Biggest opportunity of my life…and I was dreading it
G looks at me with something that is a cross between confusion and horror.
She says, “You HAVE to stop this!”
“No, I don’t, it’s fine. I’ll handle it,” I reply, trying to convince myself as much as I am her.
When I was 31 years old, Sony offered me my own record label.
A few months earlier, I’d heard about how a friend of mine, Imran, had an imprint (a sort of “sub-label”) on XL records. He’d put out the first UK single by this new band Vampire Weekend, which had blown up. One night, I’m out with my music lawyer friend Martin, and I’m feeling hard done by.
I whine, “Imran has a label. Why don’t I?”
Martin smiles and says, “Let’s get you one.”
A few weeks and several meetings later, Martin and Sony’s lawyers are getting the contracts ready for Huckster Records, an imprint of the Epic label (whose parent company is Sony). On Epic are artists like Abba, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, and now… whoever I decide to sign.
In the meantime, I am figuring out the logistics. It’s going to be a 7” vinyl records label and Epic are giving me an extremely generous budget: they’ll pay for the vinyl, radio promo, press promo, a *music video*, and a small live tour. And — because I don’t yet have either — they are also going to buy me a laptop and an iPod (this is before the days of smartphones). All I have to do is to take care of finding someone to print the actual vinyl and the record covers, then figure out distributing those to record shops.
Which, it turns out, is really hard. And really stressful. And not my skillset. And I don’t want to do any of it. Like, ANY of it.
But I don’t tell anyone that…
Are You Making This One HUGE, Common Mistake In Your Emails?
There was a time when getting free music was a really exciting perk of any job.
CDs were expensive and, when I was in radio, it was lovely not having to pay for them.
There was also effort and expense for a new band, in sending you their CD.
They’d probably had to save up to record the demo, more to get it mastered and pressed, even more for the physical copies and then a load of cash for posting.
It was easy to listen to everything I was sent, because I wasn’t sent much.
Now that I occasionally choose music for TV shows, I still get sent tunes.
Because bands no longer have to put any hard cash behind sending it (and can generally record pretty cheaply and easily), I get a LOT of music.
Far more than I would ever have time to listen to. So a lot of it slips through the net.
What is it that will make me take the time to check out an artist’s songs?…