for you to access YouTube is data. It’s data cost, the cost of loading, or the cost of watching. YouTube is that platform where every artist can just easily [upload] their project, and people all around the world can see. Not only does it have [a low] barrier to entry, but it also has the smallest barrier to market and to viewing for the rest of the world. YouTube is in a very unique position, and YouTube has been very instrumental, even with me. When people out in the world connect with videos, they start from the back end of YouTube. How important are services like Boomplay for listeners in Ghana and Nigeria? The thing is, the way people consume music [in Africa] is totally different [than in the rest of the world]. I would say 70% of music consumers in Africa get their music from the block, from the street, which kind of shows you why YouTube is important. People have not gotten used to the idea of paying for subscriptions for music, but they feel like when they go on [YouTube, it’s free], especially those that use a browser that also compresses the music and the sites to make it even cheaper for them to use data, like Opera Mini. You have to understand that you have over 20 million people using Opera Mini to go online, and the reason they’re using Opera Mini is because it’s cheaper – the data cost is smaller. It’s only when you get to A-list level of artist, when you get to Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy level that they start caring about those [paid-for streaming services]. When you start generating revenue from outside of Africa from your streaming, that’s when you start to really care [about this topic]. For the average artist, he needs his music to get on those [free] websites, because that’s the only way the fans will see it. Because if you don’t have Apple Music, you don’t have Spotify, if they’re not on Boomplay, if they’re not on Deezer, the best place you can reach them is free sites. I’d say of the 70% [of people in Africa] who consume [this kind of ] music, 50% of them get the music on the free websites, and the other 50% get it from vendors on the street. You have vendors in the hardware, software markets, who have their laptops up, and they download [music on demand], they load it up on their

“YouTube is arguably the platform with the lowest barrier to entry [for artists] in Africa.”

Is there a view to compete with companies like TuneCore or AWAL/Kobalt? Not immediately. I’ve worked with TuneCore, and I’ve worked with Kobalt. I like the [AWAL] model, because it’s not as openended [in terms of limitless signings] as the TuneCore model. Maybe in the future I [might] also migrate to do something like TuneCore, but for now I just feel like it’s very important that, instead of having one million artists, it’s better to have 100 artists; or instead of having maybe 100 artists, I’d rather have 10 artists who have priority, and are serviced properly, just to prove the business model for the next three to five years. Then we will see where it goes from there. [We’ll monitor it] for 78

INTERVIEW

Mr. Eazi launched artist services company emPawa Africa last year

phone, and you can just walk up to them and pay them money, and they will update your music library with new songs. This is how people consume music, and this is why these free websites are kind of the de facto biggest websites. They are the Apple Music or the Spotify of Ghana because they have the lowest barriers to entry. What are your views on the globalisation of Afrobeats, and how that will grow in future? It’s been driven by the internet, it’s been driven by the diaspora,

the live part of the whole movement and the whole industry. It is exciting, because what that will do is that will make music companies and people who are in the music business take the genre more seriously. When I mean more seriously, I also mean investment, which ultimately will help everybody involved. I’m happy about it. The only thing I’m always telling my colleagues about is, I’m not going to say don’t sell, but when you sell, make sure it’s worth it. Make sure you know what you’re getting into, you know? Just like you tell anybody going into business. Just be aware. Q 79

FEATURE

WHAT I WISH I’D KNOWN Having started as an assistant at Simon Fuller’s 19, Pat Carr swapped pop for Pop Will Eat Itself and, in partnership with A&R legend Korda Marshall, helped break countless acts at Infectious, Infectious Mk II and BMG. Here’s what she’d pick out from all that to tell herself on her first day… A very dear friend of mine, Ros Earls, of 140db Management, now part of Big Life Management, got a job as a receptionist at Sarm Studios in the mid-eighties, and there she met up with someone who is also now a very dear friend, Terri Hall [Hall or Nothing]. She’d just started with Simon Fuller at 19 Management. It had been going for a year or so, and they gave me a job there as an assistant. My first day was actually a bit of a shocker. This was pre-the internet, pre-computers, pre-everything – it was literally typewriters and Tipp-Ex. I spent my entire first day trying to type a letter. The one thing I achieved at the end of that day was that I managed to complete that task to an almost satisfactory standard. It could only get better. I think perhaps the most important thing I wish I’d known right at the start was, It’s okay to fuck up, just don’t fuck up twice. It’s a lesson that makes you brave, but also makes you learn fast. Another valuable early lesson was: prepare; do a bit of research – nothing can substitute for being thorough. Learn what you can off your own back, listen to everyone and everything that’s going on around you, be open-minded. The company grew a lot and I became General Manager. During that time I got very friendly with Korda Marshall, when he was head of A&R at RCA. He and I worked together on various projects and just got on really well. And much as I loved 19, the lure of the guitar was calling. Korda had just started Infectious, he’d put out one record and forgotten to put a bar code on it. Another lesson learned: always put a bar code on, preferably the right bar code. I joined him at Infectious, and that was a ride. It was just him and me and the lesson there was that you do whatever needs to be done. If Korda

“Prepare, do a bit of research – nothing can subsitute for being thorough.”

didn’t do it or I didn’t do it, it didn’t get done. So, you muck in. We had an absolute ball, it was great fun. The company was run on enthusiasm. Pop Will Eat Itself were flying, the first Ash album was flying, we were selling product as fast as we could get it made. The most important lesson I learned from – or maybe about – Korda was probably, Don’t believe him when he says it’s delivered. Doesn’t matter what ‘it’ is, always check. Korda lives and works in an incredibly creative world and I learned to keep up with him, that was tremendous fun. He has endless belief in his artists and will support their creativity all the way. We’d both walk through fire for the acts that we’ve worked with, and we both knew that about each other. We’re really good friends and we know what the other one thinks and what the other one likes. When you’re friends and you respect each other, it’s much easier to work together. It then made sense that Infectious became part of Mushroom and Korda took over the whole thing. Then the combined package was sold to News Corp, which didn’t pan out as well as expected, the result being that Infectious got sold to Warners. I didn’t really fit into the Warner system. I was an all-rounder, I didn’t want to ‘just’ be a Product Manager. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I like seeing the whole journey and being involved with an artist or campaign all the way through – not just being able to effect a part of it. I took a break, and then there was a French dance label, called F Communications, who needed some help in the UK. I suggested I could be that person and they offered to pay me – there wasn’t ‘label services’ then, that wasn’t a thing, but that’s what this was. 81

photo: Gav Ovoca The Murder Capital

I could see how Mushroom had spent all this money getting staffed up in the UK before they had a catalogue. Whereas if they did it all through me, they wouldn’t need those things, I could be their foothold. So I started Remote Control in 2000, and it did really well. About eight years later, Korda and I met up for lunch – he wasn’t at Warner anymore. He’d seen Temper Trap the night before and as we got through a bottle of red, he was talking about how much he loved the band and, at the same time, what fun Infectious was first time round. And it became obvious: Let’s do it again! So we did. 82

Eventually, of course, we got sold again. BMG were very determined. And of all the companies that we could have ended up with, they were probably the best one. I half expected to be put into a cupboard somewhere, but there was a very small team on the frontline when we went in, so they asked me, alongside Korda, to build one. We rolled up our sleeves and did that. I’d never worked for a big company before, it was interesting. I met some great people and I’m very proud of everything I did there. And I learned about meetings. Then I learned about meetings about meetings. They’re a necessary

FEATURE

“When I’ve made mistakes, nearly every time it’s when I’ve gone against my gut instinct.”

evil, at a company of a certain size anyway. Because the only thing worse than having lots of meetings is having no meetings and nobody knowing what’s going on. That came to an end almost exactly two years ago. It was time for me to return to my roots. The team we built is still there and they’re still doing brilliantly. I think teamwork is hugely important, I think people talking and working things out together is hugely important – and I think one of the things that helps that is people socialising and enjoying each other’s company. I’m loving Remote Control again. I feel a bit like an elder stateswoman this time around.

We’ve just worked on The Murder Capital’s album [When I Have Fears], which was fantastic. And I’m also about to start co-managing Ash with Stephen Taverner, which is hysterical, and brings things full circle. I’ve worked with Tav, same as Korda, for decades, and the main lesson I’ve learned about management from him is that it’s bloody hard work. There are no short cuts. And you have to really, really care about your acts. I’ve worked with some fantastic managers in my time, and I’ve worked with some less good ones; fantastic managers don’t sleep – and my hat goes off to them. Also, in management, don’t underestimate the power and importance of straightforward organisation. You also can’t be scared of your artists; you’re there to advise not to fetch and carry. When the artist feels incredibly strongly, you go out and bat for them. But you make sure they’re always fully informed and you help them see things from all angles and be aware of all consequences; present options. Tav is a fantastic manager and I’m very good at putting records out, so we make a good team. Looking back, from here to there, that first day at 19, I’d tell myself, Follow your instinct, it will usually be right. When I’ve made mistakes, nearly every time it’s been against my gut feeling. And be kind to people. I would hope the young me wouldn’t need to be told that, because it’s something I’ve always stuck by. That said, avoid lawyers and accountants as much as you can. When you’re having a conversation with someone, put yourself in their place. Why do they want to do this? Also, take a moment. Don’t rush into things without a bit of reflection and consideration. It goes back to that idea of having options. I’ve been known to be impetuous in my time – and maybe I still am now and again, but at least now I’d recognise it! Final one, maybe the most important one: don’t do things just for the money. Money’s never been my driving force. My driving force are days like today, when Murder Capital goes in [to the UK album charts] at No. 18. That’s my driving force and that’s what makes what I do enjoyable. I’d rather do that than worry about hitting quarterly targets. Q 83

INTERVIEW

‘WE'RE HERE FOR EVERYBODY THAT FITS INTO ELECTRONIC MUSIC' British exec Toby Andrews took over as General Manager of Capitol Music Groupowned dance label Astralwerks last year and has guided it to the No.1 dance label position in the US – helping to establish it as a leading brand in electronic music...

oby Andrews’ office has a great view. Located on an upper floor of Los Angeles’ iconic Capitol Records Tower, overlooking the Hollywood hills, the 29-year-old Astralwerks General Manager admits it’s still “pretty special”, just over a year into the job. Founded by Brian Long in 1993 as a dance imprint of Caroline Records, Astralwerks is one of the most influential names in electronic music, having released seminal records by the likes of Fatboy Slim, Swedish House Mafia, Eric Prydz, Porter Robinson, Basement Jaxx and the Chemical Brothers. Andrews relocated from London to Los Angeles to take over the iconic Capitol Music Group-owned label just over 12 months ago. During this short space of time he’s overseen Astralwerks' move from New York to LA, initiated a complete rebranding and guided it to its position as the No. 1 dance label in the US, up from the No. 9 slot it was in when he took over. “Growing to [occupying] the top spot in the US is something that we’re really proud of,” says Andrews. "We're not just competing against dance labels, we're competing against any label that signs electronic music, big or small. We just put our heads down for a year, put in the hard work, and put records out that we thought were cool. Thankfully, it all paid off.” One of the records that has driven the label’s ascension is Marshmello and Bastille’s five-times Platinum track Happier, the biggest single of the superstar DJ/producer’s career so far. At the time of writing, Happier has held the No.1 dance/electronic spot on the Billboard rankings for 50 weeks (the longest in history by over 17 weeks and counting), having spent a total of 54 weeks on the chart so far. Also at the time of writing, 15 of the Top 50 dance/electronic songs in the US are Astralwerks releases, including Meduza’s Piece Of Your Heart, which has spent 23 weeks on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic chart. Astralwerks is equally present at the summit of the Hot Dance/ Electronic Album chart with Illenium's Ascend, the producer’s (Nick Miller) first No.1 dance/electronic album. Released August 16, the record also debuted in the Top 15 on the Billboard 200, the highest electronic debut of the year.

Andrews, who was named on Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list for Media & Marketing last year, tells Music Business UK that his dedication to dance music started when he was a teenager. “I was a DJ, or I tried to be a DJ, when I was 15, 16,” he remembers. “I started promoting club nights. There was a bunch of us that ran student nights at [London’s] Fabric, and Ministry of Sound used to let us host rooms.” He continued doing that until his late teens, when he jokes that he “kind of ruined [my] A-levels by promoting club nights and not studying”. After deciding not to to attend university, Andrews found one of his favourite DJs on Myspace and looked at his contact section to find that “the only London-based contact on there” was a PR company on Brick Lane called Get In!. “Everyone else was in The Netherlands,” he says. “So I just emailed them and asked if I could work there. I had no real idea what a PR company did. I just thought it would be a good thing and keep me close to the music and artists I was into. They seemed to work with all the DJs that I liked, so I thought it must be a great place to start.” Andrews joined Get In! and started packing envelopes with press releases when he was just 18. He continued promoting club nights on the side during his first 12 months at the firm, but within six years had worked his way up to Chief Operating Officer. “I decided that my time was probably better spent behind the desk rather than trying to be a DJ,” he says. “[Get In!] was the best place to start working because I was always a big electronic music fan from the age of 12, 13. I was the weird kid in school that showed people Tiesto videos; my mum always played me Café Del Mar CDs and my dad gave me Hed Kandi CDs.” Andrews worked with some of the world’s biggest electronic music stars and events at Get In!, from Armin van Buuren to Fedde le Grand and Martin Solveig, Avicii (including the global campaign for his hit single, Levels), Afrojack, Tomorrowland and Ultra Music Festival. “We kind of ended up working with just about everyone at some point, and that was the best experience ever,” he says. “There weren't many PR agencies that were looking after

“My mum played me Café Del Mar records; my dad gave me Hed Kandi CDs. ”

With Jonas Blue and Luke Armitage

electronic music, as it was still not really that much of a thing in mainstream media. Plus, our global scope lined up perfectly with that of electronic music artists whose popularity transcended international boundaries.” After leaving Get In! Andrews joined Sony Music in London as Head of Electronic Music Marketing in 2014 and was promoted to General Manager of International Marketing for Sony Music International in 2017. At Sony, Andrews oversaw campaigns for the likes of Martin Garrix across his singles with Beba Rexha, Dua Lipa and Troye Sivan, plus Kygo and Jean-Michel Jarre, including the latter’s Grammy-nominated album, Electronica 1. Now, as head of the reborn Astralwerks, Andrews has overhauled the historic label’s creative direction and assembled a team of widely respected music executives who have helped make this dramatic reinvigoration possible. He’s also clearly enjoying his move to Los Angeles, which he notes “is a completely different pace of life than London”. “You're always surrounded by people in fields that relate to what you do here, so it's strange to always be meeting people who are video directors or who are writers or publicists or any section of music and entertainment,” he explains. “I thought it would feel very far away, but nowadays, people visit here on a monthly, weekly basis, and even our artists that don't live here we see regularly enough, because of their sessions or videos. “And I can see the Hollywood sign out of my window, which is pretty special...” 86

So you started as an intern and you worked your way up to Chief Operating Officer at Get In!. Can you tell us about your time there? The company did amazingly well, and Jonathan [Llewellyn], who owns Get In!, always had a dream of having a US office as well. So he left the UK to set up the office in New York, and I went out briefly for two months to help him get it up and running. That's actually where I met one of my marketing team [members] now, as he started off as an intern in that New York office. And we were out there working on TomorrowWorld, which was the first American version of Tomorrowland, at the same time. And then I went back to London and helped look after the home office until I ended up leaving. You went to Sony Music after that. How did that opportunity come about? And why did you decide to leave Get In!? I was really excited about doing something more. From being a publicist, fitting into the larger marketing plans seemed like the next logical step. We worked with so many different labels, major and independent, [and] after a while I was feeling frustrated that not all the plans they were giving us were very good or very well thought-out. By being just the hired publicist on the end of an email, you really don’t have much say in what's going on, you just get told what to do. The next step along at some point was to go to the source of where the plans came from, and play more of an integral role in conceiving them. Originally I thought I could be an A&R person,

INTERVIEW

and I spent a year or two trailing A&R people around London, trying to offer them tips and showing them that I could find loads of great music. Eventually, Patrick Moxey, who owns Ultra, and with whom I had worked on a lot of Ultra releases at Get In!, had gone into his partnership with Sony. This was mid-2013, and they were looking to bring people into the company who had a better understanding of electronic music, and just had the sensibilities of being able to know [how] a major label [works] but also understanding what independent dance [artists] and DJs need as services. I was hired by Adam Granite ultimately, who’s actually now at Universal as well [Executive Vice President, Market Development], and he brought me into the Sony International department, which was at that time under Edgar Berger in London. I started working there as a Senior Marketing Manager of Electronic Music. I was kind of finding my feet, and the department was still growing in the marketing sense, as well. About four or five months after I got there, Sony signed Kygo, and he was really the first artist we signed with a global mindset; Kygo actually signed to Sony International via the Swedish office and Ultra. We decided that the plan would be to not just break him in Norway and then Sweden, and then export him to the rest of the world. We signed him [direct] to International, and said, 'We’ll eventually make you big everywhere, because you live on the internet and your fans live on SoundCloud; they’re really not in any specific country, so let’s just go for everything all at once.’ Kygo went on to become the fastest artist in history to hit 1 billion streams on Spotify, with a career spawning multiple global hit singles, including It Ain’t Me with Selena Gomez.

being on a 12-hour flight every three weeks, just to come to one meeting or to go to one video shoot, and then go home again. And so the Astralwerks opportunity, the timing and everything worked out. I met Michelle [Jubelirer, COO of Capitol Music Group] probably around two years ago. We talked about the experience of working with electronic artists and working in a global business rather than in a US-centric one. What’s it been like working with Michelle Jubelirer and Steve Barnett at Capitol Music Group? They were so open and supportive from the very beginning. The label had gone through quite a drastic change. After 24-and-a-half years being based in New York to being uprooted and moved to LA was quite a start. Honestly, building an entirely brand new team, with the exception of two people, is a fairly drastic way of evolving a record label with such an illustrious history. From the first time I met Steve and we talked about his ideas of what he and Sir Lucian wanted Astralwerks to be known for and what it meant to Universal, we were always on the same page. And then I started sending over plans of how we could achieve our vision. Steve, Michelle and [CMG CFO] Geoff Harris were incredibly supportive and always encouraging. Even to the level of job positions; they told me I could keep things as they were, or make the changes I thought would put us on a better path. We brought in a Creative Director, which [made us], probably one of the only labels in the US that actually has its own [dedicated CD]. I’m not sure they were expecting that. And then we wanted to run our international marketing differently. I wanted a slightly different skill-set on the digital side. We had very specific people in mind for the A&R roles. They encouraged me to come up with a plan which was a bit different to how other labels are structured within the building. So it was a challenge, but it was also a lot of fun to be given such freedom in creating a label.

“Steve [Barnett] and I were always on the same page with ideas for Astralwerks.”

What was it like working with Adam Granite? What did you learn from him? Adam is probably the most decisive, clear-thinking person that I've ever met. If you say to him, 'I think we should do this,’ and he sees the logic in it, the next thing is, 'Go do it, quickly, and come back and tell me how it went. And don't worry me with the side parts of it, just get it done.’ I like working for people with clear direction. He knows exactly what you're meant to do. Then you moved to Los Angeles from London. What was that whole experience like? In the last six months I was at Sony, I got on a plane to L.A. every month. And it was becoming clearer and clearer that at some stage, I would need to move here to really make my career work. All the music videos we were making were being done out here, all the studio sessions were being done out here, the meetings with partners were all happening here, and I was getting really tired of

When you say people didn’t expect the first person that you hired would be a Creative Director, what do you think a more common hire have been? I’m not sure, actually. Maybe they thought we were going to hire someone to build up our A&R team, or make sure we had new marketing managers – more traditional choices. No label here had someone in-house [as a Creative Director] that was dedicated only to that label. But establishing a visual identity was number one on my priority list, and something I knew would pay off in a multitude of ways. Having artists come in to only talk about music just felt like a huge disservice to them. Because anyone that comes in here, of 87

With Marshmello at Capitol Congress, August 2019

With JeanMichel Jarre

You had the whole brand identity and artistic direction of Astralwerks overhauled last year, right? Yeah, we just started with ourselves. [There was] the mild personal element of wanting to be [at a label where] a whole team can feel like it’s their own. We launched a brand new look and feel of everything at Capitol Congress last year. Now it's been an official full year of utilising our new design methods and, most importantly, it was showing artists and managers that we take it seriously, and that we stick to it. Joe Mortimer, our Creative Director, is a genius. We simplified the logo to send the message that we were simply a much more understanding group of people.

of A&R) has been at Astralwerks for almost seven years, and he came from Ultra. He signed Porter Robinson here, he signed Halsey here, and he’s been with the label a long time. He’s been my main guiding point of how things used to work and how things work now. He’s always had the taste for electronic music, the same as I have. And we’ve been friends for a long time before I worked here. Working with him, especially in the transition period and then in the rebuild of that, has been invaluable. In addition to Jeremy, Luke Armitage (Astralwerks’ Senior Marketing Director) runs our marketing department. He came from doing International at Universal UK and was part of the PM:AM dance structure there, so he’s had years of experience of exporting electronic and dance music around the Universal system, and working with Tiesto, Axwell & Ingrosso, Jonas Blue and a bunch of other people, so he knows the countries inside and out. He knows the people in every territory that we can rely on. People are used to hearing from him. I think he was such a perfect fit to help us grow our global presence within Universal.

Who are some of the other key Astralwerks personnel? Jeremy Vuernick (Capitol Music Group’s Executive Vice President

We saw Marshmello and his manager, Moe Shalizi, collect their five-times Platinum plaque for Happier at Capitol Congress

course they have their music, but then they also have the other 50% of the conversation which is the photographers, visual artists and video directors that they love, the typefaces that they like, and that whole side of the conversation. I feel like if you can’t come into a label and have that broad a conversation with someone, it's probably not going to be as fulfilling an experience as it could be.

INTERVIEW

this summer. Can you tell us about the campaign behind that single and what it’s like working with them? The whole experience was amazing. It was my first time working with Moe [Shalizi] and Krista [Carnegie] and, obviously, Marshmello, but they have such a great brand and such strong ideas about what their fans like. And hopefully they feel like we were able to [provide] value where they needed it the most. Joe made the balloon artwork. I don't know where he got the idea for it to be a balloon like that, but in the end it turned into a great idea and obviously quite iconic for what we did in the campaign. Marshmello's brand is so happy and friendly and easy to work with, that making engaging content with him ends up being a very easy job for you. Because there are so many ideas, and you can make them do so many things, that's probably part of the magic of why people love Marshmello so much. Plus Moe and Krista are incredibly level-headed, hard-working people, so working with them is a straightforward and really enjoyable experience. They know what they're looking for, and we were able to show them what we thought was the right idea. It turned into a great partnership and obviously a hugely successful song around the world. What are the challenges of marketing an album versus a single in the electronic music space, in the US? A lot of people struggle with the idea of consuming an electronic album. The good thing about [Illenium album] Ascend and a lot of other albums, is the reason why I know that this one will be popular, and why previous Illenium albums have been popular, is that a story is being told. There’s great songs, highs and lows to the album, dynamics within the storytelling, and there are interludes etc. Sometimes it's hard, purely as a listening experience, to absorb a full electronic album of 15 songs or so. It's not a fully digestible experience, which is why some of those things work better as mixes or mix tapes that make the music an easier experience to get into. Obviously, you can go through such highs working with a single. And what you can do to continue to promote the single and such are probably easier than what you can do to continue to push an album’s worth of songs to people. It's much easier to just focus on one, with the opportunities abound from radio or playlisting and such. To get people's attention focused on one thing is easier than getting them focused on many things.

something you’re witnessing? No. I’ve stopped paying attention to stats like that. Since 2014, people have been saying electronic music’s bubble is bursting. I worked with a lot of people surrounding the rise and fall of SFX Entertainment, that whole saga, and that triggered off everyone thinking and saying, "Oh my God, dance music is dead in America and the whole business is collapsing.” I got bored of listening to that a few years ago, and I’m still bored by it. That report will show, obviously, that there are less big mainstream pop hits from the electronic genre than there probably were two or three years ago [when] there were bigger, crossover pop records happening on a more regular basis on the radio, in the charts, in the US than there probably are now. It is harder to have a hit with an electronic record in the US [today] than it was. The part that everyone overlooked is the fact that there’s tons of other electronic music out there, which is great, which people want to listen to. Which is why we’ve hit a good stride in working with such a breadth of people who are making popular, electronic music, and that we’re able to progress so far within the genre. To hold the largest market share of electronic music in the US (12.49% current YTD, almost 1% greater than the closest competitor, with a weekly high this year of 25.11%) is purely down to the fact that we are releasing a wide range of all the popular styles of electronic music in the US, rather than just focusing on signing only pop hits.

“Having artists come in to only talk about their music felt like a disservice to them.”

In the IMS Business Report from May, one of the stats showed that the electronic music market share in the US was down in 2018 to 3%, down from 3.5% the previous year, and down from 4% the year before. Astralwerks successes seem to tell a different story though. Is there a concern that electronic music’s popularity is winding down? Is that

You're just over a year in as General Manager. What are your hopes for the label over the next five years? We want to just keep working with artists that we admire who are making great music, and make sure we support them with great creative, great marketing and great data. We want to be able to spread to other areas of the world and expand the Astralwerks brand, make ourselves a bit more of a destination label globally for electronic music. The US part of our mission feels good right now, so we’re expanding our focus to become more of a global brand and will be announcing our first overseas expansion in the coming weeks. Do you think that the Astralwerks legacy helps make the label an attractive proposition for emerging electronic/dance artists to want to sign with? Now more than ever, it’s easy to point at the fact that Astralwerks has been the main voice of electronic music, for [the US] certainly, and I’m proud that we’re continuing to re-establish and enhance the label’s reputation. Our roster and history speaks to the fact that we are open to a myriad of genres and styles. People have now learned that we’re not here only to sign main stage DJs; we're here for everybody that fits into electronic music as a format, or a style, or a production method. Q 89

INTERVIEW

Meet the old boss This quarter we plunder the memory banks and photo albums of Steve Lewis, a man who joined Virgin as a schoolboy, initially operating under the name ‘Angie’, before going on to lead the group’s publishing arm through a period of astonishing success...

teve Lewis has his own version of the old maxim, ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ It goes like this: ‘Those who can, sell records; those who can’t, publish.’ Or at least he had his own version, a few decades ago – based on very strong (and wickedly cynical) beliefs – until, perhaps inevitably, certainly spectacularly, he carved out a stellar career in, where else, publishing, revitalising the sector in the process. He was, in fact, part of a generation of executives that put the lie to the (then) commonly held view of publishers as the industry’s ‘bankers’, making money while they sleep, and not always at night. After Virgin’s sale to EMI in 1992, he went on to work within records and publishing at Chrysalis, and then launched Stage Three, a company that specialised in acquiring catalogues, reinvigorating them, putting them in a basket and selling them as a very tidy package for a very tidy sum – a business model that’s not unfamiliar in the modern market. He’s still extremely active, enthusiastic and only half-jokingly concerned that a reflective piece such as this might suggest he’s semi-retired rather than full throttle (or, as Lewis himself puts it, “please don’t make it read like an obituary!”). He’s a board member and shareholder at Rotor Videos, Synchtank, Triumph Music, The Rattle and Landr – companies with interests ranging from studios to lyric videos via online mastering and, of course, publishing (he has a JV with Imagem founder André De Raaff, under the CTM umbrella). When asked to pinpoint the most enjoyable time of his career, Lewis insists it’s right now. And it’s tempting to believe him.

Nevertheless, we persuade him, just for a couple of hours, to look backwards. Initially, in fact, five decades back, to memories of first hearing two artists that were probably the most disruptive influences on the old Tin Pan Alley/Brill Building version of publishing. By bringing the song and the artist closer together than ever before, they demoted the influence and diluted the dynamism of publishers to an extent that arguably brought on the somnambulism that so irked the young label-loyal Lewis. And

And where was this? Where did you grow up? Essex. Funnily enough, I went to the same school as [Warner Music UK legend] Rob Dickins, Ilford County High School. What did you want to do in terms of a career back then? I hadn’t a clue, to be honest. I wasn’t a very good student. But at the same time I was brought up believing that if you get a good education then you’ll have options. My parents wanted me to go to university and become a ‘professional’. So I did, I was the first person in my family ever to go to university – but I dropped out, which I think broke my parents’ hearts.

“I loved hanging out with those guys, they were the big brothers I never had.” made him view publishing as a backwater – albeit one in which he would soon make a very big splash. What music do you remember first hearing and having a real effect on you? For me it was The Beatles and Dylan. I remember to this day first hearing Dylan. I was in the backseat of my parents’ car and Blowing in the Wind came on the radio. There’s the line in there that goes, ‘Mothers and fathers throughout the land, don’t criticize what you can’t understand/ Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.’ Yes! This bloke understands me! And then The Beatles came along and changed everything, even more than Dylan. Everything about them was great. I wanted their clothes, their haircuts, their guitars: basically, I wanted to be in The Beatles.

Oh dear. Why did you drop out? I went on the road with a band.

Double whammy! How did that come about? I always had an urge to be independent; I didn’t like to ask my parents for money, so I always tried to get jobs, doing whatever I could. And in the summer between taking my O-levels and starting my A-levels, the summer of ‘69, I saw an ad in The Times. It was an ad for Virgin and it said something like: ‘Record company/magazine needs young people. Good money. Easy work.’ Well that was the best ad I’d seen! I phoned up, and they told me to come to Albion Street, just opposite Hyde Park, where the door was opened by Nik Powell, Richard [Branson]’s partner at the time, who I’m still very good friends with. He had lank shoulder-length hair, and the seams of his jeans were completely gone, held together by safety pins. He looked a bit like a homeless person. 91

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Virgin label with Richard Branson in 2013

Anyway, he said, ‘You see those magazines over there? If you take those into Hyde Park and sell them for three bob, you can keep one-and-six.’ I said, ‘Sorry, I don’t want to sell your magazine; I’ve come for the record company job.’ He said, ‘Right, well my partner’s dealing with that, you’ll have to wait until he gets back.’ So I sit down, wait, and watch this parade of hippies come and go. I thought, This is interesting… I also quite liked the whole thing of, How did they know I was going to come back with the money? Or the magazines? That was pretty cool. Eventually Richard arrived and it transpired that the mail order business they ran [had taken out] an ad in their own magazine [Student], with a coupon that said, ‘If the record you want is not listed, please write to Angie and we’ll tell you the Virgin price.’ But Angie had left. Richard and Nik didn’t listen to music, didn’t really like music and didn’t know much about music – certainly not which records were on which labels. The 92

important thing about that was that all the labels had different ‘manufacturer’s prices’, and you needed to know those in order to work out what the Virgin discount should be. All of that meant the interview was a pop quiz: What label are the Edgar Broughton Band on? Luckily, I knew the answers, and so I became Angie – because the ad said ‘Angie’ and all the pre-printed stationery had her signature on it, I just filled in the numbers. I worked there the through the summer, I loved the whole vibe of the place – and I ended up staying continuously employed by Virgin, one way or another, from then until EMI bought the company in 1992. But you also went back to school and continued your education? I did, because I didn’t need to be in the office to answer the inquiries, plus I was working evenings, fitting it in around schoolwork. I just tried to make myself indispensable; whatever they asked me to do, I did it, and I wanted to do it. I liked

them. I liked the whole place. I loved hanging out with these guys, they were like the big brothers I never had. And I think they saw me as a kid; there’s a big age difference between 19 and 16; those three years mean a lot. I was living at home with my parents; they were living with their girlfriends in Notting Hill. I think that was something that, in some ways, didn’t help in the later years, because I think, they continued to see me as a kid. It was all right [pause]. Well, not really [laughs]. But back then it was certainly all right, because at the end of the week I had enough money to buy an album, happy days. And eventually Virgin started to open shops and you worked there? Yes, so they got a store in Oxford Street, above Shellys Shoes, and when a postal strike disrupted the mail order business, I went and worked there in the evenings. You said it was continuous, so did going to university not interrupt it?

INTERVIEW

No, but then I wasn’t a very diligent student at university. I spent more time at Virgin. And then one day Richard or Nik phoned me up, and said, ‘We really want you to be part of this, and there’s only one big job left: Simon’s running the record label; Carol Wilson’s running the publishing company; Johnny Fewings is running retail, but we really need someone to run the management company.’ I wasn’t sure, I’d always wanted to work for myself. But they said, ‘Oh don’t worry, you’ll be a shareholder, you’ll be a partner.’ Okay… so what’s involved? Well, the first thing is, we’ve got a Kevin Coyne European tour that needs to be organised. I loved Kevin Coyne, worshiped the guy. I thought he was a cross between Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. And he was a very charismatic man, I knew him because I’d been down to some of the recording sessions with Simon [Draper] by this point, this was 1974. So, yeah, in part because Kevin Coyne was involved, I decided to go for it, despite the fact I had no idea what I was doing. Somehow we got through it. I can’t say I did a brilliant job, but I did my best. We got back, and the money came back with us, which was good. I ran Virgin Management for four years. During that time I discovered that management companies weren’t usually structured the same way mine was. It had been set up by Richard, it was owned by Virgin and all the bands were signed to Virgin Records, and sometimes to Virgin Music [publishing] as well. That felt uncomfortable, How can you negotiate with the record company if your boss owns everything? It was difficult, and I just didn’t see where I could take it under the Virgin umbrella. So I went to Richard and said, ‘I think it’s time for me to go, it’s been a lot of fun, but I really want to do my own thing.’ And he was great, because all the contracts were with Virgin, not with me personally, so he just assigned them all to me. Mainly because they wanted someone to carry on organising the bands’ lives, I suppose, but even so, he didn’t have to do that.

So, I was in the process of setting up my own management company, trying to ensure a smooth transition, when Richard and Nik suddenly said, ‘Don’t go, it’s been a lot of fun, why don’t you join the board of the label?’ And they were right, it had been fun! So I became Deputy Managing Director of the label in 1978. What was that period like for the label, with Simon Draper as Managing Director? Oh we had a fantastic run. Simon and I, I think, worked really well together. You could say I was COO, I just made sure the trains ran on time. Simon could spend all day in a meeting with Jim Kerr talking about the next Simple Minds record, or go and spend the day at the studio with Peter Gabriel, because I made sure everything was

be a good person to run the publishing company? Richard Griffiths is leaving.’ My immediate response was, ‘In all honestly Richard, they’re all wankers, so how about I just stick a pin in a list of names?’ Because, as far as I was concerned… I’d met publishers, and from my perspective they didn’t do anything! They were bankers. We did all the work! We signed the artists, we made the records, we did the marketing campaigns, we promoted the records – and they collected vast amounts of mechanical royalty income on the back of our hard work! [laughs] The only contact I ever had with publishers was when they would come in and blag a box of free records and a T-shirt. So your view, as regards Richard’s question, was, it doesn’t really matter because 1) they don’t do much and 2) they’re all useless anyway? My view, frankly, at the time, was that the guys who work in publishing companies are the guys that aren’t smart enough to get a job at a record company. I discovered later I was wrong. Also, when I found out that Richard Griffiths was going to get a [Virgin affiliate] label, I was pretty upset. Because, well, wouldn’t I be the obvious person to get my own label? I’ve been the number two here at Virgin Records all this time.

“The only contact I had with publishers was when they blagged free records and T-shirts.” running back at Vernon Yard. Of course he made the big strategic decisions but the heads of departments reported to me, I would sign-off on marketing campaigns, video budgets, the general day-to-day running of the place. And we had this golden run where we had Simple Minds, XTC, Culture Club, Phil Collins, Human League, China Crisis, Japan. We had difficult periods, but for quite a while everything we touched seemed to turn to gold. It was wonderful. And was it still just as much fun to work there, as the business got bigger and the expectations grew? It was terrific. When you’re having that amount of success, you’re just hanging on for dear life, trying to keep everything going, but having the time of your life. And then, in ‘83, Richard phoned me up and said, ‘Steve, who do you think would

And of course what Richard Branson meant by, ‘Who do you think should take over publishing?’ was, ‘Will you take over publishing?’ Of course! In fact he phoned me a second time, ‘Have you had any ideas yet?’ And when I said again that I didn’t think any of them were any good, he changed the conversation, he asked me if I thought there was a better way of running publishing. Stupidly, my reply was that it shouldn’t be bloody hard. At which point he said, ‘Fine, you do it.’ I guess I kind of took the bait [laughs]. After that, the brief was: do it any way you like, just make money, nothing more complicated or detailed than that. 93

So this is 1983, and you’re now running a publishing company? And most of the people at that company knew more about publishing than I did when I walked through that door. I remember it took me a while to understand what publishing was, and to get to know the artists that were already signed to me, the artists that had been signed by my predecessors, Carol Wilson and Richard Griffiths

Receiving an ASCAP Award from legendary songwriter Hal David

Who were the stars of that roster you took over? Many of the early signings I’d worked with at the label like Culture Club and Human League were there, as were Tears for Fears, The Pet Shop Boys and a few others I didn’t know. So it was a question of getting to know all of them, whilst also trying to build my own team, which you need to do when you take over. One of my first hires, in fact, was Mike McCormack [now MD of Universal Music Publishing Group UK and one of the most respected figures in the sector], who I brought in as a scout, and who was fantastic for me. He was great and I eventually made him Head of A&R. He’s brilliant at being a writer/artist’s friend and confidant. He has great ears and is so likeable. And then I also had to make successful signings, the first of which was The Dream Academy. From then on, we were on a roll. Initially, you see, Virgin Music was there to publish the artists on Virgin Records. Richard [Griffiths] had changed that a bit, but we just ripped it up and became a properly competitive and extremely successful publisher. It turned out to be a good job that we did, because after I left [Records], they had a bit of a re-organisation – and at the same time Simon stepped back a bit. He wasn’t as interested in the music they were putting out and he wasn’t as engaged in the A&R process. I’m not trying to say the Virgin Records label was less successful because Steve Lewis left. There were many factors at play, but they weren’t breaking many new artists. They were signing established

INTERVIEW

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artists like Bryan Ferry and they were living off the NOW series to some extent, which was no help to me. Having said that, I attended the group A&R meetings, which Simon chaired, and which included the affiliate labels 10 Records and Siren, as a result of which I was first in on Soul II Soul, Cutting Crew and T’Pau, all of whom I signed.

Fine Young Cannibals, Take That, Bros, Terence Trent D’Arby, Alison Moyet, The Farm, we picked up the first Prodigy record and Seal’s first record with Adamski [Killer,

world, which was not easy, but worked well. I had a lot of help doing that from the guys running the various Virgin Records offices in those territories. And then, when Virgin Records opened in America, Richard Griffiths went to run Virgin Music in America. He was technically reporting to me, but I never asked him to actually report to me, just attend meetings now and again, because [Griffiths] was as good a publisher as anyone. He didn’t need my supervision but I needed to coordinate international activity.

“The brief was: do it any way you like, just make money, nothing more complicated than that.”

So the idea of relying on the label was out of the window anyway? Absolutely. My thing was to be successful in our own right. And I was given a completely free hand to run it as I saw fit, independent of the record label. We started signing mostly bands on other labels, and that’s when we really hit our stride. Who were some of the artists/writers you signed?

1990]. It was a terrific list. At the same time we’d gotten to the point where we were paying sub-publishers 15% of our income, when 15% of our income was a huge amount of money. We thought, Why are we paying third parties so much when we could do it ourselves for less? So we set up a network of publishing companies all around the

Did that period in publishing feel like the period you mentioned previously in records with you and Simon at the helm together, when it was home run after home run? Yeah, it felt like we couldn’t miss. The only thing that disappointed me about 95

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that whole period was that I was never quite sure that it was appreciated by Richard and Simon. For instance, I got a reputation for writing large cheques, which was true, but I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t pay more than the competition to get the same rights. I structured deals so I got, say, four albums when everyone else was trying for three. I insisted on long retention periods when others didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. The large advances werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t reckless because I added other protections for us, but the headline number on signature always attracted the attention of the manager and writer! So, when it came to the sale [of the Virgin Music Group], the value in the publishing company had increased by tens of millions of pounds during the period Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been running it. Now, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how much of that was appreciated. I think Simon always saw publishing as banking, which I thought when I was in records as well, so fair enough; I just donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think he ever changed his view. But even if you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t change that view, the fact is, we were a very good banking business! 96

Staying on that, when you joined publishing, how much was it a question of you realising that publishers did more than you thought, and how much was it you actually doing things differently, and more pro-actively, yourself? Both. Most importantly, I wanted to unlock the value of sync and started what I called the Film, TV and Sync department. I think it was the first. As a record company executive, at Virgin Records, I felt publishers werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t helping me sell records. The dynamic had changed in the music industry. Originally, songwriters depended on their publisher to get the songs recorded. By the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;80s most of the writers I signed were artists too, and their primary source of income (and that of their publisher) was from their own recordings of their songs. So I was always frustrated, thinking, Why arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the publishers helping me sell more records? You publish this guy, the more records I sell, the more mechanical royalties youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re going to get, the more performance income, compilation

income, synchronization income etc. I tried to do that when I moved over. I tried to help my writers who were artists sell more records, working either directly with their label or indirectly with management, using my label experience. That was one way I could help my artists. And were those sort of ideas and initiatives acknowledged and appreciated back at Virgin â&#x20AC;&#x201C; when youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re actually moving the needle in terms of sales numbers? Ken Berry, I think, appreciated what I did, but no-one really looked at anything much other than the numbers. So, no, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not sure the nuances were appreciated. I might be wrong. I still see Simon from time to time, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m still in touch with Richard, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m good friends with Nik, so I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want any of this to come across as being angry or sour, because Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m definitely neither of those things, but, put it this way, I now know more about how you value publishing catalogues than I did at the time. At the time Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d never sold a publishing catalogue and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d never bought

INTERVIEW

a publishing catalogue. I always tried to get long retention periods; I always tried to get extra albums. For me, it was about profit and creating long-term capital value. I remember, some of my competitors paying 100% royalty rate, just so they could get the market share! I tried to make sensible deals. Another example: prior to signing Take That to publishing, I’d signed a band called Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, who I liked a lot. The manager said to me, ‘You only need to sign the main songwriter, he’ll write everything but, just in case he wants to record a cover, we’ll only guarantee you an 80% album.’ So we did that deal. The album’s finished, the same manager comes in and says, ‘Do you wanna pick up the other 20% of the album?’ Okay, who wrote that? ‘The rest of the guys in the band – who aren’t signed to you.’ So when I spoke to [Take That manager] Nigel Martin-Smith, he said, ‘You just need to sign Gary, the rest of them are dancers. I said, Well they can have the same deal as the main songwriter – but I do want to sign them all.’ And as a result of that, EMI, after the company was sold, got three Robbie Williams records on a leaving member clause.

talk to me. His office was across a bridge from where publishing was, and we had this conversation saying that most of those people back at Kensal Rise were not wanted by EMI. It was not a particularly happy meeting. I walked back to the office and the staff have set up this whole surprise birthday party to greet me: they’ve put up bunting, they’re singing Happy Birthday, they’ve invited some of our writers. It was all very touching and very lovely, and of course I knew that the vast majority of them were going to lose their jobs very soon.

You mentioned the sale to EMI, when did you first get wind that something was going on? Earlier than most, of course, because we had to start doing the due diligence with EMI. And then the sale itself happened in two parts. It was announced in March [1992], but they had to have a rights issue in June to pay the balance. So the headline in Music Week in March, following the announcement, was, ‘EMI buys Virgin, Lewis heads the list of casualties’. Great. But I knew they didn’t need two UK chief executives, and I wasn’t going to survive. Peter Reichardt ran EMI, they weren’t going to give me his job, and I wasn’t going to work for someone else. So we get past that, and then my birthday is at the end of May. I get a call from Ken [Berry] saying he needed to

How was that time for you – and the process of redundancies for your staff? Well, thankfully, Terry Foster-Key, who was the Deputy Managing Director of EMI, dealt with the redundancies. And I was able to sit down with him and say, ‘Look Terry, this is not a list of names, these are people. I’m going to tell you about these people. I’m going to tell you who’s been here since they were 20, who’s got an alcoholic husband, who is a single mum. I’m going to make sure that you’re aware of all the sensitivities when you’re looking at individual compensation packages.’ And Terry was terrific, very decent and human about it. I can’t really complain. I don’t think any of the Virgin staff that lost their jobs, including myself, would say that EMI were unkind to us or didn’t treat us in the right manner.

Did they not suspect as much? No, not really. I knew I was going because of the MD situation, but the general feeling amongst the staff was, We’re at the top of our game, we’re good at this, we keep winning Publisher of the Year awards – why wouldn’t a new owner want to keep hold of that?

By this point you’d been running publishing for a long time, but you’d been part of Virgin since you were a schoolboy, so how were your emotions as you watched it get swallowed up by EMI? Horrible, just horrible. We had that one big meeting that everyone talks about, where Richard ran out. I phoned him that night, at home, and I said, ‘It feels like a bereavement doesn’t it?’ I’m feeling devastated at this moment – because it was a huge part of my life. I probably define myself a bit too much by what I do. Which is why I said to Richard that it felt like a bereavement, and he said, ‘Oh don’t start me off again, I can’t handle it.’ At which point I just said, ‘Okay, pour yourself a stiff drink, I’m going to do the same, talk to you soon.’ And that was that. Did you have any equity by this stage? No, I had a very good contract, but there was nothing over and above what my contract provided. Fortunately, Ken was really decent about it. We renegotiated most of my contract before I knew that the sale was taking place. One day he called me and said, ‘Steve, time to sign the contract.’ I said, Well, yes, but there are still a couple of outstanding points I need to... ‘Steve, it’s time to sign the contract.’ Ah, right, gotcha. I trusted Ken completely. And so I signed a new long-term contract just before EMI bought the company. And, fortunately for me, EMI by then was run by Ken, so when they settled my contract, they settled it very generously and quickly.

“I phoned Richard that night and said, It feels like a bereavement, doesn’t it?”

What were you thinking in terms of your next steps at this stage? Well, because it was announced in March, I’d had a few months of phone calls coming in, but emotionally I was still all over the place. And I said the same to everybody who got in touch, I’m just going to do this job, I’m finding it really hard, and when I’ve done it, I’m going to take a break and get my thoughts together about what I want to do next. 97

And that’s what I did. I left in June, we went away for the summer, and when the kids had to go back to school in September, we came back. That’s when I started talking to people about various things. And it was incredibly flattering – the number of offers that I had... I was just blown away. One of the first people that got in touch with me was Stuart Slater, who was running Chrysalis Music Publishing at the time. He said, ‘My boss would like to meet you.’ So I had dinner with Chris [Wright], and I remember, I went home thinking, He’s a beaten man. Most of the dinner was him saying he didn’t feel that EMI treated him well. Because Richard had sold 100% for cash, on the nose, I’m out of here. Chris sold 50%, and they were going to sell the second 50% at a pre-determined multiple on a pre-determined date. And he was convinced that they’d depressed the sale price of the second 50%. The dinner was just a long list of grumbles. I came away thinking there must be far more interesting things out there than that! I was 39 years old. I had options; I’ll find something I really, really want to do, thanks very much.

it was only a preliminary conversation and I wasn’t ready to think about next steps. And, honestly, there were a couple of dozen more, tempting to varying degrees.

Can you talk about some of the other opportunities, now that time has passed? Not in great detail, because of course other people ended up getting those jobs. But there was one big job, running a major label group. I told them I didn’t have time to discuss it, I was managing the transition to EMI, the winding down of Virgin Music, dealing with people who were really important to me, but they said they could do it in less than a day. Fair enough. I was flown out to New York on Concorde for a 20-minute meeting and came straight back. Also, I don’t think Paul McGuinness would mind me saying, he got in touch with me and said U2 were setting up a label and a publishing company and they wanted me to be their partner – myself, Paul and the four members of the band as partners. I like Paul a lot, and I liked the challenge of setting up a new company for them, but

excited about the prospect of launching a label, but I wanted a piece of it. Plus, I’m a good publisher, so I want some sort of interest in the publishing company as well. And that’s what we worked out. I was appointed CEO of the Music Division. We founded the Echo label, and publishing and other music activities reported to me as well. When I went in there the NPS was £1.9 million and when I left it was £8.2 million, without making any acquisitions. So if you work on, say, a 10 multiple, that means that the publishing company increased in value under my leadership by about £70 million. But, because it was quite a diverse business, and I had people from all sorts of areas reporting into me, I eventually got pressure from the board to be a bit more hands off, and that sowed the seeds of my eventual disenchantment. I became more corporate, and that’s

So what led you to make the decision you made, and go back to Chrysalis, despite the dinner from hell? I saw Chris again up at a conference in Manchester, and he said, ‘We have to get together; don’t do anything until we’ve spoken.’ He suggested dinner, I thought, uh-oh, here we go again… but he was a different man, he’d got his mojo back. I went to the office and I thought, This feels comfortable, this feels like the sort of culture that I could work in and I liked the new, motivated Chris. We started talking terms and I really wanted to have my own thing there. I didn’t just want to run a label. I was very

a different kind of success, it’s one step removed. For instance, we signed David Gray, and I get some credit for that, but the main credit I should get is for hiring Jeremy Lascelles, who actually signed David Gray, and had the relationship with him. We had a really good run. As well as David, we brought in Portishead and Skunk Anansie, we signed Outkast in the US and became the top UK independent publisher. And on the label side? We had Feeder, Moloko, Babybird… it wasn’t as successful as I would have liked us to have been, but we put out some records that I’m still very proud of. How did that Chrysalis period come to an end? In 2001, we were negotiating a new contract, and I just started wondering if it was what I really wanted to do. I felt I’d got away from the things I really liked. I wasn’t spending time with writers and artists anymore.

“I had dinner with Chris Wright and went home thinking, He’s a beaten man.”

How was Chris as a chairman compared to Richard? Very different. Chris was a music man, he was opinionated about music. But, weirdly, he was also very indecisive. He would say things like, ‘I’m not ruling it out, but I’m not ruling it in either.’ And then, when you made a decision that didn’t work out, he would say, ‘Well, I never really wanted to do that anyway.’ Why didn’t you bloody say so?! Richard was completely hands off, as long as I was making money. I think in some ways I paid a price for that. The companies that got the attention were the ones that weren’t making money. And that fed into what I was doing not always being appreciated by Richard and Simon. Because I just got on with it, and their view was, Oh, we don’t have to worry about publishing, or even talk about publishing, they’re doing fine. Where did you head after leaving Chrysalis in 2001?

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$6&$3 $ZDUGV 1DVKYLOOH ZLWK Stage Three writer and Songwriter RI 7KH <HDU %UHWW -DPHV -HVXV 7DNH 7KH :KHHO DQG PDQDJHU &KLS 3HWUHH

First of all I tried to write a book â&#x20AC;&#x201C; which is still not finished. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know, it was an odd time, my marriage broke up, and I found myself living in a rented apartment, struggling through a divorce, struggling and failing to write a book. Then one day I realised, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not a novelist! I reckon I should go and do some proper work! Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s when I had the idea for Stage Three [founded in 2003], which was a fantastic experience â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and a real crash course in media finance. I had this idea that there were a lot of sleepy publishers out there. Almost literally, because the great thing about publishing is that it makes money for you while youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re asleep. And some people are happy just to accept that. You register your copyrights and regular cheques land on your doormat without you having to do anything more. My thought was, I could probably do a better job with some of those catalogues, and for those writers. So I raised the money, found premises in Notting Hill, and put a really good team together. The business model was based primarily

on acquisition, because itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a proposition investors can understand, whereas theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re frightened by A&R. If I spend ÂŁ100K on a catalogue, then Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not going to lose ÂŁ100K. It might take longer to earn it back, and you might get a very low rate of return, but you know itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s going to come back eventually. But if I pay you ÂŁ100K because I think youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re a fantastic songwriter, and you turn out not to be successful, I have to write the whole lot off. So they didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want me to do A&R, but they did buy into the idea of acquiring catalogues and running them harder, running them better and exploiting them better. Ultimately, though, I persuaded them that the beating heart of a real publishing company is A&R, and the deal was that I could spend 10% of what weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d raised, still a substantial sum, on signing writers so we had what they termed a mixed portfolio. In that mix were catalogues of Aerosmith, ZZ Top, Gerry Rafferty, David Essex, Inner City, Johnny Hates Jazz and, perhaps best

of all, Mike Oldfield, every album going right back to Tubular Bells, the first release on the Virgin Records label. I thought there was some poetry in that. We had a good business, I had a great relationship with the investors, and we were reinvigorating all these catalogues, which obviously benefitted the writers. The one thing that never entered my head was that other people would do the same thing I was doing. Yes, because this is a very common model now, isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it? It is, but it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, at the time. I think you had other people looking in thinking, Oh, if Steve Lewis can do it, I can do it. And on the other side you had investors going, Hang on a minute, Ingenious and Apex Partners are investing in this kind of IP, maybe we should take a look at it. So you had this kind of toxic mix of eager publishers combined with investors that were, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know, agricultural funds for example, who didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really understand 99

tell them they shouldn’t do it. We can all make money, and why would I not do it, just because I’m enjoying myself? That’s not a good enough reason for you guys, I get that. So we sold to BMG [in 2010], and Hartwig [Masuch] was fantastic, he wanted me to stay on. But then we couldn’t work out the exact details of what the role was going to be, and other things started to come along whilst we were trying to do that. But I’ve enormous admiration for what Hartwig has done and I like him as a person. In fact, I phoned him not so long ago and said, ‘Hartwig, I ran Virgin, Chrysalis, and Stage Three, you bought them all, why don’t we save time? I’ll sell you my new business before I even get started!’

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media, but thought it was sexy and wanted to get into it. There were now more people in the market and, at the same time, I was realising that our money was not the same as a pension fund’s money, because they had a different returns requirement to meet. They could pay more and still make the kind of returns that their investors required – which meant prices went up. By then though, we’d had a very good run. And my investors were great; from the very beginning, they were very honest. They said to us, If we can get the return we want by selling the business the day after we buy it, we will. How long did it take in the end? Well, there were offers when these other companies came in to the market and it was clear there was going to be a consolidation. And my investors were very loyal, because I’d been diluted. I owned a majority of 100

it when I started, but I was diluted to a minority shareholder after Apex came in with tens of millions of pounds. So there were a couple of conversations where I had to say, ‘Look, I can’t stop you doing this merger, but at the same time, my service contract says I’m the worldwide CEO, and I’m not going to report to this bloke in America.’ At which point they would say to me, No problem, you’ll run the combined business. And then it just didn’t work out, either because we couldn’t agree valuations, or because the other company’s guy was saying the same thing as I was: I’m not going to work for Steve Lewis! Then one day they called me in and asked me if we could have a chat about BMG KKR. And it was clear from the very beginning of the meeting, this was going to be irresistible. They’d stuck with me for eight years, and I didn’t really have a good reason to

What was that next business going to be? Well I had a couple of conversations with Simon Cowell, we talked about setting up a publishing company together. And I honestly don’t know why we didn’t do it. We had a couple of great meetings at his house, one before I set up Stage Three, and then again after I sold. Both times it was like, We’ve really got to do this. And we still haven’t! And he still hasn’t started a publishing company as far as I know If he’d have gone out and hired someone else, I’d think, Oh, he just preferred them to me. But he’s never done it, so who knows. I like Simon a lot, and the thing that most impressed me about him was he’s a real song man. It’s not just about the money with him although, he’s obviously very smart as far as that’s concerned, but he loves songs, and he knows there’s no music business without songs. I know it’s a cliché for publishers to say that, but I believe it; that’s where it all starts, and it fascinates me. Where do those songs come from? How do you fucking do that?! I think that’s why I love publishing. Are there any artists you nearly signed and just missed out on? Is there the one that got away? Well, yeah, The Spice Girls. I was the CEO of the Music Division of Chrysalis. They came in and I heard the demo, which was

INTERVIEW

great. I’ve still got it at home. It just says, ‘Spice’ on the cassette box, they weren’t even called Spice Girls then, just Spice. The songs were great, Simon Fuller was the manager, and they were going to be successful. But we were competing with Fuji Pacific, a Japanese company that were setting up their office over here, and they wanted a flagship signing to show that they were in business. The deal was virtually our entire remaining annual global A&R budget, the royalty rate was eye watering and the retention period was really short. I took the view that they had to become the biggest band in the world to justify those terms. Guess what… There was a nice personal upside to that, though. I was in LA on holiday, and the Spice Girls checked into our hotel. I was with my family and my son, Max, who was about eight at the time said, Dad, can I ask them for an autograph? I said, Yes but be very polite. So he goes over to Emma Bunton, she’s sitting at the other end of the pool to where we are, I can’t hear what he says, but I see her roar with laughter. And then she comes over to me and says, ‘Is he yours?’ Uh-oh. I said, ‘He is, why? What’s he done?!’ She said, He came over to me and he said, ‘My dad’s the idiot that didn’t sign you. Can I have your autograph instead?’ So, yeah, my son signed the Spice Girls, where I blew it.

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Do you think some independent publishers are building businesses with the sole goal of being bought? That’s a very good question, and one that makes a point with which I don’t disagree. I think if you’re just accumulating assets with a view to an exit, then you’re probably not going to do a very good job. I don’t want to sound hypocritical here, I always knew that Stage Three was going to be sold and I always made deals that reflected the fact that I needed to have a package of rights to sell that was attractive. Besides, I hoped to buy out my investors. I had the right to match the best offer, but in the event I couldn’t afford to exercise it and also keep the overhead, which BMG eliminated when they bought the company. So yes, of course it influences you, and anybody who thinks that the music industry isn’t about making money in the 21st century is delusional. But I also think that, if you’re in publishing, after paying the rent and keeping the lights on, the priority is doing a great job for your writers – that’s what a great publisher does, and that’s what ultimately creates value. Q

“Where do songs come from? How do they fucking do that?! That’s why I love publishing.” Obviously Hipgnosis are extremely acquisitive right now. What do you think of what they’re doing? Good luck to them.

Are publishing valuations getting scary? Yes.

What do you think of the impact Kobalt are having? I admire Willard, I admire his vision, and I hope that the execution is able to keep up with the concept.

And where does that lead? It will end in tears for some companies that are overpaying, as it did when there was a consolidation first time around, when BMG were the consolidators. I believe that most of Stage Three’s competitors lost money for their investors. Although the catalogues always earn, the overhead has to be covered. And I think there’s a possibility, if these multiples keep rising at this sort of rate, that the same thing could happen again.

What do you think about the current split between records versus publishing on Spotify and other streaming services? I think the songwriters are being done a terrible disservice. They should be getting a larger share of the royalties and more recognition. I also think it should be easier to find out more about who wrote the songs that you’re listening to. I know they’re trying to address that, but that’s a problem for me right now.

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GALLERY

To North London! And the offices of United Talent Agency, where Booking Agent Heulwen Keyte shows and tells with posters, football shirts and – bigup The Generation Game – a cuddly toy!

eulwen Keyte’s dad was an opera singer, her mother was a music teacher (earning an MBE for her efforts) and her brother is a professional pianist/harpist. There would have been nothing stopping her from ending up in an anarcho-punk collective, of course. But Keyte has perhaps ended up following a music-related path that more neatly befits her family tree – at one of the biggest talent agencies in the world, helping further the careers and expand the audiences of artists in the booming classical/crossover space. Keyte initially completed a degree in music, but felt she “wasn’t competitive enough” to consider carving out a career as a performer. Instead, she landed an internship at IMG’s UK office, in Chiswick, then still run by the legendary sports agent, Mark McCormack. “I stayed on as an assistant then became a manager there,” explains Keyte. “My first seven years straight out of uni were at IMG, which was great fun because Mark was still running it, so we had access to all these other parts of the business, which was quite eyeopening. And I was working with core classical people, the leading opera singers in the world, including Anna Netrebko, which was great.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the Thames, Neil Warnock, founder of The Agency Group (which was later acquired by United Talent Agency in 2015), was looking after Katherine Jenkins – and

realising there was something potentially lucrative going on. “It was the beginning of this boom in classical crossover,” says Keyte. “Neil became aware of the work I was doing over at IMG Artists and decided it was an area of business that he wanted the company to get into, so he brought me across. “That was 13 years ago. We started from nothing, with no-one really looking after that space. Now we have a team of six here and eight in the States.” The crossover boom, she says, has never really let up. Alongside the success of household names like Alfie Boe and Jenkins, there are serious careers and huge shows for artists that Keyte says “are some of the biggest stars you don’t necessarily know about”. “The Piano Guys sold out two Albert Halls. A lot of people might not know who they are, but their YouTube and streaming numbers plus their online presence adds up to a trajectory of ticket sales worldwide which they’ve built and built. And a lot of these artists lead on live. Some release an album and tour on cycle, but they tour the rest of the year as well. They tour all the time. “The breadth of what they do is huge, which is really exciting for us, because there are so many routes into each market. We’re not waiting for the label to release an album and set up some promo, we’re leading it ourselves when it comes to building careers and audiences.”

“We’re not waiting for labels, we’re leading when it comes to building careers.”

103

104

ALFIE BOE ONE MILLION ALBUMS POSTER I signed Alfie Boe within six months of arriving here at UTA, so I’ve been working with him for 12 years now – from the very beginnings when he signed an album deal with Classic FM. He was then known as Britain’s favourite operatic tenor, but what has happened to him since has been a trajectory through musical theatre, through the ‘Les Mis’ moment – when he performed as Jean Valjean in the show’s 25th anniversary performance at the O2, shown in cinemas around the world – and on to his current run of album success. But I think what people sometimes forget is that Alfie had sold over a million albums before the Ball & Boe project had even been thought of. This poster celebrates three of his albums [Alfie Boe, Bring Him Home, Storyteller] selling a million between them in the UK. He’s such a versatile artist, he’s done Classic Quadrophenia [at the Royal Albert Hall in 2015], he loves his rock, he loves his country music and Americana – and he’s great fun to work with, a really likeable chap and incredibly hard working. I love clients with that sort of diversity.

CUDDLY TOYS FROM KATHERINE JENKINS Katherine Jenkins was here when I joined, and in many ways was the catalyst for our department as it stands now. Neil [Warnock], drove the success she was having and knew that they [The Agency Group] wanted to expand in that area, so he asked me to join and I took it from there. Katherine has been really important to me and my career – she still is. In 2008 we teamed her with Darcey Bussell when the two of them decided to put together a show celebrating their heroines [the sell-out, 17-date Viva La Diva tour] and female icons. It was a huge success and Katherine gave me two teddy bears in top hats from the merch from that show. I’d mainly been doing concert work before then, and that was my first step into theatre. I now have 8-10 leading West End and Broadway artists. Katherine is a brilliant business woman. She’s got two little children now, in fact her eldest is a month older than mine, so it was perfectly timed in terms of us both taking a bit of time off – although not planned, I should say!

GALLERY

3 WALES FOOTBALL SHIRT FROM 2016 EUROPEAN CHAMPIONSHIPS This is from the Welsh squad that got to the semi-finals of the Euros in 2016. As a proud Welsh woman I’m thrilled to have it, but it’s also a nice link to having worked with the Welsh FA, and other organisations, on lots of major events. We’ve had artists at Champions League finals, we’ve had artists at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert. Most recently we had the Invictus Games in Australia, which of course is Prince Harry’s charity, and we had The Kingdom Choir (who also sang at his wedding) out there. I do have a piece of paper showing me whose signature is where, but I can definitely point out Gareth Bale, because I’m a Spurs fan as well as a Wales fan.

A PROP PIE FROM WAITRESS Waitress is a fantastic West End show, currently running at the Adelphi in London, and I represent Marisha Wallace, who is in the cast, and was previously in Dreamgirls. We’re working with her to carve out a soul trajectory. In a year’s time, when people talk about her, which they will, I want them to say, soul singer – and West End star – Marisha Wallace, because she’s a fantastic soul voice who happens to be in a show. To that end we’ve been doing some key positioning shows, she played Love Supreme Festival, for example, this summer, and she did the London Jazz Festival last year. At the moment she’s in the studio, working on original material. Currently when she does a headline set, she does 80/20 covers; by the time we reach festival season next year, that will be completely flipped.

4 PETER BLAKE ROYAL ALBERT HALL ARTWORK The Royal Albert Hall commissioned Peter Blake to create some artwork for their new foyer. That’s where the original is, but there were also 500 prints, and I’m lucky enough to have one. 2021 is the 150th anniversary of the Royal Albert Hall and I’m one of the ambassadors of that campaign, with UTA’s own Neil Warnock as the Chair of the Committee. For many of the artists I work with, it’s the ultimate goal. You combine the prestige of the place with the quality of the room and the brand new sound system and it’s on its own. Even people like Gilmour and Clapton don’t want to do arenas, they want to do five nights at the Royal Albert Hall instead. For our artists it’s most definitely a ‘bucket list’ venue.

105

THE ALBUM: OUT NOW? Ben Wardle toiled within the industry’s A&R machinery during a period of the music business when the album was king. Now, he’s watching the format's current status, and wondering what the future holds...

key plot device in recent Beatlesamnesia blockbuster Yesterday hinges on the impending album release by its central character Jack Malik. His 'agent' (screenwriter Richard Curtis’ catchall for manager/record label exec/promotor) signs Malik – the only person who’s heard [of ] the Beatles – to her label. She then proceeds to prepare the marketing plot for the worldwide release of his debut album, One Man Only. As a populist, Curtis knows that anyone over 30 is as familiar with the idea of an artist releasing an album as they are with an author publishing a novel or a director releasing a movie. After all, as a concept, the album has been with us for over 70 years. Indeed, it is appropriate that a film about the power of the Fabs’ music should include reference to a format which they largely invented: not just the album but the album as a ‘story’. But does anyone under 30 still care? And, if not, is the music business doing anything to prepare for that level of indifference? In a blog post earlier this year entitled ‘Preparing For The Post-Album Music Industry’, research company MIDiA’s Keith Jopling acknowledged that the album “is still the format that drives industry economics as a whole”, before going on to refer to data which shows that from Q3 to Q4 2018, the percentage of adults claiming to listen to albums in their entirety dropped from 24% to 16%. Jopling is right about the album driving industry economics. But it’s not just the cash that album sales still generate for the industry (32 million UK CD sales in 2018): every cog in the current pop machine still revolves around the format. The LP acts as a measure of popularity, as a way of commissioning money for management and publishing; as an excuse for touring; as a medium for festival bills which require ‘name’ (read: ‘album’) artists to pull in big crowds; as feature content for digital, broadcast and print media; as a career for all the A&R, legal, recording, and marketing talent 106

“The percentage of adults listening to albums in full dropped to 16%.”

responsible for deal negotiation, production and promotion. Key to all this is the traditional options-based albums deal, which still appears to be alive and kicking 20 years on from the Napster-led file sharing apocalypse. Since Napster, the industry has gone through denial, rage, resignation and, more recently, rebirth. But the positive statistics reported by ERA at the start of this year (the UK’s spend on recorded music in 2018 was up 8.9% year-onyear, with the second annual increase of £100 million-plus) does not fully obscure the truth of the BPI’s data, which reported album unit sales down by 22.1% – the steepest drop since 2013. The growth in spend is, of course, down to streaming. But this format is even less inclined to be bothered about albums than downloading was, despite what Apple Music’s Oliver Schusser stated in March: “[Apple Music] still emphasizes albums because we understand their value as a storytelling tool for artists.” The word ‘story’ now crops up regularly in the current discourse about the album. What does it mean? It’s

INTERVIEW

Yesterday tells the story of a world in which, to everyone but Jack Malik, the Beatles never existed

certainly been chosen for its Instagram value but, crucially, it also suggests an artistry and coherence that may be lacking in a selection of songs on a greatest hits collection or a playlist; the difference between, say, Please Please Me, with Love Me Do and 13 other songs, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But are music consumers as interested in the ‘stories’ of artists as the artists are in telling them? Or has the attention economy made us more inclined to skim a couple of the best chapters on YouTube before moving on? In this year’s BPI Annual Report, Geoff Taylor excitedly states that more people are accessing music because of streaming “complemented by collectable physical formats on vinyl, CD and super-deluxe box sets.” Yet if the album merely becomes a format that ‘complements’ streaming then it will die with middle-aged vinyl collectors like myself because, despite Schusser’s statement,

“If the album merely becomes a ‘complement’ to streaming, it will die.”

the streaming experience is one much more geared to playlists and individual songs than promoting albums in their entirety. This is not a conspiracy to kill the format, it’s simply responding to how most music listeners behave. Unlike fans or collectors, most people simply want to hear the tunes they like, regardless of ‘story’. For this year’s National Album Day, the BPI co-opted various high-profile musicians to speak on the format’s behalf. Instagram genius Lewis Capaldi cannily turned the subject round to his own LP, via a line recycled from that record’s initial promotional run: “On the whole I’m very proud of it... I won’t lie, there’s probably a few stinkers on there, but I’m only human.” It’s typical Capaldi self-deprecation, but it contains a key truth: the record industry has historically based its entire business model on said stinkers. 107

Billie Eilish's When We Go To Sleep, Where Do We Go? is a true breakthrough album in 2019

The good news is that artists can no longer get away with sneaking makeweight tracks onto their releases. They need to develop genuine relationships with their audience (as Capaldi has done so well), not just via their socials and live shows but also via the quality of their music – because the public no longer have to buy their work to hear it. In pre-digital days, fans who invested cash in an album but weren’t convinced on first listen, more often than not gave the thing a few plays to see if it was a 'grower'. Noone has time for growers now; there’s too much choice. To work on streaming platforms, tracks need to work fast and benefit from repeated listening. It’s a tall order, yet artists such as Billie Eilish, The 1975, Kamasi Washington and plenty more have managed to do it. And crucially, the albums they proffer are coherent stories, not just a collection of tracks. This year’s Mercury Prize shortlist is full of such albums and one of the best lists yet: Dave’s Psychodrama, Slowthai’s Nothing Great About Britain and Idles’ Joy As An Act Of Resistance all tell stories both personal and political. And, crucially, they connect instantly and bear repeated listening. To this listener, at least. 108

“No-one has time for growers now; there’s too much choice.”

Yet will these albums make it to the ears of casual listeners? Or are the Mercury Prize and National Album Day just preaching to the over30s, 6Music converted? Lewis Capaldi’s Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent has already gone Platinum, but – similar to the only Goldcertified album by a new British artist album last year (Anne-Marie’s Speak Your Mind) – it’s been boosted by two years’ streaming promotion of individual singles. Despite whatever ‘stinkers’ it might contain, it’s a very different ‘story’. The central conceit in Yesterday is that a power outage results in no-one knowing the Beatles apart from one man. To the rest of us, they never existed. So the succession of ‘story’-like classic albums they made and inspired, and the respect they ultimately secured for pop music as an art form, would never have happened. If this story played out in 2019 for real, no-one would consider releasing or buying an album by Jack Malik because the music industry would never have fallen in love with the format back in the 1960s. It would have continued to follow the 1950s-era hit song formula – and the current paradigm shift from physical to streaming would be as seamless as side two of Abbey Road.

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INTERVIEW

‘THIS HAS BEEN A STORY OF A SHARED VISION AND RUNNING OUR OWN RACE, AT OUR OWN PACE’ Covert Talent has really made its mark as a leading UK artist management company over the past 12 months via its work with Tom Walker, the BRIT-award winning, chart-topping Scottish singer-songwriter signed to Sony’s Relentless. Founder Simon King discusses Walker’s journey so far, and the plan to secure his status as a long-term career artist...

h my God. Thank you so much to anybody who listens to my music… to my management team, Simon King and Jake Tasker, absolute legends; to my label Relentless, big up Shabs, absolute hero… to my gran who’s watching somewhere on telly. Yes gran! Here we are!” Witnessing the awestruck expression on Tom Walker’s face when winning the Best British Breakthrough BRIT Award in February, you could be forgiven for thinking his climb to the top of the music industry was supernova-level in its suddenness. The sincerity of the Scottish singer-songwriter’s surprise at that ceremony was purely expressed – but his rise to prominence in this complex, streaming-dominated world hasn’t been straightforward. Walker must now be considered a bona fide British breakthrough star. His smash single, Leave A Light On – co-written with Steve Mac – not only has over 250 million plays on Spotify, but also, according to Radiomonitor, was the fifth mostplayed track on radio across Europe in 2018, with 14.78bn impressions (i.e. separate individual listens). It was also the biggest radio hit in France last year, beating out the likes of Maroon 5, Imagine Dragons and Shawn Mendes. Another major hit, Just You And I , has already racked up 117.5m streams on Spotify, and is Europe’s 36th biggest radio hit so far this year, with over 5bn impressions. And Walker’s debut album, What A Time To Be Alive, released in March, hit No.1 in the UK and has since gone Gold. Walker signed to London-based Covert Talent for management five years ago after the company’s founder, Simon King (pictured), heard an early demo. Up until this point, King had been better known for working with producers and songwriters (including Belle Humble, who wrote for Paloma Faith and Alexandra Burke), as well as being heavily involved in classical crossover ‘Q4’ artists including choirboy Jack Topping and the sea shanty sensations, Fisherman's Friends.

With Walker, King spotted an opportunity to build and break a self-contained singer-songwriter – but it didn't take too long before it dawned on the pair that theirs was something of a crowded lane. According to King, Walker’s emergence as a standout talent in a competitive field has relied hugely on the Scottish artist’s musicianship – but it’s also been a lesson in persistence and patience. Covert Talent was originally formed ‘under the radar’ whilst King worked other jobs in the industry (that's why he named it Covert, see). In 2010, King left his long-time role at Universal Music Publishing Group to run the company full-time, whilst also consulting for the late Jazz Summers at Big Life, in their publishing division. Today, Covert continues to manage artists, songwriters and producers. Alongside Walker, it also represents songwriter Alex Stacey (signed to Mike Caren’s Artist Publishing Group) and writer/producer Hight, and it has also recently taken on a few new development clients. In addition, King – a former music supervisor and A&R figure at agency BBH – runs a production music library, Sauce Music, and is set to launch Covert’s own indie publishing arm later this year. Here, King explains to MBUK how Covert, working closely with Relentless, has battled to ensure Tom Walker got his time in the limelight – and what’s next for the artist and his management company....

“We purposefully avoided inﬂated hype. We won a lot of friends, bit by bit.”

You had some notable successes after you left UMPG in 2010 – not least a Top 10 UK album for the Fisherman’s Friends. At what point did Tom come into the picture? Around five and a half years ago. I was mainly managing songwriters and producers and the business was doing well. Then a friend of mine who was a music lecturer at the London Contemporary College of Music sent me a song of Tom’s. This was a year before I met him and I thought, ‘It sounds good but I’m not convinced 111

Tom Walker currently has 9 million global monthly listeners on Spotify

he’s quite sure of who he is as an artist just yet.’ Then, a year later, that same friend sent me another track, Home, which had been produced by Tom’s housemate, Nima, from the group Whilk & Misky, and I instantly knew it was something special. I remember exactly where I was when I heard it. His voice was amazing, the production was interesting; he had really found the beginning of something great. I asked to be introduced to Tom, we met in the coffee shop next door to my office and we just hit it off. Fade Away was another track he had at that time, which eventually made it on to his debut album. I started putting Tom in writing sessions and one of the first tracks he came up with was Hot 2 Touch, with another great writer/producer we manage, Tim Deal, aka Hight. That later became a No.1 airplay record in Germany for Felix Jaehn and has since gone Platinum. How did Relentless Records get involved? We were helping do some remixes with Relentless at the time and they heard [the Hot 2 Touch] demo featuring Tom's voice. Jamie Croz [Head Of A&R, Relentless] took me for lunch; I was 112

expecting him to talk to me about a production deal for Hight. In fact, he was like ‘Who's this voice? Who's this guy?’ I explained, ‘It's a new artist and we're not ready to talk to labels right now, but thank you very much. We'll come back to you when we are.’ Then Shabs [Jobanputra, MD, Relentless] pursued… and kept pursuing! He said, ‘Look can I just come down to a rehearsal, just to hear Tom perform?’ Eventually, I agreed and Shabs came down and, in typical fashion, brought 10 people from the label along with him! When we walked out of that session, he laid his cards out and said, ‘I really, really want to do this.’ He convinced you? Absolutely. And he took the time to really get to know Tom. I’ve known Shabs for a number of years. At that point he’d had three years for Relentless to find its feet within the Sony system and was building a really good team around him. It felt like the right choice. I’m not a big fan of starting a bidding war for artists, and we didn’t shop Tom for a deal. We went in early and agreed to develop it together with Relentless from the ground up and take

INTERVIEW

our time. The deal was sensible and it meant we would stay off the radar of business affairs or anyone wanting a quick return on the investment at Sony, that we could grow organically and look to the long-term rather than having a quick hit. Some people suggest that if you shop an artist around the industry you risk creating a situation where a lot of people, when they’re rejected, will secretly hope your artist will fail. I like to be very open and upfront with people. If you shop an artist around and use everybody else to drive up the price of the deal, it’s not a shock that people then get resentful. You obviously have to make sure you find the right home for your artist and get the right deal, but it's all about how you treat people. For me, the best deals, like with Shabs and Relentless, are those when someone hears something and goes with their gut at an early stage: ‘I love this, I completely believe in it and share the artist’s vision.’ That way you can build steadily, put the right team around an artist and get everyone else excited over a period of time. This is a day and age when there are more options for you to do things independently. What does an attractive early-stage major label deal look like to you? I think it's about a sensible advance that allows the artist to live, but isn’t at the level where people are hurrying you to finish your album or put music out. It’s about getting a sensible, short number of options so the label knows they're going to get a return on their investment if it does well. But, at the same time, you’d always like a chance to renegotiate or review things down the line, so you’re not locked to a stringent deal for years and years. A sensible share of ancillaries is also important. Obviously no ancillaries is ideal, but its unlikely these days unless you’re already a successful artist. I don't believe in giving a share of gross live revenue; that's insane. But a sensible share of net can be acceptable, especially if the label financially tour-supports the artist properly.

What was the UK media support like in those early days? It's been interesting. Each single we released had a different effect. The first single we put out, [Sun Goes Down in 2016] was supported by Annie Mac and BBC Radio 1. That gave us a little bit of a ‘cool’ factor. And then the following single [Fly Away With Me] didn't get any radio play at all – but Spotify and YouTube really supported it. So that was our first expansion into streaming, which also helped us build Tom’s live fanbase. And then the next single [Play Dead] didn’t get much streaming but it got us a Radio 1 BBC Introducing Track of the Week. So it seemed like every track we released was another part of the jigsaw puzzle, but wasn't necessarily bringing everything together. We were at a point where Tom had some amazing songs, but radio stations were saying to us, ‘These are big day time radio hits, you need to go and build him through specialists first.’ Then the specialists would say, ‘These are big day time hits, so they're not specialist enough for us.’ We got to a point where I was a bit worried we were stuck between a rock and a hard place. What was the breakthrough? The Radio 1 Brit List was a massive turning point. [Radio 1 Head of Music] Chris Price and his team confirmed we were going to get support for our next three singles. MistaJam was an early champion, and he backed the first track [of this trio], Heartland, which Tom wrote with Naughty Boy, and that crossed over on the B-list at Radio 1 and 1Xtra. And then Leave a Light On came in October 2017.

“I’m not a big fan of starting a bidding war for an artist.”

What was the lay of the land like when you signed to Relentless? We came up when there were a lot of hype artists around, and a lot of male singer-songwriters. I remember BBC Radio 1 sent out a tweet naming about 20 male singer/songwriters at the time, saying, Who’s going to be the one that cuts through?’ The whole industry was speculating and it often felt like Tom was the underdog as he wasn’t always in, or as high up as others, in the various polls, but we were cool with that and just stuck to our way of working and kept on building steadily whilst purposely avoiding getting pulled into any inflated hype. We won a lot of friends, bit by bit. For Tom, he always exceeds expectations, but it’s very much been a story of a shared vision and running our own race, at our own pace.

The track that changed everything! Exactly. What was interesting about that track is that it initially reached No. 41 in the UK singles charts. We were A-list at Radio 1 and then we got Radio 2 as well, but it seemed to hit a bit of a ceiling. Then, while we’d released it in the UK, it was building throughout Italy, becoming a hit and getting Top 10 in the radioplay chart out there. And then that momentum spread through Austria, Switzerland, Germany and France as well. Things really got supercharged when we got a [Europe-wide] Sony Bravia ad sync. That escalated the track in Germany [where it hit No.8]. So then at home in the UK we took the decision to go straight back again with the single in conjunction with the Sony Bravia advert, and we went Top 10. It really then spread around most of the world. When you have a big breakthrough track moment like that how do you build on it and capitalize on it? Tom did everything. We tried to take every single, suitable, opportunity we were offered. From radio events to TV, wherever it was, Tom worked so hard. He took about 127 flights last year and 113

Celebrating a million sales: Shabs Jobanputra, Tom Walker and Simon King

was touring or promoting constantly. That helped us build some great foundations, as well as relationships internationally with the DSPs, radio stations, TV shows, promoters and fans everywhere. For example, we did a collaboration with an Italian artist [Marco Mengoni] which allowed us to tap in to the domestic audience there and establish Tom as a household name. Off the back of that we performed at San Remo Festival for 15 million people on TV. Now when Tom arrives in Italy he gets mobbed at the airport, chased by paparazzi on motorbikes. It’s crazy but fun! Tom has been touring and promoting in the UK and across Europe for the last three or four years. We’ve very much done it the old fashioned way of building up a live fan base, putting out records, and then further building on that foundation. We are fortunate that Relentless and Sony International have supported us to build Tom’s live business and with Olly Hodgson and Sol Parker at [live agency] Paradigm we are continuing to grow it internationally. The goal is for him to become a long-term career artist sustained by both live and records; album one will give us a strong foundation, album two will build on that and we’ll just keep growing his career. That’s the way classic artists like U2, R.E.M and even Coldplay, more recently, built their careers. It wasn't about a massive flash-in-the-pan hit. Of course this is also a very different time and we need to constantly adapt our approach within this ever-changing industry. 114

Streaming is a very demanding environment in which to build an artist like that. It’s possibly harder nowadays to globally develop than it was in the era of U2 – you have to keep feeding the beast, while managing radio too. What we’ve found really hard is that different territories move at different paces. For us, Leave a Light On took about eight months to peak. It just kept on going and going. But, as some territories were moving on, and we [were ready] to release another single, it was still one of the highest radio played records in other markets. Radio station feedback was, ‘Actually we're good. Thanks but we are still playing this record.’ That situation is a blessing and a curse. You want to maximise the success, but also to carry on building the story of the artist – so you have to either be patient or maybe just focus on streaming, which brings its own challenges. We get a lot of good support from Apple Music and Spotify [in the UK/Europe], but I’ve also been out to the US nearly every other month this year to constantly push Tom to streaming gatekeepers there too. Generally speaking, Leave a Light On was very much driven by radio. Radio seemed ahead of DSPs at the start, then the DSPs caught up. In other places the DSPs were ahead of the game. You need all the stars to align to give the whole international story the right level of power; it’s not just about streaming, and it’s not just about radio. They look at what each other are doing so you have to work at it all.

INTERVIEW

personally connects with and in turn fans do too. We have tried lots of different producers, but that’s a different thing. That’s about bringing out the best bits in the songs and developing his sound.

Signing Alex Stacey to Mike Caren's APG

How important was the BRIT Award win in that journey of getting people to know who Tom is as a character? It was amazing and unexpected. Tom and the entire team worked hard to campaign because it was a public vote. We didn’t have the size of social media following some of the others did, so we had to approach it in a more old school way and do a mix of guerrilla marketing and just getting Tom out in front of people, especially focusing on his Scottish and Northern fan-base. When it was announced Tom won, it was an amazing moment and I think Tom’s genuine reaction really resonated with the general public. It was a ‘join the dots’ moment, solidifying all the previous TV appearances and showing his personality. He became a real person to a lot of people off the back of that.

What have Relentless and Sony brought to the table? Relentless feels like a slightly rebellious independent record label within the major infrastructure, which I loved. Shabs, when he wants to, can move mountains. He's super passionate about the people he signs. What I loved about him before we signed, and certainly now, was that he sticks by his artists and really follows through. Shabs often drives me mad with his crazy ideas and energy but, pointed in the right direction, it is a powerful force. He also has a great marketing team around him: Ben Coates [General Manager], Hannah Colson [Senior Marketing Manager] and Roland Hill [Marketing Consultant]. We knew Relentless didn’t have many artists on its roster, so we’d be likely to get a decent amount of focus and energy, and that’s happened. They have a great team in-house and we also brought in an amazing freelance team to support key areas of the campaign. We’ve also benefited hugely from Mark Collen, his team and the Sony international infrastructure, which has been incredible. They really got behind us and we had the international conversations from very early on to try and build Tom. Sony has been great across the board, from marketing to allowing Tom to do what he wants to do on a creative level. But also having the strategic and creative drive of Shabs and the label team. We’ve also been lucky that both Jason Iley and Rob Stringer have been huge supporters of Tom. It genuinely feels the whole of Sony are behind him from all departments. Is the USA the next big ambition for Tom? Yeah definitely. We've still got a lot of work to do in the US; obviously it's a very hard territory to crack. We're still building, and we haven't quite necessarily positioned ourselves in the way I’d like yet in the States. That’s not to say we haven’t achieved some great stuff over there already: Tom’s selling out venues, and he’s performed on the Late Late Show with James Corden as well as The Today Show etc. I guess it still fits in with our long-term plan of just keep growing. America is definitely something we want to expand into and really conquer. But I’m more than happy for it to take a little bit longer and build a more solid foundation.

“Tom’s one of the few artist/songwriters to have a hit with a 100% [written] track.”

Industry-wise, what other things mark Tom out as unique? Aside from his incredible voice and work ethic, I will say he’s one of the few artist/songwriters who's had a hit with 100% track: Just You and I was 100% written by Tom and most of his songs are either 100% original, co-written with one or a maximum of two other writers. Leave a Light On was 50/50 with Steve Mac. It was a four hour writing session and the first song they ever wrote together after Mike McCormack [MD, Universal Music Publishing Group UK] introduced us to Steve. We as a company fell in love with Tom's songs from the get go. My background is publishing so I'm very song-driven anyway. As a rule, anyone I manage has to be a great songwriter and have his or her own personality as a writer. We never felt like we needed to get in a dozen people to help rework and rewrite Tom’s tracks. That’s not who Tom is. He’s a self-contained artist/songwriter who writes great songs that he

Outside of Tom, what does the next chapter look like for Covert Talent? We’ve just set up our new home in London Bridge, where we will look to develop the company further, growing into the world of publishing, and we're also developing some great new talent which we aim to break internationally in the near future. Q 115

Photo: Oli Marlow

‘YOU DON'T NEED 50 PEOPLE WORKING ON ARTISTS TO DEVELOP THEM’ Alex Bean is the co-founder, General Manager and Director of London-based 37 Adventures. Here, Bean tells MBUK how the indie record label and artist management company, co-founded with ex-XL A&R and 679 Recordings founder Nick Worthington, is dedicated to finding and nurturing new pop artists... 116

INTERVIEW

ndependent and pop don't usually go together,” says 37 Adventures co-founder Alex Bean, from across the table at the company’s new spiral staircase-accessed office space in East London. The reason for this, explains Bean, is because “pop music generally feels like it came from big industry machines”. “It’s because of that long term development thing,” she adds.“[Pop A&R] takes a long time and a lot of independent labels don’t have the resources. There’s also the financial element. Pop’s an expensive-looking and sounding entity.” 37 Adventures aims to disprove the theory that pop music requires a huge “machine” behind it to be successful. Described as an “independent boutique pop label”, the Londonbased company’s co-founders, Alex Bean and Nick Worthington, have drawn on their years of experience “sonically and visually” to develop a small roster of pop artists that they say are “able to compete on the world stage”. “You don’t need 50 people to be working on artists to develop them,” says Bean. “You just need a small team who are dedicated, and who have got time and a really clear vision and focus.” 37 Adventures’ mission is helped by the fact that Bean, an ex-Pure Groove Label Manager, and Worthington, a former XL Recordings A&R, are experts at identifying and developing culturally impactful alt-pop artists. The pair previously worked together at 679 Recordings, a label set up by Worthington in partnership with Warner Music in 2001. 679 released The Streets’ first album, Original Pirate Material, and million-selling follow up, A Grand Don’t Come For Free. It was also the home of releases like the Futureheads’ self-titled debut, Kano’s first album Home Sweet Home and Plan B’s Who Needs Actions When You Got Words, plus releases by Marina And The Diamonds and Little Boots. Plan B’s No.1 second album, The Defamation of Strickland Banks, a critical and commercial smash, was also a 679 Recordings release. “That was fascinating to watch up close, how an album can go from that very basic demo stage to, ‘Oh look, there’s your BRIT Award, there's your sold-out O2,” remembers Bean. “I absolutely loved the 679 years because every week was so exciting and we released some classic alternative pop albums. That definitely gave us the basis for what we brought over to 37 Adventures.” Since launching in 2013, 37 Adventures has put its “boutique pop” philosophy to work on campaigns for the likes of JONES, whose debut album New Skin was released in 2016. The artist’s songs have been streamed tens of millions of times on Spotify and she recently signed with BMG. Fellow 37 Adventures alumni Emily Burns’ debut EP Seven Scenes From The Same Summer was released by the label in 2018, with the artist having more recently signed with Island.

The current 37 roster features the likes of Australian duo Geowulf, whose single Saltwater has been streamed 20m times on Spotify alone and was used in a Corona advert for two straight years, plus pop collective Studio Black, whose debut single Friends Don’t Kiss Friends is nearing 10 million streams on Spotify. 37 Adventures celebrated its 100th release in 2018 and has recently entered into a partnership with Black Butter/Sony Music, which Bean tells Music Business UK “enables the label to use their weight and resources when needed”. The above-mentioned streaming numbers are evidence that Bean and Worthington’s approach to running a label is working – and the past six years have seen them demonstrate what can be achieved in alternative pop music with a small but dedicated team, plus strong relationships with management, producers and artists. “That is probably the most interesting part of where we are and what we’re doing,” says Bean. “I don't really know how many other labels are doing that; finding artists very early doors, no press pictures, no socials, barely a demo. Just a lot of attitude – in the best possible way...” Are there any labels, historically, that you’ve looked at in terms of a model that you wanted to base 37 Adventures on? Or alternatively did you think, ‘There really isn’t a model that we could base this label on, so we need to pioneer what we’re trying to do?’ I guess the closest reference point is probably XL. Nick Worthington and I co-founded [37 Adventures] together. I met Nick because I used to work for Pure Groove, which was a record shop in Archway, and then in Farringdon, that he was a co-founder of back in the day. Nick’s first label job was as A&R at XL, so he’s done his dues there and worked with a lot of interesting artists. I was running very small independent labels for Pure Groove. We were effectively signing tracks to press to vinyl to sell in the record shop, which might sound slightly bonkers, but this was the boom of the seven inch era, so like, 2005 to 2010. We would frequently sign a record and easily press and sell 2,000 seven inches. [Bands] like Bromheads Jacket, Klaxons, The Shoes; we did so many. That was my first experience of an indie, and it was very indie, but it was also done with quite a distinct and productive purpose – we were selling everything we were making. It wasn’t just signing things on a whim.

“It has deﬁnitely not been easy being an independent label; it’s a challenge at times.”

How did you start working at Pure Groove? To go right back, when I was at university, I was absolutely desperate to work in music. I’d been completely obsessed from the minute I found out that you could work with bands, even at like age five or ten. I didn’t have any family contacts, or friend contacts [in the music business]. When I got to university, it was 117

like, ‘Right, I need to make this happen’. I blagged DJ’ing at my local music venue. I didn’t know what I was doing, of course. I just brought some CDs and hoped for the best. From there, the promoter of that venue was almost bought out by The Barfly in Camden, when [that company was] expanding across the UK. That didn’t go through, but it gave me the links to someone at The Barfly. I ended up doing a year’s unpaid work experience with them in London, which was my first foot in the door. From there, someone introduced me to the guys at Pure Groove, because they were looking for an intern. It was a lot of free, unpaid work for a little while. Within a month of being at Pure Groove, I realised that these were my people and ended up staying there for five or six years. Pretty much until it closed down. It was an amazingly productive time, that period. I worked with Daniel Avery in the shop, I worked Gold Panda in the shop. It was a real hotbed of artists playing gigs in the evening and working in the shop in the daytime. It was really good fun. So I ended up doing that with them and frankly I didn’t have any experience. They were just, like, ‘Give it a go’ and it worked. It was quite jammy, really. Have you been able to apply any of those experiences from Pure Groove to the way you run your label now? From that job at Pure Groove I went to work at 679. I went in as Label Manager there. And that was in a very interesting period when a lot of artists had come to the end of their deals. When I joined it was Nick Worthington’s label, so that's how that came together. He was looking at Marina and the Diamonds. I came aboard the week before we signed her, and then I took a lot of those sensibilities of Pure Groove of like, ‘Let's just make some product, let’s put out some product, let’s sell it direct, let’s do this.’ We definitely took that into the early days of Marina’s campaign. There was a lot of, ‘Let's just press some sevens, let’s just send them out. Let’s go and sell them direct, and let’s just go do some gigs.’ That was definitely an approach that was probably quite fresh, in terms of [being in] that Warners, Atlantic structure, because it was just, ‘Right, let’s go, let’s not over-think these things.’ Certainly, that tempered a lot of the stuff that we did at 679 with all our artists and any ones that came subsequently. That has rolled into what we’re doing at 37 because the attitude and what we do here is definitely just an extension of what we were doing at 679.

like, ‘I hope I can work there one day.’ And then, when I started at Pure Groove and found there was a very loose link, it was like, ‘Right, I’m now going to start honing my way over there.’ I was obsessed with The Futureheads’ first album before I worked there and I was completely obsessed with The Streets before I worked there. When I got to do my first meeting with Mike Skinner, that was like, ‘This is pretty good.’ What was that first meeting like? I played it very cool! It was just one of those moments where you're just really thrilled that they wanted to hear what you had to say. I still get that when you meet people that you admire. By the time I got to work with Mike Skinner, it was on his fourth and fifth albums, so luckily I’d had two years at 679 running up to it to feel confident enough to go and have those conversations. The period that I was Label Manager for 679, we did Marina's first and second albums, Little Boots and then Plan B's Defamation of Strickland Banks album. I’d been a massive fan of his debut album before I worked with the label. That was incredible to be a part of, even though by the time it was actually released, it had sort of been driven into the Atlantic system, rightfully so. An album taking on that much momentum was exactly why that deal [with Atlantic] was founded.

“Pop is an expensive looking and sounding entity.”

You worked on some hugely influential releases at 679. What was it like being a part of those campaigns? I was so thrilled to get a chance to work at 679 because I had genuinely been a massive fan of the label. It had been in my head, 118

How, broadly speaking, did it work being in the Atlantic system? An artist would upstream either into Atlantic or into Warner Music UK. The split was Plan B and The Streets into Atlantic, and Marina and the Diamonds into Warners. It was fascinating for me because it meant I got to work with both teams and see a slightly different approach and how that worked. We were based in Atlantic for a year or so and then we moved into an office in Carnaby Street. You said something earlier about not over-thinking things and about just getting things out. Is there a risk of that over-thinking happening in a big structure like that? I was definitely incredibly naïve [about the major label structure]. When I was doing my GCSEs I did two weeks’ work experience at a major, but apart from that, I’d had no other contact ever, so I just didn’t know about these systems and structures. I would go in and buy something and hadn’t got a PO for it and get told off, which I just couldn’t believe was happening. Those sort of things. I definitely didn’t intend go in there and be antagonistic with the methods that were [in place], and I hope that they weren't viewed as such. We worked with a really awesome Creative Director called Alan Parks at the time. He’d been at London Records beforehand and done a lot of really amazing stuff, and he'd worked with Nick for a long time. It was a very deliberate intention for us to keep that indie mentality through the stuff that we did in that period. We all

INTERVIEW

Photo: Ben Gore

Elle Charms

believed in our vision, we loved working with the artists. We wanted to treat it like a long-term development. We were not signing loads of stuff at all. We only really ever had three artists on our roster at one time, which was probably quite unusual. That’s really what allowed us to spend all that time working on [each] project, being focused. ‘We're going to develop you, because we're not working with 17 bands at once.’ I really believe that had a lot to do with our success, getting to the point where they go up into those systems. That’s definitely something that we’ve tried to maintain to this day.

At the moment the label is me and Nick, and we’ve just taken on an assistant. It's back to being a really small operation. But then we always work with external promotions teams, and we have a creative artist who works with us on all our artwork for the label. We’re working with a writer who does all our biogs for our artists, press releases and stuff. Weirdly, it’s turned out that they’ve become additional members of our team, almost in the same way that we treat our artists. Like, ‘This is not just a one off. In you come, let’s make sure that we've got this really nice coherent vision and consistency.’

How does the current 37 Adventures team work? You're asking me at a really funny time because I went on maternity leave in September last year and I am not just the Label Manager, I do everything. Nick is very much A&R, he is 100% embedded in the music but I’ll run absolutely everything else. Going on maternity leave felt like it wasn’t really something that I could get cover for because it’s so relationship based. Training someone up within three weeks to know the nitty gritty and ins and outs would have been a bit of a nightmare. It coincided with [us] taking a pause in the label for just a few months. That meant that we changed offices and a couple of our members of staff went off and worked at different places.

It helps sometimes to take a bit of a break, and to come back and to re-evaluate things. Yeah, totally, and especially having a baby – where you get to spend a lot of time up in the middle of the night pondering things. It really honed this idea that it is about long-term development of two or three artists at a time. It’s about alternative pop music; it's about being a boutique label. It’s about taking it very seriously but also working with artists that are so driven and motivated, that are like, ‘We are all in it together, we are not mucking about here.’ If you're going to join us, we want you to be as big as possible. The sky’s the limit. It was really refreshing coming back. It just felt like, ‘Yeah let's go, what's next?’ 119

Photo: Ben Gore

Measure For Measure

How does an artist get signed to the label and how much has that criteria evolved from when you first started? The way that we hear about new artists is probably similar to a lot of other labels in that it can come from anywhere. We get a lot of recommendations via producers that we work with. That tends to be quite a good endorsement. If they've done a session, they’re like, ‘Guys, this person’s the real deal.’ One of the artists that we are currently working with, a girl called Elle Charms, Instagrammed me directly a year ago and was like, ‘I really love your label.’ Rather embarrassingly we only discovered this a month after she started working with us! I was like, ‘I'm really sorry I didn't reply,’ and she was like, ‘Don't worry, I knew we’d get there in the end.’ She had also messaged the producer that we [manage], Measure for Measure, who also does artist projects. Elle was a really big fan of Emily Burns, whose mini-album we released last year, and so she had literally looked at everyone that was working with Emily and been like, ‘I want to work with this label.’ Measure for Measure, the producer, had been like, ‘Yeah, come for a session, let’s do it.’ So that's how that one came in. [Elsewhere], recommendations from managers that we’ve worked with before and who we like are always a good place to start. We genuinely do listen to all the demos that get sent to us and occasionally something comes of it. And [we also get] recommendations from all the artists that we’ve worked with. 120

37 Adventures is an artist management company and a record label at the same time. Was that dual setup planned from the start? No, it wasn’t our intention, but at 679 I pretty much managed Marina for the first year of her being signed to us until the point it got incredibly busy and [that] wasn’t possible [anymore]. That's when someone else was very welcome to come and join the party. That’s rolled over into what we ended up doing here. ‘Here's a brand new artist, you don't need a manager just yet; so don't rush to get a manager and let's just keep working things internally.’ Emily Burns, when she started working with us, she didn't have any management but we were just doing things [anyway]. Everything was moving forward and working. It wasn't intentional. We definitely didn't sit down and say, ‘We're managers now.’ It was just a natural part of the company and what we ended up doing. I've read a few things in the past that said it's a complete conflict of interest to be acting in both [areas]. I really don’t think it is, as long as there's a good lawyer in [the artist’s] corner who’s very aware of their situation and everything’s very transparent. That really goes back to our ethos of being artist friendly and transparent. ‘This is what we’re doing and why we’re doing it; we’re spending this much on your video for this reason.’ It's all out there [for the artist to see] and I really feel like we’ve had better working relationships for that.

INTERVIEW

You celebrated your 100th release with a compilation last year. How did that feel, reaching that milestone and thinking about the journey of your company? To be honest with you, when we started the label and got to our 10th release I was like, ‘Flipping brilliant. Come on guys, we’re doing it!’ And then we got to our 37th release. It’s not that I wasn't sure that we’d get there, but you just don't know do you? It has definitely not been easy being an indie label. It's a challenge at times, and so those milestones are fantastic. So the 10th, 37th, the 50th; a 100th seemed to roll in quite quickly at that point. The 100th release is really special. It’s a compilation of a mix of artists that we’re already working with and some new ones that we just loved, as well. It sounds great. I'm really happy with it. Going back to 2013, why did you set up 37 Adventures? What were the discussions like at that time? Quite naturally, our 679 deal with Warner had come to an end. With Nick's previous work at XL and my very different experience of indies with the Pure Groove stuff, we’d always had an eye on going back to being independent. It happened very naturally from my recollection. Like, ‘Shall we do this? Yeah, all right.’ We just needed to pick a name and somewhere to work from, which was cafés for the first year, and, classically, Wetherspoons. That was me, not Nick; he’s way classier than I am. It was the core team at 679. It was like, ‘We like working together, shall we carry on?’ It was really natural. And again, like I was saying about the indie approach to music development within a major, we said, ‘Why don't we just carry on and be an indie?’

artist liaison? Can I come and meet you? Can I come and bring you some vinyl?’ This wonderful new technology and digital company – here, have some old vinyl. As much as is possible, I will definitely try to maintain those relationships. I hope that [those platforms] like what we do. At the base level, the music we release sonically fits very well on those streaming services. But, nothing’s a given. Every time you release a record, you’re crossing your fingers and trying not to have a sleepless night the night before. I don’t know if artists look at us and if that's something that impacts them, but it’s definitely something we're very conscious of and something that we make a big part of our focus. Your artists also do really well with the sync deals they get. What is it like navigating that world? It’s two fold really. We work with a sync company in the States called Hidden Track, who we love. They've got incredible connections at Netflix, HBO and stuff, and I think they wanted to work with us because our music sounds quite sync-friendly to those people. We’re now distributed by The Orchard, but we worked with [PIAS] for a few years and they got us some [sync] things. We still get syncs completely out the blue sometimes, which is great. Navigating it is quite tricky. I think we’re very happy to work with sync companies and for them to put out our stuff, because that would be a completely full time job for me if I was going to do it myself. We've been lucky. As a small company, those things are a massive success for us.

“I really believe in the artists we’re working with at the moment.”

37 Adventures artists have really impressive streaming numbers. Do you have good relationships with the streaming companies? How important are those relationships for the artist and label? When we started in 2013, Spotify existed but wasn’t what it is today, and the early conversations we were having about targets for our releases were very much [about] radio and SoundCloud. It quietly started to turn and what was in our benefit was that as soon as we saw [streaming] emerging, we were like, ‘Guys, this is our new focus.’ I definitely won't name any names but I saw a lot of indie labels begrudging it, and not just grumbling in a meeting, it was publicly on Twitter, like, ‘I hate streaming.’ Rather than being like, ‘Oh, this is an exciting opportunity for us,’ it was rejected, whereas we said, ‘No, this is really exciting. What can we do with our releases? Let's make sure this is now part of our plans.’ Weirdly, the relationship built up with Deezer first. They were doing a lot of artist outreach quite early and that migrated quite quickly into, ‘Who's doing the playlist at Spotify? Who's that

You’re past the half-decade stage as a young company. What are your hopes for the next few years? I really believe in the artists that we’re working with at the moment. We've recently signed two new artists. One’s a girl called Elle Charms, who is from Devon. She is incredible. And another is a girl called HAZ who is from Peckham and they're just both separately writing the most amazing music. My hope for the next year is that people absolutely fall in love with them. They’re both bringing very different things, but they’re wise beyond their years in terms of what they're writing and the sounds. We’re also working with a producer called Measure for Measure, who I've mentioned. We’re in the process of setting up a studio with him and that is going to be our 37 Adventures studio. I'm really excited to see what comes out of that. That’s hopefully going to be an extension of our creative boutique company. Our artists can go and demo in there and other people can come and use it, and collaborate. We’re really up for building up a scene [of ] good, creative people working together. I hope that we continue putting out some more incredible releases that get lots of streams and have really beautiful artwork, and that we continue to work with some really great artists. Q 121

Every Picture Tells A Story

Date: 18th February, 1976 Location: The Lyceum Theatre, London Marc Bolan is in his dressing room before a gig at the Lyceum Theatre, London, during the Futuristic Dragon tour. Seated in front of him are his Mum and Dad, Phyllis and Sid Feld. They were heading to the bingo and they decided to pop in and say hello to their son on the way! On the right-hand side of the picture is a journalist from Sounds. I’m the one making the introduction. My hair was less grey and slightly longer in those days. And a PR with a cigarette dangling in hand was nothing unusual. I was working for the doyen of PR, Keith Altham, who was, at that time, without doubt the PR in the UK. However, his setup consisted of one room in Marble Arch, with three phones, a bookkeeper called Claudine (who came in a couple of times a week) and me. Keith believed in throwing people in at the deep end. It was certainly a sink or swim environment. He was very busy with The Who and I was given my own clients. I had special responsibility for two artists in particular, the mighty Hawkwind and Marc Bolan. Marc had gone through a bit of a dip in his career and this was part of the beginning of a comeback. He was great fun to work for, 122

had a wonderfully generous spirit and was totally charismatic – an absolute star in every sense of the word. His lovely nature was illustrated when Keith was rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack, leaving only me to man the phones and run the show. I was 18 years-old at the time. The first star to ring asking for my boss was reasonably sympathetic. The next seemed less concerned: ‘Okay, but I’ve got an album coming out next week, how will we handle the PR on that?’ The next call was Marc. His response: ‘Wow man, what a drag, I’ll be over to help out in the office.’ I didn’t think much more about it and got on with things. 20 minutes or so later, the doorbell rang. It was Marc in a glitter jacket, eyeshadow, the whole look. He smiled, rolled up his sleeves and got stuck in. He spent the rest of the afternoon answering phones. That tells you everything you need to know about Marc. I’m pleased to say the story ended happily when it turned out that Keith hadn’t had a heart attack, just smoked some very strong grass! Q Alan Edwards, founder of The Outside Organisation, is one of the most successful PRs in the history of the music business. For once it is true to say that it would be easier to list the legends he hasn’t worked with. He is currently sprinkling magic PR dust on the new Marc Bolan tribute album, Angel Headed Hipster.

PRS for Music member Flohio performing at PRS Presents #PRSF Funded

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