Just so you know, I'd go make yourself a cuppa before proceeding. I started my label in '08 to help Ivana and John-Joe put their album's out. John-Joe's can be found in Rise Records or here: http://tinyurl.com/7fbykh7
I spent years before that studying business books and slaving away to save up the money needed. Over the years I've watched the industry change dramatically and adapted my ideas acc
ordingly. I'm big on the YouTube side of things and believe that it's a very important part of every artist's online presence. Whenever someone tells me to check out a band or I'm looking at a gig/festival line up, if there's an act I haven't heard before, the first thing I do is pop their name into YouTube and see what they're about. Back in 2007, that was something that you just couldn't do with local musicians in Worcester, so armed with a digital camera I set out to change that. Unfortunetly my camera was designed much more for pictures than videos and the abuse the mini mircophone took at metal gigs was way too much for it and the audio quality of my videos just got worse and worse. So, I worked and saved for months and invested £400 in the camera that I've still got now and fair play to it, I've used it pretty much everyday since Valentine's Day 2009 and taken it into mosh-pits, big festivals, Spanish deserts, strip-clubs...but I digress. I started documenting the local music scene in Worcester and then all the other gigs I found myself at in London and Birmingham and anywhere else I ended up, a lot of which (I'm now uploading allday everyday trying to catch up on the backlog) can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/KingDaveRecords/videos
I think the idea of what a record label is and does has changed a great deal and a lot of savy musicians are doing very well for themselves, but another way of looking at it is that before being signed was like a private VIP pool party, nowadays it's open waters which is great, but now everybody wants to swim. There is a hell of a lot that as an independent artist you can do for yourself but having the backing of a label/management team does make promoters/venues take you more seriously. I had a discussion with someone a couple of weeks ago who described 'unsigned' as being a genre in itself, but that's a topic for the wall and not here. As a label, watching the many musicians around me struggling for money, most working jobs and doing music on the side before giving up on their music, I didn't feel like charging bands and singer/songwriters for management (which is how it works) opting instead to just try to be supportive and filming bands for free so they'd have videos that they could email to out of town to promoters to get more gigs. I've got a fair few bands a quite a number of gigs, one of the best I'd say was when I got Jenny Hallam a gig in Surry. All the equipment was provided so she just had to hop on a train, the fair taken care of, she got picked up from the train station, driven to the venue, played for 45 minutes and got paid in curry and then driven back. For the past couple of years I've helped shape the line-up of the Session stage at Bridge Bash festival and helped a couple of bands play the Pyramid Party. I also work at Choice Radio as a co-presenter, A&R and videographer on the 'Live from The Royal' show where every week we have bands and singer/songwriters come up and perform either acoustic or slightly amped sessions, all of which are recorded, broadcast and put online as podcasts for free download. A list of previous guests and their sessions can be found here:
http://tinyurl.com/7ykc8mk
I run a gig guide for Worcester and Malvern which extends to Birmingham and includes the gigs of local musicians who're playing out of area, which can be found here:
http://tinyurl.com/bwy766f
Plus I also do my best to maintain a music blog where everyday I offer up a free download by some amazing artists, which is well worth checking out here:
http://tinyurl.com/d8oe8sf
I've waffled on far too much already and I'll come back later and try to edit this down a bit. So for now I'll conclude by saying that right now, my dream team of artists to represent, given the choice, would be:
Muchuu
Jenny Hallam
Ria
Rebecca Leach &
Thistle & Thorn
