Independent Record Labels Research Articles

A Transformação da Produção Musical Independente de Canções no Século XXI

Independent record labels and their often implicit relationship with major labels are one of the themes investigated in this historical retrospective through exploratory research with bibliographic review that addresses the musical landscape in which independent artists are embedded. Due to the complexity and breadth of the topic of independent production in the music industry, it was chosen to explore not only the structure of independent record labels but also the nature of independent scenes themselves. For this purpose, categories such as "independent artist," "artist direct" (Mulligan, Mark, 2021), and "artist entrepreneur" (Cerqueira, 2018) will be addressed. Furthermore, the importance of the contemporary connection between independent artists and the consumer market for songs through social networks will be highlighted, as they have become an important channel for the dissemination and promotion of their works. This work arises from the close relationship of one of the authors of the article with independent music production, being himself a artist direct who seeks to understand the challenges and opportunities that permeate this ever-changing musical universe.

Declarations and Independents: How Chicago DJ Al Benson Brought Black Cultural Production to 1940s Commercial Radio

ABSTRACT Al Benson’s legacy as one of the first Black DJs on commercial radio is widely acknowledged in Black radio studies. However, his achievements and contributions warrant inclusion in more interdisciplinary scholarship, particularly in popular music and media histories. This article analyzes a surviving Benson aircheck, first contextualizing his role during the mid-century boom in independent record labels and local radio, then showing how he refashioned popular music narratives as Black-mediated sites of cultural production. Additionally, the modest scope of primary sources available for this study brings critical attention to the need to preserve Black radio voices.

‘Fuck Art, Let’s Dance’: An interview with Chris Morton

Born in Singapore, Chris Morton moved with his family to England as a young child, settling in the north-east in the early 1960s. His passion and talent for drawing was reflected in his love of comics and animation, later with a combined interest in music leading him to underground magazines and posters associated with the hippie counterculture. After having to leave art college early in 1975, he found himself in the right place at the right time and was commissioned to create a graphic identity for a new independent record label based in London – Stiff Records. Still running a design studio in Newcastle, he discusses punk, new wave, typography, print technologies, humour, parody and graphic design with Russ Bestley.

Indigenous Hitmakerz in the Arctic: negotiating local needs with global ambitions within commercial music industries

ABSTRACT Although music by Inuit peoples is systematically relegated to the margins, recent artists from Nunavut have garnered limited commercial attention. Using a case study approach with critical political economy theoretical grounding, we focus on Hitmakerz, an independent record label based in the Arctic region of Nunavut. We analyze the ways independent music producers negotiate the commercial music system, specifically the symbolic and economic tensions, to promote Indigenous languages and counterhegemonic discourse. We argue that Hitmakerz has successfully negotiated local needs while pursuing global ambitions, strategically blending Inuktitut, colonial languages, pop, electronic, and rap for subversive purposes, and critiquing colonialism in digital forms produced in local environments and exported globally. Under limited conditions, Indigenous artists can exploit the marketplace to their advantage, as demonstrated by Hitmakerz.

Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records

Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records

Review: Crying in H Mart: A Memoir, by Michelle Zauner

Review: <i>Crying in H Mart: A Memoir</i>, by Michelle Zauner

Crossing Borders: My Journey in Music by Max Baca and Craig Harris

Reviewed by: Crossing Borders: My Journey in Music by Max Baca and Craig Harris Jason Mellard Crossing Borders: My Journey in Music. By Max Baca with Craig Harris. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021. Pp. 184. Illustrations, notes, references, index.) Crossing Borders: My Journey in Music delivers much more than a memoir of a working musician, employing Max Baca’s experience to sketch an [End Page 334] entire history of the Mexican American musical traditions he has done so much to further during his time with storied groups the Texas Tornados, Los Super Seven, and Los Texmaniacs. It makes sense that Baca could thread this needle of the personal and historical. As Daniel Sheehy of Smithsonian Folkways states in the foreword, “Max doesn’t just typify tradition: he is tradition” (xi). It is a simplifying claim, surely, but one that rings true throughout the book. Southwestern music’s syncretism comes through from the outset, as the Grammy-winning Baca reveals that the first two songs he learned were Bill Boyd’s “Monterrey Polka”—a country artist invoking Mexican culture through a German genre—and the swing standard “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller. By age twelve, he was in the recording studio with a band led by his father, Max Baca Sr., and he grew into his own in Los Hermanos Baca with brother Jimmy on accordion. Through these family bands in 1970s New Mexico, Baca charted his path to becoming one of the modern masters of the bajo sexto, a twelve-string guitar that is the traditional accompaniment to the accordion in conjunto. Crossing Borders interweaves many themes well, and the way the book becomes a biography of the bajo sexto as much as Max Baca is one of its best turns. Baca and Harris recount the history of this instrument that is little known outside the southwestern borderlands, tracing its links to related string instruments such as the Middle Eastern oud and the mariachi guitarrón. In other words, there is a great deal going on in this short, rollicking account. The authors succeed in balancing historical breadth and biographical focus partially through the deployment of the Texas Tornados, the band that took Baca from the New Mexico scene to the global stage when he stepped in for his mentor Oscar Tellez on a 1991 tour. Complementing Baca’s own story, the middle chapters sketch the careers of Tornados Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers, Freddy Fender, and, especially, legendary accordionist Flaco Jiménez. The Tornados chapters open up brief but essential discussions of the independent record labels and nightclubs of mid-twentieth century San Antonio, Freddy Fender’s dealings with the notorious producer Huey Meaux, and the origins of conjunto recording with Flaco’s father Santiago Jiménez Sr. The Tornados’ crossover success also takes this regional account into the wider arena of popular music, featuring episodes with artists such as Peter Rowan, Lyle Lovett, Los Lobos, and the Rolling Stones. Shortly after the passing of Doug Sahm and Freddy Fender, the remaining Tornados stopped performing as a unit. Baca picked up the preservationist torch as a member of Los Super Seven and bandleader of Los Tex-maniacs, whose mission is to keep traditional conjunto alive and on stage. Nevertheless, his art is about looking forward as much as it is reflecting on what has come before. At one point, bluegrass artist Peter Rowan reflects on “heading towards the ultimate Tex-Mex twang music” in collaboration [End Page 335] with Baca (147), and at the book’s end the reader is inclined to believe that Baca will reach it. More than just music, though, the arc of his career recounted here also aims at a broader understanding of the crossings and hybridity of modern southwestern culture. This readable, poignant, and rich memoir is an essential building block in that larger project. Jason Mellard Texas State University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

“We Don’t Have Those American Problems”: Anti-Black Practices in Canada’s Rap Music Marketplace, 1985–2020

Beginning in the early to mid 1980s, Hip Hop culture appeared on Canadian stages and in homes, even as it was limited in supply on commercial radio and television. Unlike their American counterparts, mainstream Canadian emcees (many of whom were racialized as Black and identified with the city of Toronto) were notably dependent upon personal finances, under-resourced independent record labels, distribution deals, and state and not-for-profit grant monies to subsidize the conceptualization, production, and promotion of their art. Labelled “urban music” in an attempt to spatialize and covertly reference Blackness, Hip Hop in Canada, from the outset, was mapped against, in conflict with, and outside of the national imaginary. While building local scenes, an independent label system, and a cross-Canada college radio, television, and live music infrastructure and audience, Hip Hop artists developed spaces of resistance, circumvented industry-generated obstacles, and defined success on their own terms — all of which suggested that they were not solely at the will of the dominant white music industry. And yet artists simultaneously encountered anti-Black practices that constrained the creation and sustenance of a nationwide Hip Hop infrastructure and denoted an inequitable structuring of support for the arts in Canada. By examining the interface of Blackness, art, and the racial economy of Canada’s creative industries, this article will outline instances of Canada’s anti-Black racism as well as the challenges Hip Hop artists and industry professionals have faced in the areas of recording and label relations, music sales, broadcasting regulations, and the accolade system. These social relations — many of which are rooted in longer histories of race relations and anti-Blackness in Canada — resulted in industry-wide policies, practices, norms, and ideologies that unfairly disadvantaged Black artists and undermined the realization and marketplace potential of a Hip Hop infrastructure within and beyond Canada.

Marketing

Marketing

Digital Technologies and Music Digitisation: Challenges and Opportunities for the Nepalese Music Industry

Abstract This paper investigates the current legitimate digital music business trends and models created by the innovation of new digital technologies and examines their pertinence in the Nepalese music industry. Further, it scrutinises neighbouring music markets and juxtaposes the Nepalese music market against their current market trends. Based on eight in-depth semi-structured interviews with executives and stakeholders of different major, medium and independent Nepalese record labels, the paper examines two questions: what is preventing Nepalese recorded music from being found digitally and accessible legally; and what are the opportunities, gaps and requirements that confront the search for a commercially viable route for the optimal digital music business model to make Nepalese music digitally and legally accessible, both locally and globally?

American Indian Soundchiefs

American Indian Soundchiefs, an independent record label founded by the Rev. Linn Pauahty (Kiowa) in the 1940s, developed a remarkable model of Indigenous sound media that combined home recording, dubbing, and small-scale mass production. Alongside other Native American media producers of the same era, Soundchiefs built on earlier engagements with ethnographic and commercial recording to produce Native citizens’ media a generation prior to the Red Power era of the 1960s and 1970s. This soundwork provided Native music to Native listeners first, while also seeking to preserve a “rich store of folk-lore” sometimes in danger of being lost under ongoing colonial pressures. Pauahty’s label found ways to market commercial recordings while operating within what music and legal scholar Trevor Reed (Hopi) calls “Indigenous sonic networks,” fields of obligation and responsibility.

Sellos musicales ayer y hoy

Este artículo explora una experiencia de producción, gestión y edición musical disociada de la industria discográfica clásica: los sellos musicales. En un primermomento, en el artículo se describe estos sellos como organizaciones descentradas de la producción discográfica y gestionadas entre amigos. En un segundo momento, se comparan estos sellos con experiencias autogestivas y con emprendimientos discográficos independientes previos. La descripción y el análisis etnográfico de este caso permiten identificar claves de la actualidad de la música joven en la Argentina y calibrar su novedad respecto a la historia de las instituciones musicales.

From Blue Horizon to Saydisc: Independent Record Labels in the British Blues Revival

After World War II, British jazz fans and critics looking to better understand the genre stimulated a demand for blues records; this market expanded further as first Trad jazz, then skiffle and British R&B launched a British blues revival. Major labels like Decca and Pye offered major US urban blues and soul artists, but the specialty market, dominated by connoisseurs interested in a wider variety of artists and eras, was underserved by the major labels. Thus, committed blues lovers took matters into their own hands. This paper will survey the turbulent independent blues record scene in Britain from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of labels with colorful names, shadowy origins, lofty goals, and often surprising founders. Dozens of British musicians, critics, and collectors founded labels, licensing (or bootlegging) materials for reissue, importing 45s from the United States and reselling them in Britain, or recording new material for exclusive release. Many of these small concerns, reissuing rarities and recordings by artists outside the commercial mainstream, were labors of love rather than serious commercial enterprises. Their limited-edition discs were marketed directly to their target audience, and label owners rarely did more than break even. Most only issued a handful of recordings, though in the process they revived the stalled careers of US blues singers, provided much-needed income and support to older artists, and introduced Britain to a wider variety of blues.

Vinyl as event: Record Store Day and the value-vibrant matter nexus

ABSTRACT Why would anyone purchase expensive, natural resource-intensive, and seemingly obsolete material carriers of music when streaming providers provide unlimited access to over 40 million songs for a small monthly fee? As I will show, we can no longer assume that contemporary interest is driven solely by a collector’s market or because of the audible qualities of the vinyl listening experience, and must attend to the many ways people engage with record objects today – and by extension, the vinyl record as an ontological multiple. Through an analysis of Record Store Day 2015 and affiliated phenomena including YouTube unboxing videos, other social media activity and the Discogs resale market, I will demonstrate that the vinyl record gains value when the lived experience of materiality becomes an event and enables the performance of self in social contexts. As I will show, while certain types of actors have appreciably benefitted from the recent revival of interest in vinyl (e.g. brick and mortar stores, mastering engineers, manufacturing plants, and ancillary service industries), others have not to the same extent (e.g. musicians, independent record labels).

Arid fidelity, reluctant capitalists: salvage, curation, and the circulation of Tuareg music on independent record labels

ABSTRACT The record labels Sahel Sounds and Sublime Frequencies position themselves as insurgent alternatives to the mainstream music industry’s capitalist profiteering in the global circulation of Tuareg music. While they are rooted in an art scene promoting a new media ethics and mode of world music circulation characterised by David Novak [2011. ‘The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media’. Public Culture 23(3): 603–34] as ‘World Music 2.0,’ the relations of production among the Tuareg artists and American producers involved, in many respects, differ little from those of other labels. I argue that these producers’ claims to subversive subject positions are primarily motivated by the values of their U.S. social worlds rather than those of northwest Africa, though these worlds are entangled. To this end, I situate these labels within a particular global network of music circulation, examining their remediation of salvaged recordings, production of new studio albums, and competing claims of ethnographic authority to show their ambivalent reckonings with the commodification process.

Persepsi Musisi Folk Surabaya Berlabel Independen Terhadap Media Baru Sebagai Sarana Komunikasi

ABSTRACTIn the music industry, record labels are divided into two. The first is the independent record label better known as the indie label, and the second is the major record label known as the major label. Major labels are known as a huge record labels in the music industry, while indie labels are associated with smaller industries. Indie labels, the distribution tends to be uneven and not in official distribution stores or through communities. Indie musicians do more publications through new media, especially social media. Few of the independent musicians is Yuvi and Briliyan, who are personnel from the band Humi Dumi. Social media is used, among others, Instagram and Twitter, facebook, spotify, Youtube, and soundcloud. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze perception of the folk musicians in independent label about new media as a communication medium. This study is a qualitative study using the case study method. This type of research is descriptive research that is supported by the data collection technique through observation, interview, and documentation. The result of this study demonstrate the use of new media that include Instagram, Twitter, Soundcloud, Spotify, Youtube, and website as a medium to communicate. With new media, the interaction between Briliyan and Yuvi and fans becomes easier. With a good interaction, the awareness of the audience to independent musician will also increase.Keywords: Perception, New Media, Independent Music, Communication

A Different Kind Of Tension. Discursos artísticos, marginales y musicales en las escenas del punk

Las diferentes escenas del punk, que de Estados Unidos y Gran Bretaña se exportaron al resto del mundo, se gestaron en un espacio textual compuesto por clubes, tiendas de moda y locales de ensayo, facultades de Arte y cafés, fanzines y revistas musicales, discográficas y sellos independientes. El siguiente trabajo, que forma parte de una obra más amplia que estudia los discursos artísticos, marginales y musicales del punk, se centra en estos espacios de libertad, deudores de todo tipo de prácticas autónomas y alternativas, nihilistas y defensoras de lo amateur, que a su vez contaminaron las corrientes artísticas de finales de los setenta.

Punk’s popularity anxieties and DIY institutions as ideological (anti-)state apparatuses

Abstract In the 1990s United States, an increasing number of punk and punk-inspired bands made their way into the mainstream. This commercial success and popularity provoked profound anxiety within the underground punk scene, which had spent the 1980s building a DIY (do-it-yourself) network of zines, venues and independent record labels and prided itself on its autonomous cultural production. In the pages of punk zines, the overwhelming response to punk’s newfound visibility was to insist that punk remain underground, protect the scene from outsiders and cast out punk bands that signed contracts with major record record labels or even became too popular on independent labels as traitors. So-Cal punk, a style that fused 1980s hardcore with melodic vocals, occasional lead guitar parts, technical precision and more professionalized production, went from being praised for its innovations in the pages of punk zines to being castigated as a generic attempt at commercial success. The debate over DIY versus ‘selling out’ was guided by a fear that the mainstream viability of a few would dilute punk’s ethos of rebellion and compromise its integrity. While much ado has been made of DIY in recent scholarship, the robust discourse within the underground punk scene defending DIY as ideological principle and decrying ‘selling out’ has not yet been adequately chronicled or critically interrogated. This article draws on four prominent punk zines in the 1990s United States – HeartattaCk, MaximumRockNRoll, Profane Existence and Punk Planet – to elucidate the construction of DIY discourse in response to the newfound 1990s popularity of punk. Rather than romanticizing the DIY underground, this article critically evaluates the assumptions underpinning it, such as extolling the autonomous individual and small-scale production, or the notion that distance from the dominant cultural apparatuses automatically portends a praxis of rebellion.

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony: Government economic policy and independent record labels in the United Kingdom in the 1980s

Abstract This article seeks to examine the relationship between independent popular music cultural production in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and the policies and political philosophy of Thatcherism. Although often regarded as being oppositional forces, closer scrutiny reveals areas of significant complementarity, most notably in the influence of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme on various emerging independent record labels. The first part of the article will look at genuine attempts at resistance to Thatcherism in popular music culture such as Red Wedge, and cite various ‘common-sense’ ideas around anti-Thatcherism in contemporary popular music culture. The second part looks at the historical roots of Thatcherism in order to provide a definitional framework as well as to explore some of the ambiguities around Thatcherism itself (particularly regarding the competing strands of social conservatism and economic liberalism) and the central importance of the promotion of an ‘enterprise culture’ based on self-reliance and entrepreneurship. An examination of the role played by the Enterprise Allowance Scheme in the development of independent record labels follows in order to assess the degree to which the economic liberalism of Thatcherism found an expression in independent popular music culture.

The digital distribution of music and its impact on the business models of independent musicians

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the impact of digital distribution of music on business models developed by independent musicians. More specifically, it aims to analyse the main changes in the network of relationships between musicians and record companies, and between musicians and consumers; and to analyse how independent musicians’ business models have been evolving as a response to increasing change in the distribution of music. The data was collected through semi-structured interviews with independent musicians, music journalists, and small independent record labels. The article discusses empirically the main results regarding changes in the network of relationships under study and analyses the evolution of business models, concluding that independent musicians follow a diversification strategy, aiming to capture the business opportunities provided by technological changes in the distribution of music. The implications of such an option, including its main challenges, are discussed.