The changing face of A&R in the music industry and the heavy metal resistance!
Conrad Withey runs the online A&R platform instrumental (https://www.weareinstrumental.com). Here is how the platform works according to his interview at the publication Music Business UK:
“As a result of this fishing exercise, Instrumental finds around 5,000 new artists every week with the potential to go on to greater things. It can then match these artists to over 4,000 ‘micro genres’ in order to help labels, managers, agents and others to discover would-be hit artists operating in their specialist fields. To aid those labels further, Instrumental recently launched its own ‘Watchlists’, which it manages internally on behalf of record companies. These Watchlists continually monitor data on artists that have been highlighted as being promising for a specific external A&R team, but when said A&R team deems it ‘too early’ to commit to these acts with a full signing. Watchlists pull in additional social data about each artist, in addition to Instrumental’s own daily ratings – with one based on growth (Gx points) and one based on online engagement/popularity (Ix points). Any spikes in status automatically generate email and/or text alerts that can be sent to label A&R teams.”
It seems that some US metalhead label boss, does not agree with the data-based A&R process. The magazine asked Conrad the following question:
Do you still meet resistance in the industry based on those who dismiss you as being on the wrong side of ‘gut vs. data’?
All the time. My favourite email was from a metal label head in the US who said, ‘With respect, I like going to dirty bars, drinking beer and finding live bands – so you can fuck off.’ Fair enough, I love that attitude, but we are seeing that less and less. We have been described as ‘Moneyball For Music’
before in the FT and I do often compare the journey we are on to the way the use of data was adopted in sport.
Publishers have traditionally been thought of as being spoon-fed music by labels and artists, but today they are anything but passive in the field of artists and repertoire (A R). And while it is true that the roles of the publisher has been to police IP, collect royalties and serve as sync agents, beyond all of that, what is the role of a publisher in the music business of today?
But developing recording artists isn’t always easy: “It depends on their personality,” Graham says. “Some musicians are incredibly stubborn and you just have to let them get on with it, and some are just very insular. An example is a duo I signed called Yosoy. They have been working together for 15 years and only recently released their first recording and started playing live. But ultimately, publishers have to be creative in A R, because if we don’t help artists to keep making music, then we will eventually run out of work .” Thanks to this unorthodox A R channel, Haarsten has another hit in the making. “It’s the same brand, but this time it’s Hannah Mae with Back To You. In late November the song was announced as NPO Radio2’s TopSong, and in fact it is the fourth song we created for an advert that then gained significant airplay on Dutch National Radio.”